A rough draft

The NBA regular season is over which means you’re either celebrating a playoff bid or you’re getting ready for the lottery.

Since the first envelope emerged from the freezer in time immemorial,* teams have schemed for ways to get ahead using the draft. Of course, the NBA has a lottery system to prevent just that. Instead of distributing picks according to record alone, the NBA introduces an element of randomness to discourage teams from losing on purpose to secure a good draft pick.

Tactless in Seattle

This is awful. Actually, I should specify: Sacramento’s NBA franchise moving to Seattle after a rather public courtship is awful for the fans. It’ll work out just fine for the owners, and probably even better for the league. New stadiums flaunt, new merchandise to sell, and hey even though they won’t be able to the threat of moving to Seattle as leverage for franchises anymore, they’ll be able to do the same thing with Sacramento in a couple of years.

There has been plenty of study/discussion of team relocation and how best to handle it. You could just keep on playing and hoping or you could dance on a grave or practically anything in between. After seeing my hometown Twins forced to sit under the damocletian sword of contraction in the aftermath of the 2001 World Series, I got to watch helplessly again as the Viking were batted around as a likely candidate for LA's new NFL franchise* during the second half of 2012. That is at least until the state built them a new stadium. Funny how that sort of thing works out.