We Americans love sports but we love
sports hype more. Nothing makes that point stronger than the telecasts of the annual
NFL and NBA amateur-player drafts, the NBA version of which will be held next
week. The leagues have been televising those exercises “live” since 1980 and
although the “action” consists of men in suits reading names, their ratings
typically exceed those of the actual games the airing networks carry.
The
drafts are quintessential hype events, the culmination of months of
speculation. With its seven rounds compared to the NBA’s two, the NFL’s is the
bigger deal, having spawned a sort of mini-industry, but the basketball edition
also is big stuff. Most of the players involved haven’t taken the courts for
real since their college seasons ended in March, and won’t play again until the
next NBA season starts in October, so that leaves a full six months to fuel imaginations.
Most
fans never think about it, but the drafts are among the most unAmerican of
American institutions. They are illegal on their faces, with the young men
involved (and women, via the WNBA) having no choice in their initial
professional postings. How would you have liked to have been told you had to
spend a few years working in Oklahoma City, under a restricted salary scale, before
you could do as you pleased? They exist because the players’ unions agree to
them, and because our Congress and courts go squishy on anti-trust law when it
comes to sports. That the unions represent only players already under contract
is another reason to look askance at the process, but that, too, is generally
ignored.
To hear the draft analysts tell it,
talent evaluation in our big-time professional sports is highly scientific,
based on many things that aren’t in the box scores. Prospects are weighed,
measured, timed, tested, interviewed, investigated, poked and prodded, all with
the intention of exposing weaknesses. To feed the hype machine the NFL has made
a show of its draft preparations, televising its week-long “combine” in
Indianapolis every February. Prospects run sprints before the cameras, pump iron
and do such basketball-looking things as vertical jumps. Scouts hover, punching
stopwatches. Commentators comment. The NBA also has tryout camps, albeit
quieter ones.
Foolproof, huh? Not really. In this
century the No. 1 choices in the NBA draft— supposedly the crème de la crème
of their classes—has produced such busts as Kwame Brown, Greg Oden, Anthony
Bennett and, apparently, the oft-injured Markelle Fulz, plus a few others who’ve
had marginal pro careers. The chance of
any team’s top choice becoming a dependable starter is no better than 50-50.
The bust-out draft bust came in the
NFL’s 1999 event, when the New Orleans Saints traded their entire list of
picks, plus a few the next year, for the right to make U. of Texas running back
Ricky Williams the fifth player chosen. Williams had an up-down, three-team
career marked by suspensions and a premature retirement before he decided he
liked marijuana better than football and quit the game altogether. He’s now an
advocate of the weed’s medicinal properties.
Failures by the basketball and
footballers are all the more apparent when their draft situations are compared
with those of Major League Baseball. While our nation’s universities
thoughtfully provide high-level care and training for young basketball and football
players, the baseball teams must pretty much do that on their own dime, through
their minor-league systems. The baseball draft, 20 rounds in all (it used to be
40 rounds), involves many high schoolers as well as collegians. These
youngsters are, typically, three to five years from big-league ready.
“The toughest thing in sports isn’t
hitting a Major League fastball,” Jerry Krause once said. He was a 15-year
general manager of the NBA Chicago Bulls (1985-2000) and a baseball scout
before and after. He continued, “It’s looking at a high-school hitter playing
in 40-degree weather in the Midwest in April and projecting how he’ll do in the
Bigs.”
Participants in the drafts always exude
confidence in their choices, but this doesn’t mean they are free of doubt. As
in other facets of their sport, they’ve developed their own language with which
to discuss the proceedings. For instance, after every first-round pick except
for the very first is announced, a honcho from the selecting team can be
expected to say he was surprised to see that the lad still was available when
he was, adding “we had him ranked higher.” What he really means is that he
wished he knew what the other teams know that he doesn’t.
Similarly,
when a football player is drafted in the middle rounds, or a basketballer in
round two, the drafting team will claim “he meets our needs.” Translated, this
means that his team has so many holes that any large, warm body would be an
improvement.
If the exec is less bullish on a choice he’ll
say he thinks the selectee “can compete for a job.” The unsaid line is “as a
management trainee at Target.” If a kid is praised for “high character” it can
mean that his rap sheet contains no felonies, only misdemeanors.
So enjoy the draft, but try not to
get too carried away.
