Swamigp’s Weblog

Over the past couple of years, there has been an art that has been mastered by bad teams, the art of losing, maybe on purpose. It starts with high profiled players entering the draft, that NBA teams, with any luck, would get. A good player on a bad team, would come down with an exaggerated injury that would shut him down for the season, resulting in the loss of many games. A prime example of this would be the latest news of Dwayne Wade being out for the season because of “soreness.” This, for the hapless Miami Heat, would hopefully result in getting the #1 pick and selecting the best player available. It has happened in past years as well, more under the radar than this blatant attempt, but still as effective. Last year there was many instances where teams were intentionally faltering night in and night out with hopes to land the #1 pick of either Greg Oden or Kevin Durant. The great thing that the NBA did to try and lessen this from happening as regularly was to institute, many years ago the lottery where the team with worst record would be placed in a lottery with other bad teams, to see who would get the top pick. So, in short, the worst team wouldn’t be guaranteed the first pick. The Boston Celtics and Memphis Grizzlies were the two worst teams in the league, posting 24 and 22 wins, respectively to earn the #1 title. Though bad teams already, they got worse over time to hopefully see a rainbow through the darkness. As it happens neither team got either of those picks with Boston nabbing the 5th pick and and Memphis getting the 4th. A very similar thing happened the the Lebron bidding war as well, in 2002, which worked for the worst team Cleveland, but not for Denver (though they ended up with a pretty good player, Carmelo Anthony). Dwayne Wade may be injured enough to sit out, and risk further injury, but I wonder that, deep down, management is hoping that this will land them that number one spot.