The Lottery Thread

[lethalweapon3]

The Big Dog for Kukoc+Leon Smith deal, in August 2002, granted the Bucks the better of the Hawks' pick (top-3 protected, 2003-2009) and the Pacers' first-rounder (lottery-protected, 2003-2006, acquired via the 2001 Draft dealing of Jamaal Tinsley). While slim, the 2.9% shot at striking gold was why Billy Knight was there at the celebrated 2003 Draft Lottery.

With our pick at #8, Milwaukee would take future Horford swipe magnet T.J. Ford. And with Indiana making the playoffs, we took Boris Diaw at #21.

 

~lw3

[Jungle Jack]

Glenn Robinson.  Those were the days, but I remain more a Priest Lauderdale fan.  BK should be our rep at the lottery.

[lethalweapon3]

IF. YOU. DARE!

("Draft Lottery Party" at STATS bar downtown next Thursday, reported on 92.9, more details once I find some online, but it sounds self-explanatory)

(UPDATE: here it go. Y'all really gotta remind me of Bud, dontcha? lmao)

http://www.nba.com/hawks/lotteryparty?cid=hawks_18lotteryparty_w_h_hp_2xl_-_0501_lppage#

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WHAT:	2018 Lottery Watch Party
WHERE:	STATS 300 Marietta St NW Atlanta, GA 30313
WHEN:	May 15th from 6:30 – 9pm. Draft Lottery coverage begins at 7pm.

---

The official Atlanta Hawks Lottery Watch Party presented by Budweiser will be hosted at STATS Brewpub.

$1.00 12oz drafts of Budweiser for General Public while supplies last.
**Must be 21 or over to enjoy this offer.

This fun evening will feature a DJ, prizes for all in attendance, and appearances by Harry the Hawk, the Atlanta Hawks Cheerleaders and Flight Crew.

Don't forget to wear your Hawks swag!

 

 

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

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1999 NBA DRAFT LOTTERY TRIVIA

Q1. The only NBA team to miss the playoffs despite finishing with a winning record, which Eastern Conference Team Leapt from the Lowest Possible Odds (#13, 0.5% odds) into the Top-3? Who was that team’s representative at the Lottery?

 

Teal Ambition! At the outset of the Lockout-delayed 1999 season, the Charlotte Hornets struggled under Dave Cowens. That coach got canned 15 games into the 50-game season, and under his assistant Paul Silas, who had to wait 15 years for his next head coaching shot, the Hornets made a spirited run for the playoffs.

A home-and-home series sweep by the Hawks in April had playoff hopes looking bleak. But then, Silas replaced Derrick Coleman with the late Bobby Phills in the starting lineup, and Charlotte rattled off nine wins in a row, finishing the 1998-1999 season with a 15-3 flourish.

Two of those three losses were to the Knicks, who finished a game ahead of the Hornets for the East's #8 seed and went on to enjoy some magic of their own. PR-wise, the league dodged a bullet: can you imagine if that was New York, with Pat Ewing preparing to head for the sunset, sitting at the Lottery with 0.5% odds and still getting a Top-3 pick (along with the actual #1-seed winner, who was just moving on from a franchise player of their own)? Talk about "rigged!"

Instead, it was Silas (who played for St. Louis/Atlanta for five seasons, and whose son, Stephen, may or may not be a Hawks coach finalist right now) grinning ear-to-ear as it became immediately obvious, from the first envelope revealing Seattle, that his team was movin' on up. There were a LOT of long faces, as each team got revealed, that they were sliding down.

Surging up from #13 to #3, Silas was certain his Hornets could get the superstar-caliber player that would carry Charlotte well into the next millennium... whoops, wait, I forgot about George Shinn... that would carry Charlotte into 2002.

https://nypost.com/1999/05/23/surprise-bulls-hit-lottery/

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“I’m elated,” a beaming Hornets coach Paul Silas said. “We should get a very good player. We didn’t make [the playoffs] and it hurt, but this kind of takes away some of the sting. I should go right to Atlantic City. This is my day.”

This was a nice development for the head coach after a rough start to the offseason. Just weeks before the Lottery, Silas found himself in the middle of a squandered opportunity to keep these Hornets in town.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/08/sports/pro-basketball-jordan-backs-out-of-hornets-deal.html

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(May 8, 1999)

Michael Jordan backed out of talks to buy a stake in the Charlotte Hornets after team management rejected his demand for complete control of the franchise, people familiar with the negotiations said today.

The Hornets' owner, George Shinn, was willing to hand over all of the basketball side of the franchise but wanted to keep at least 50 percent of the business operations, the people said.

Coach Paul Silas said Shinn told him that Jordan would not own any part of the team. Shinn only said, ''This type of thing is something you don't talk about publicly.''

 

 

After the Draft, Silas was confident (and eventually correct) that he wouldn't have to sit in a lottery chair again. At least, not for this particular  outfit.

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PAUL SILAS was at the office early yesterday morning preparing for his first draft as head coach of the Charlotte Hornets. With his team picking third, Silas was excited to be in position to snatch one of the great young players in the National Basketball Association draft. He got his wish, selecting Baron Davis, the 6-foot-2 1/2-inch point guard from U.C.L.A.

This is the wave of the future and Silas is glad to be part of it -- this year.

''If I'm in this position next year,'' he said, ''if we're ever in this position again to pick in the lottery, I might as well go look for a job.''

 

 

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

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1999 NBA DRAFT LOTTERY TRIVIA

Q2. For the team that had the Best Possible Odds (25.0%), why was the prospect of winning a top pick about to become problematic?

I have never traveled west of the Mississippi, so I'm the last person to turn to for advice about Vancouver, British Columbia. But from everything I had seen growing up, The Couv was never all that bad. They had art, culture, food. Quite a few good late-Saturday-night-style TV series were getting filmed there. They got mountains, a skyline, and I think I even saw a beach or two.

Yeah, I could see how, for any North American not already in the Pacific Northwest, Vancouver does kinda feel like an outpost. But, once you're there, seems to me like they've got more going on than some of these smaller NBA markets. I mean, Milwaukee? As Hubie often says, "C'mon." Were I in charge of running the Convention/Visitor Bureau, my catchphrase would be like, "VANCOUVER! YOU COULD DO WORSE."

We'll never know if Duke's Elton Brand would have found some appeal in moving to BC. That's only because the Lottery winner didn't give the Vancouver Grizzlies a chance to acquire him. 1999 was the first draft where the former expansion clubs in Toronto and Vancouver would have been allowed by the NBA to draft 1st, had they won the Lottery. The team went All-In on the Tank Job, winning just 16 percent of their games, but had to settle for the second pick.

The next best talent, in the Grizzlies' estimation, was clearly Maryland's athletic guard Steve Francis. But Stevie was letting it be known, well before the Draft that would soon convene in his NBA metro of Washington, DC, that he had zero interest in becoming The Franchise there.

https://www.thescore.com/nba/news/525985-draft-flashback-did-drafting-steve-francis-kill-the-vancouver-grizzlies

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Francis had already let the Grizzlies know pre-draft that Vancouver was not a preferred destination. The Vancouver market was not yet a preferred one of NBA players - [Mike] Bibby had reportedly been less than thrilled to be drafted there the year before - and he was being steered away from the Northwest franchise by agent Jeffrey Fried and manager Nathan Peake. Francis hoped to be taken by the Bulls, his team hoped for the Hornets, and when he worked out for the Grizzlies pre-draft, "For some reason, most [of his jumpers] went "clang" off the rim," wrote Harry Jaffe of the Washingtonian. 

 

Some markets aren't necessarily ideal matches for some professional sports ventures. Much like pro basketball in Orlando, or pro soccer in Atlanta, it often requires an early out-the-box spark to convince people inside and outside your market that it's worth the gamble. That spark never happened with the Grizzlies.

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In the summer of 1999, the Grizzlies had just wrapped their fourth year of existence, and had still yet to win 20 games in a season. The 1998-99 Grizz went 8-42 in the lockout-shortened season, the worst record in the league. They had a couple building-block players in the form of two previous top-three picks, star college point guard Mike Bibby and stat-stuffing forward Shareef Abdur-Rahim, and what should have been the foundation of a youth movement to finally bring the Grizzlies to promience.

But their supporting cast was deplorable, full of fungible veterans like Sam Mack and Tony Massenburg, as well as declining one-time franchise player Bryant Reeves, who saw a huge dropoff in productivity as he battled injuries and conditioning issues. They'd also yet to find success with a head coach, having already cycled through Brian Winters, Stu Jackson and Brian Hill in their first three seasons. The Grizzlies struggled to find any kind of organizational identity, and desperately needed more talent on the roster. 

Looking at it from purely an on-court perspective, the prospect of playing alongside a similarly-sized score-first point-guard in Bibby, and a lead-footed center in Big Country Reeves, probably shouldn't have warmed the cockles of Francis' heart. But then, layer on the travel time between Vancouver and his family in the DMV, the jet-lagging between Vancouver and many NBA markets, and Francis was sure things weren't ever going to work out for him there. He just needed a way to convince Tom Dubois look-alike GM Stu Jackson and the Grizzlies' brass of that.

 

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/theater/article/13018059/oooooh-canada

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Francis told WRC-TV last week that he would visit Vancouver the day after Independence Day. The Grizzlies had just taken him with the second pick of the NBA draft, so, barring something radical, he'll be spending the next four years of his professional life there. He'd never left the country before. But on draft night, Francis showcased his disappointment about being bound for Canada as soon as his selection was announced. He made things worse a day later, when asked what he knew about Vancouver during his first interview on the Grizzlies' flagship radio station: "It's cold. It rains a lot. It takes all your money," he said.

Flying there and enjoying some fancy dining, Jackson hoped, would allay Francis' reservations. But the Maryland star hardly stayed in town for more than eight hours. A purported incident at the Airport, where his agent told him an airline staffer asked whether Francis' entourage was a rap group, entrenched his adamant position that he be traded somewhere "better".

"Better" would turn out to be Houston, home to two NBA Finals trophies in the mid-1990s. With legends soon to retire or move on around Francis, the eventual 2000 Rookie of the Year would need some new help to carry the Rockets into a new era.

But the combination of bad drafting, the bad publicity around the NBA lockout, the spiraling losses, and the perception, previously espoused by Bibby and later sealed by Francis, that NBA talent would not want to pitch their tents there, doomed Vancouver's fate as a viable NBA market.

Faced with an undesirable franchise and a weak Canadian dollar, Orca Bay Sports (who also owned the NHL's Canucks) pulled an inverse-Thrashers, selling the Grizzlies to a tycoon (Michael Heisley) who intended to move the team out of town.  They lasted two more seasons in Vancouver before becoming the Memphis Grizzlies in 2001.

As for Stevie Franchise, the now BIG3-able player, upon deep reflection... remains sorry-not-sorry to this day.

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/steve-francis-i-got-a-story-to-tell

Quote

 

(March 2018) Now, I know people in Vancouver are still pissed off at me for forcing a trade out of there. I damn near cried when I got taken by the Grizzlies at No. 2. I was not about to go up to freezing-ass Canada, so far away from my family, when they were about to move the franchise anyway. I’m sorry but … actually, I’m really not even sorry.

Everybody sees the business of basketball now. That team was gone. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I went up there and gave probably the rudest press conference in NBA history before they traded me.

A.I.’s whole “Practice?!” thing had nothing on what I did up there.

Come on, man. Canada? Me? Up there? It just wouldn’t have worked. Houston was the perfect spot for me.

 

Blame Canada!

~lw3

[Spud2nique]

On 5/9/2018 at 2:35 PM, lethalweapon3 said:

Teal Ambition! At the outset of the Lockout-delayed 1999 season, the Charlotte Hornets struggled under Dave Cowens. That coach got canned 15 games into the 50-game season, and under his assistant Paul Silas, who had to wait 15 years for his next head coaching shot, the Hornets made a spirited run for the playoffs.

A home-and-home series sweep by the Hawks in April had playoff hopes looking bleak. But then, Silas replaced Derrick Coleman with the late Bobby Phills in the starting lineup, and Charlotte rattled off nine wins in a row, finishing the 1998-1999 season with a 15-3 flourish.

Two of those three losses were to the Knicks, who finished a game ahead of the Hornets for the East's #8 seed and went on to enjoy some magic of their own. PR-wise, the league dodged a bullet: can you imagine if that was New York, with Pat Ewing preparing to head for the sunset, sitting at the Lottery with 0.5% odds and still getting a Top-3 pick (along with the actual #1-seed winner, who was just moving on from a franchise player of their own)? Talk about "rigged!"

Instead, it was Silas (who played for St. Louis/Atlanta for five seasons, and whose son, Stephen, may or may not be a Hawks coach finalist right now) grinning ear-to-ear as it became immediately obvious, from the first envelope revealing Seattle, that his team was movin' on up. There were a LOT of long faces, as each team got revealed, that they were sliding down.

Surging up from #13 to #3, Silas was certain his Hornets could get the superstar-caliber player that would carry Charlotte well into the next millennium... whoops, wait, I forgot about George Shinn... that would carry Charlotte into 2002.

https://nypost.com/1999/05/23/surprise-bulls-hit-lottery/

This was a nice development for the head coach after a rough start to the offseason. Just weeks before the Lottery, Silas found himself in the middle of a squandered opportunity to keep these Hornets in town.

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/08/sports/pro-basketball-jordan-backs-out-of-hornets-deal.html

 

After the Draft, Silas was confident (and eventually correct) that he wouldn't have to sit in a lottery chair again. At least, not for this particular  outfit.

 

~lw3

Wow! Trip down memory lane for sure. I was really rooting for that Raps team to beat the Bucks in the playoffs..actually that was a couple years later but they had an exciting style of play and just a fun overall team with the monster mash, and the two veteran big men in PJ Brown and Elden. (Two of the most underrated bigs to ever play imo)

 

if if it wasn’t for Ray Ray, medium Dog and the E.T. (Sam I am) it would have set up an epic conference finals between up and coming BDiddy vs the Answer. Oh myyyyyy (d*ck Enberg)...

[Spud2nique]

23 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

I have never traveled west of the Mississippi, so I'm the last person to turn to for advice about Vancouver, British Columbia. But from everything I had seen growing up, The Couv was never all that bad. They had art, culture, food. Quite a few good late-Saturday-night-style TV series were getting filmed there. They got mountains, a skyline, and I think I even saw a beach or two.

Yeah, I could see how, for any North American not already in the Pacific Northwest, Vancouver does kinda feel like an outpost. But, once you're there, seems to me like they've got more going on than some of these smaller NBA markets. I mean, Milwaukee? As Hubie often says, "C'mon." Were I in charge of running the Convention/Visitor Bureau, my catchphrase would be like, "VANCOUVER! YOU COULD DO WORSE."

We'll never know if Duke's Elton Brand would have found some appeal in moving to BC. That's only because the Lottery winner didn't give the Vancouver Grizzlies a chance to acquire him. 1999 was the first draft where the former expansion clubs in Toronto and Vancouver would have been allowed by the NBA to draft 1st, had they won the Lottery. The team went All-In on the Tank Job, winning just 16 percent of their games, but had to settle for the second pick.

The next best talent, in the Grizzlies' estimation, was clearly Maryland's athletic guard Steve Francis. But Stevie was letting it be known, well before the Draft that would soon convene in his NBA metro of Washington, DC, that he had zero interest in becoming The Franchise there.

https://www.thescore.com/nba/news/525985-draft-flashback-did-drafting-steve-francis-kill-the-vancouver-grizzlies

Some markets aren't necessarily ideal matches for some professional sports ventures. Much like pro basketball in Orlando, or pro soccer in Atlanta, it often requires an early out-the-box spark to convince people inside and outside your market that it's worth the gamble. That spark never happened with the Grizzlies.

Looking at it from purely an on-court perspective, the prospect of playing alongside a similarly-sized score-first point-guard in Bibby, and a lead-footed center in Big Country Reeves, probably shouldn't have warmed the cockles of Francis' heart. But then, layer on the travel time between Vancouver and his family in the DMV, the jet-lagging between Vancouver and many NBA markets, and Francis was sure things weren't ever going to work out for him there. He just needed a way to convince Tom Dubois look-alike GM Stu Jackson and the Grizzlies' brass of that.

 

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/theater/article/13018059/oooooh-canada

Flying there and enjoying some fancy dining, Jackson hoped, would allay Francis' reservations. But the Maryland star hardly stayed in town for more than eight hours. A purported incident at the Airport, where his agent told him an airline staffer asked whether Francis' entourage was a rap group, entrenched his adamant position that he be traded somewhere "better".

"Better" would turn out to be Houston, home to two NBA Finals trophies in the mid-1990s. With legends soon to retire or move on around Francis, the eventual 2000 Rookie of the Year would need some new help to carry the Rockets into a new era.

But the combination of bad drafting, the bad publicity around the NBA lockout, the spiraling losses, and the perception, previously espoused by Bibby and later sealed by Francis, that NBA talent would not want to pitch their tents there, doomed Vancouver's fate as a viable NBA market.

Faced with an undesirable franchise and a weak Canadian dollar, Orca Bay Sports (who also owned the NHL's Canucks) pulled an inverse-Thrashers, selling the Grizzlies to a tycoon (Michael Heisley) who intended to move the team out of town.  They lasted two more seasons in Vancouver before becoming the Memphis Grizzlies in 2001.

As for Stevie Franchise, the now BIG3-able player, upon deep reflection... remains sorry-not-sorry to this day.

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/steve-francis-i-got-a-story-to-tell

Blame Canada!

~lw3

Not sure why you wouldn’t want to be in Canada. Cap could have shown him around a bit. 

 

ps Not a huge fan of Franchise myself. Point guards that get their teammates involved first is more of my forte.

 

would have loved to see a pass first pg team up with Yao. I mean eventually they got Tmac for him which was a steal.

[lethalweapon3]

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1999 NBA DRAFT LOTTERY TRIVIA

Q3. While Atlanta was not part of this Lottery, how did the Hawks wind up with a Lottery pick? Who was the representative of the Hawks’ trading partner at this Lottery, and what is his current occupation?

 

How bad is it to get swept in the playoffs as a home favorite... by the Knicks?

That would be tough in most years (just ask the Raptors). But after the 8th-seeded Knickerbockers, led by Latrell Sprewell and sparked by upstart Marcus Camby, put the broom to Dikembe and Friends, with Atlanta squandering yet another golden opportunity to break through to the Conference Finals, throttled into just 66 points in an elimination game, Hawks GM Pete Babcock knew it was time to shake things up.Breaking up the bland band meant starting fresh at the point guard position, where Mookie Blaylock had been holding the fort for seven seasons.

Blaylock had recently turned 32 years of age, and was five years removed from his stellar 1994 All-Star season. Still, he expressed surprise at the trade winds blowing right before the 1999 Draft.

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/704977/Hawks-shake-up-NBA-draft-with-Blaylock-trade.html

 

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Blaylock called the team offices earlier in the day, asking about his future in Atlanta after reading media reports saying he was a likely candidate for a trade. Still, he was stunned by the move when it happened a few hours later.

"It was very shocking, especially when you're with a team that long and you think you're one of the guys that's going to be around and you're going to end your career there," Blaylock said.

The Hawks choking in the second round of the playoffs held irony, since Babcock found a trade partner, with an available Lottery pick, in Spree's former team.

Still coached by P.J. Carlesimo, the Golden State Warriors had some tumultuous times moving on from the infamous incident, but seemed to be coming around, going 21-29 in the Lockout-shortened year after finishing just 19-63 the season before.

A defensive-minded guard could take pressure off 1998 Lottery prize Antawn Jamison, surmised team executive Garry St. Jean. "The Saint" (above, right) was in his second full offseason as the GM in Oakland, after 4-1/2 years coaching Sacramento.

The June 29, 1999 deal was essentially a pick-swap, with the Hawks gaining the Dubs' #10 pick in exchange for their own at #21, plus Mookie. The sweeteners in the deal included Bimbo Coles and former Hawks swingman and future Hawks broadcaster Duane Ferrell, the latter of whom would get waived prior to training camp.

Both teams drafted players who would gain some longevity in the league, although only one would get to enjoy it with a single NBA team. Babcock was coy about the likelihood the Hawks would seek a playmaker in the next day's draft...

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"This gives us an opportunity to move up significantly to a part of the draft where we feel we can get a high-quality player," general manager Pete Babcock said. "The top 10 was what we were trying to get. We got to the fringe of it."

Babcock would not commit to drafting a point guard. The Hawks also are looking for a center to back up 33-year-old Dikembe Mutombo, and they need better shooting at every position.

"We don't want to pigeonhole ourselves into something," Babcock said.

...but, at #10, the Hawks indeed selected a scoring-minded but celebrated point guard, in Arizona's Jason Terry.

At #21, St. Jean and the Warriors took Jeff Foster, but then swung a draft-day deal for Vonteego Cummings and a 2001 pick that would become Troy Murphy in exchange for Foster, who would never leave Indiana and retired after 13 seasons as a Pacer. St. Jean would become kind of a Dubs lifer himself.

With Blaylock in tow, the 1999-2000 Warriors regressed and were on their way to another 19-63 season. But that was not before St. Jean gave Carlesimo his walking papers, after a 6-21 start, and came downstairs to coach the team himself.

St. Jean gave the coaching gig to (there's that man, again) Dave Cowens the next season, but remained GM until 2004. After some years scouting for the Nets, he returned to cover the Warriors in 2011, as a gameday studio analyst. The Saint continues to serve as "The Stinger", if you will, for NBC Sports Bay Area's Warriors broadcast team to this day.

~lw3

[Dnice]

.. and we're back.

[Vol4ever]

13 minutes ago, Dnice said:

.. and we're back.

What happened?

[NBASupes]

Luck of the draw. Got our franchise player in Bagley.