5 Lessons from the NBA Draft for people who don't watch basketball
Like, it gets a little technical, but not too technical
Unfortunately, the NBA Draft ended last night, which means that I will officially have to find other things to do instead of watching basketball.1
For the uninitiated, the Draft is a two round exercise conducted at the end of each NBA season. Each team is granted a pick in both rounds, seven years in advance. They can trade those picks for other picks or players in the interim.2 Generally, the worst teams get earlier picks in each round, in the interest of balancing out the league’s talent distribution over the long-term.
Frankly, the Draft is overrated. Every year, pundits talk about all of the crazy last-minute trades expected to take place, none of which materialize. Instead, the closest we tend to get to excitement is when teams make shocking or bad decisions, like the Brooklyn Nets somehow accruing five picks and using them all on a single type of player.
Still, there are some valuable life lesson nestled in there. I mean, there has to be, right? Otherwise, I’d just be wasting my time watching a poorly paced, poorly announced, two-hour show when I could have just followed the results on my phone.
Winning fixes everything.
The Dallas Mavericks’ absurd 2025 has been well-documented on this blog, when February’s Luka Doncic trade resulted in unprecedented backlash by the fans. Then the Mavericks won the lottery and got the first pick in the Draft, and everyone was confused about what to do next. I thought it’d be extremely funny if they ended up passing on generational prospect Cooper Flagg, but, alas, the Mavericks front office decided to make the intelligent move.
Well, almost. Wunderkind General Manager Nico Harrison had this to say last night:
God, this fucking guy. Guess what, though? They got the best pick! It worked out! Fans are excited for their next seasons! ESPN played a graphic during the draft showing how amazing the Mavericks team is going to be next year!
The lesson here is that people can tolerate a lot of grief when they win.3 That’s a bad thing. Don’t fall for the bread and circuses! Tell your state representative that the tariffs are still too high!
Some things are just out of our control.
Little old Rutgers University had two of the three best players in this year’s draft class, and somehow went 15-17 this past year. Dylan Harper was taken second overall, but Ace Bailey had a more… tumultuous landing.
Ace and his agent had a plan - don’t work out for the top five teams, tell them you don’t want to be there, and navigate to DC or Brooklyn picking sixth and eighth. This is weird, since falling in the draft results in millions of dollars less in guaranteed salary.4 But it also might have worked. If you were interviewing a bunch of candidates for a seven-figure job, you’d probably avoid the guy who didn’t actually interview.
Well, the Utah Jazz disagree. They didn’t interview Ace, and they knew he wanted to play on the East Coast, and they drafted him anyway. Whomp whomp.
It doesn’t matter how much technology and knowledge improves - people will always be put in positions of power to make bad decisions.
There once was a GM named Joe,
his adaptability was low.
He was fired from the Pistons,
and I don’t think they miss him.
Now his legend continues to grow (in New Orleans).
Joe Dumars won a championship with the Pistons in 2004. He proceeded to manage the team for 10 more years and developed a track record of picking “old school” players unfit for the modern (like bulky big men) and trading away young players before they had a chance to develop.
So he hopped around other teams for a decade, before being hired in New Orleans a few months ago. Last night, Joe got to run his first draft since June of 2013, and it did not go well. Without going into the details, Joe made a bad, bad trade, and people are going to be talking about it for all of next year. The more they lose, the worse the trade will look, and their team is likely going to lose a lot.
I don’t know whether to be angry that I have yet to be hired as the New Orleans GM or grateful that AI still hasn’t taken over all of our decision-making.
No one can sustain excellence on their own.
On Sunday, the Oklahoma City Thunder won an exciting Game 7 to take the NBA Championship. On Wednesday, they drafted players 15th and 44th, and traded away the 24th pick. The players and the coaches got all the glory, but, as we’ve seen from poor old Joe, a team can’t survive without a steady front office.
Oklahoma City’s GM and assistants were spending the past few weeks preparing for last night, even as the team they built was out there winning a championship. And I guess this is just how life works, right? You don’t get to finish one project at work and just call it a day - there’s always new tasks to start on, things happening in the background… the reason that we’re able to take moments to enjoy our success (and lament our failures) is because we have teammates of all sorts who we can rely on.
You can only squeeze so much content out of people walking across a stage.
The NBA Draft was stretched into a two night event, for some reason. I’m the only person I know who was desperate enough to watch the first night,5 but even I didn’t deign to watch the second round. There’s not exactly a lot of excitement when the Warriors trade up from 59th to 56th.
Even the producers must have been getting bored, since the Warriors’ 52nd pick was drafted during a commercial. How is that even possible? They planned a two-hour event to show the second round of the Draft, and they’re skipping parts of the Draft?
Some videos are just meant to stay in the camera roll. Some blog posts are just meant to stay in the Notes app. Sometimes, things are fine as they are, like doing the whole Draft in one night and having people stop caring after the first hour. Grrr.
Shoutout to The Bear and the final season of Squid Games for choosing the right week to release. I might make it through next week before crashing out!
Teams can even trade for coaches or cash, although that doesn’t happen too often.
Ironically, the Mavericks achieved this win by losing, but who am I to judge?
It didn’t help out that the agent himself was weird - he asked to be paid to appear on tv! He was convicted of attempted murder and cocaine distribution!
Except for Nadia, who had no choice but to listen to it as she was sitting next to me.
Side note: The Jazz DID interview Ace Bailey. In fact they kind of interviewed him twice because Austin Ainge who was with Boston ant the time interviewed him while he was there. Ace didn’t do a workout with the Jazz. I also think it’s notable that this agent his is first client and he really didn’t do a stand up job haha
It’s been a while since I’ve heard the term “fortune favors the bold.” Love that for me. I happen to be bold. Bolder as I grow older, even. (But not when I grow colder.) Perhaps that’s why I’m so fortunate.
With that said, an important fallacy to note — don’t become complacent or “tolerate grief” when you win.
Sometimes, we win out of sheer luck. Not because we made the right call. The last thing I want to do is to justify flawed decision-making just because it *worked out.*