This year’s upcoming draft is projected to be one of the most exciting in recent memory (and possibly ever?).
The consensus No. 1 prospect is Victor Wembanyama, an 18-year-old who is 7’4″ and also happens to have very impressive ball-handling and scoring skills.
He blocks about 1 out of every 9 shots his opponents take while sinking about 1.5 three-pointers per game.
The team he currently plays for is called Metropolitans 92. That’s not really relevant to his draft stock, but I thought it was a fun name.
Then the likely number two pick is Scoot Henderson, a point guard for the G League Ignite. The Ignite is like college, except you can also make up to $500,000 while playing, which is a pretty sweet deal.
Henderson is a slashing point guard with good playmaking ability and might be developing a nice jump shot, too.
Plus, can you envision a world where a player named Scoot Henderson DOESN’T do well? I simply cannot.
Other top prospects include Amen Thompson from the Overtime Elite and two college dudes (Nick Smith Jr. and Cam Whitmore) who have played a combined zero games and yet are still being touted as potentially franchise-altering players.
The point is there are a lot of very good players in this draft. And that means teams are going to tank to try and get them.
Making Tanking Work
But a truly strong tank strategy needs to happen early in the season. You can’t coast your way through games and pick up a few accidental wins here and there.
You’ve got to be committed to putting people in places where they could theoretically succeed but probably won’t actually do it.
This is the first of an ongoing series revisiting famous spectacles from previous NBA seasons. We’re only about a quarter of the way through the year, so these will pop up as the season goes along.
First up, we’re taking a trip back to 2006 (a future issue will also cover this season but in a different way).
The Minnesota Timberwolves were sitting at 33-48 and needed a loss to inch ahead of the Boston Celtics in the draft lottery, increasing the likelihood of a better pick.
In the game’s final moments, the Timberwolves ran a play for power forward Mark Madsen, a 6-foot-9, 245-pound man who made his first NBA three-pointer during his rookie season in 2000-01.
He then missed his final 15, including SEVEN IN THIS GAME. And the crowd loved it.
You hear a murmur of excitement as the ball is in the air. The Timberwolves’ broadcast team encourages Madsen to shoot. Fans even proudly yell, “DRAFT PICK!” as the game goes on.
They’re openly rooting for failure, which is all kinds of wild.
Madsen, to his credit, keeps on shooting those three-pointers. They do progressively get closer to going in, so maybe if he had another few minutes, we would have seen a swish. Instead, we get a special 2-for-1 miss of consecutive shots as the final seconds tick away, mercifully ending this game.
I once missed 15 three-pointers in a row over like a six-game stretch in high school, and it was a terrible feeling. I wonder if making millions of dollars would have helped ease the pain a bit.
Either way, NBA rosters are filled with guys trying to make it in the league, so it would be absurd for anyone to try and mess it up to gift the team a better draft pick that could very well be used on his replacement.
Thanks to Reinis Lācis for sharing a video of this matchup. He dives even further into tanking over on his blog, which also explains that the Timberwolves ended up surpassing the Celtics in the draft, only to end up swapping draft picks anyway.
Then again, Minnesota has had some bad luck in the NBA Draft. Fans may recall the team drafted two points guards in 2009, neither of whom was multi-MVP Steph Curry. The Golden State Warriors took Curry after the Timberwolves did not, and he’s won four championships in the Bay Area.
The Timberwolves? Well…they’ve only made the playoffs twice since that 2006 draft. But at least they won a play-in game last year and celebrated like 10-year-old me opening up a Nintendo 64 for my birthday. You love to see it.