Those three teams had engaged in a spirited contest over the last half of the NBA season to see which could lose more games—and, thus, put themselves in prime position to snare the grand prize of next month’s NBA draft, Ohio State center Greg Oden. Under the NBA rules, designed somewhat imperfectly to keep bad teams from losing all their games on purpose to get a better pick in the draft, all teams that don’t make the playoffs get thrown into a draft lottery, in which your team’s position is determined—just like Powerball—by a ping-pong ball drawn from a hopper. The worse a team is, the more of its balls get put into the hopper, thus increasing the chances that bad teams will get the top picks.
But not always. Boston, Memphis and Milwaukee, bad teams all, each had a strong chance to get the first pick. But not only did they all miss out on that one, which went to the Portland Trailblazers, but they also got pipped by Seattle for the excellent consolation prize-University of Texas’s Kevin Durant, a 6-foot-11-inch forward with Kevin Garnett-like skills.
For Celtics fans, it is a case of déjà vu all over again. It was exactly one decade ago that the Celtics were perfectly positioned—with a 36 percent shot—to land the top spot in the draft and with it Wake Forest’s Tim Duncan. But the San Antonio Spurs drew the lucky ball, leapfrogged Boston to grab Duncan and a decade of glory. Instead, the Celtics, the most storied franchise in NBA history with 16 championships, got Chauncy Billups, who has gone on to an All-Star career—with the Detroit Pistons. Since then, I have struggled to make my peace with the ping-pong balls of outrageous fortune. And now, after Tuesday night’s draft lottery, there’s apparently no escape for Boston from basketball hell.
While NFL teams routinely go from worst to first, and Major League Baseball has celebrated seven different champions in the last seven years, the NBA turnaround remains the toughest trick in sports. It is a league of dynasties—the Bulls, then the Lakers—and of dominant teams, like San Antonio and the Detroit Pistons, which contend year-in and year-out. Even the top pick in the draft is seldom a sufficient boost to propel a team from bottom-dweller past playoff also-ran to the status of a genuine contender. In fact, Duncan is the last No. 1 overall selection in the NBA draft to have even won a title. And Shaquille O’Neal, in 1992, was the previous one before Duncan.
Oden is expected to be next. He is a seven-footer, a pure center who is a formidable rebounder and a dominant defender. And NBA conventional wisdom has it that a great big man—and only a great big man—can transform a losing franchise into a contender with any rapidity. That was certainly gospel in the league’s early days: Bill Russell led the Boston Celtics to a championship in his rookie season; the Philadelphia Warriors went from 32-40 to 49-26 with the arrival of Wilt Chamberlain; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) took Milwaukee from 27-55 to 56-26 in his rookie year, then led them to the NBA title the following season; and Bill Walton brought a championship to Portland in his fourth year. Of late, with expansion of the league and its playoffs, the championship slog has become even more difficult. Still, Shaq has worked out rather well. He lifted the Orlando Magic to the NBA Finals in just his third season in the league and has gone on to anchor three title teams with the Los Angeles Lakers and one with the Miami Heat.
In basketball, just like in boxing, you should always opt for the great big man over the great little man. Of course, assessing basketball talent is an inexact science and once in a while that stratagem will backfire. The most notable example was when Houston and Portland drafted star centers, Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Bowie respectively, leaving “little” Michael Jordan to the Chicago Bulls. It is worth noting, however, that it took the greatest little man in the history of the game seven seasons to net his first championship. And he remains a rather singular exception. The best of the “next Michaels,” Kobe Bryant and DeWayne Wade, have won rings only when paired with Shaq in the middle; those great little men who have played without a dominant center—John Stockton, Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, Steve Nash—have repeatedly come up short.
The Duncan divide remains the NBA paradigm. Since he landed with San Antonio, the Spurs have the best record of any team in the four major American sports leagues—the only team with a winning percentage over .700—and are the current favorite to win their fourth title. The Celtics’ winning percentage over the same period: .450.
But perhaps it is a little more complicated than Duncan or not Duncan, and the Celtics have had their share of missteps since then. One example: Boston had three first-round picks in the 2001 draft—and took Joe Johnson (currently a star in Atlanta), Kedrick Brown and Joe Forte (both no longer playing in the NBA)—before the Spurs selected their standout point guard, Tony Parker. And back in 1999 every team had a shot at Manu Ginobli before the Spurs used a second-round pick on the Argentinean star.
The unanswerable question is whether Parker and Ginobli would have shined, absent Duncan, on a team like the Celtics. My guess is that Ginobli, older and experienced in international play, would have fared just fine. But Parker, who was just 19 years old when he entered the league, likely would have struggled without a great big man to relieve the pressure. And he might not be engaged today to “Desperate Housewives” hottie Eva Longoria.
Perhaps the most revealing case is the flip side of the 1997 draft, the player that the Celtics took after Duncan eluded their grasp. Billups was the playoff MVP of the 2004 champion Detroit Pistons and will likely be one of the key players standing between Duncan and his fourth ring.
Billups lasted little more than a half season in Boston before he exhausted then-coach Rick Pitino’s limited patience. He would last less than that in Toronto and two disappointing seasons each with Denver and Minnesota before he blossomed with his current team, Detroit. He stands as a lesson in how much patience is required to develop an NBA point guard and how much easier that development comes when the player is surrounded by talent like that on the Pistons. After the playoffs, Billups will be a free agent and likely the most coveted player on the market. Yet nobody would choose the polished Billups over the raw Oden. We may love the little men, but it’s the big men who win championships.
