One of the favorite pastimes of basketball fans when it comes to NBA draft time is figuring out who will be number one. Another, to review the mistakes of the past. Michael Jordan (third in his promotion), Larry Bird (6th), Kobe Bryant (13th), Giannis Antetokounmpo (15th), Nikola Jokić (41st), Stephen Curry (7th) and Joel Embiid (3rd) were relegated by players who left much less footprint. Others, such as LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O'Neal were number ones that marked an era. To the list of the undisputed numbers one it is taken for granted that the Frenchman Victor Wembanyama will be added this year. And after the lottery on Tuesday, the team with priority to choose him are the San Antonio Spurs.
Wembanyama is a prodigy of nature. With 19 years and 2.21 meters tall can mark an era in his new team. In addition to height and wingspan (he can almost grab the hoop without jumping), he has skill for both shooting and passing. He needs to gain muscle and weight to increase his power, but the NBA coaches will surely take care of it, as they did in their day with Pau Gasol and have done with so many others.
The French player was born on January 4, 2004 in Le Chesnay, on the outskirts of Paris, the son of an athlete of Congolese origin and a basketball player and coach, 1.98 and 1.91 meters tall, respectively. Genetics played his cards and although as a child he liked football and judo, he was destined to succeed in basketball. He started playing for Nanterre. With 14 years and 2.10 meters high, he was invited by Barcelona to play the ACB Minicup, but he only spent a week wearing Barça. Years later he said that he declined to stay at Barça for several reasons, but that the main one was that he felt that the coaches did not dare to correct him and make him improve.
Although the club has won the first pick in the lottery, the draft as such will not occur until June 22, after the end of the season. Last year the favorites were not so clear, but the choice of Paolo Banchero as number one by the Orlando Magic ahead of Chet Holmgrem and Jabari Smith caused some surprise. Banchero has fulfilled and has been the rookie of the year, although Orlando has been left out of the postseason.
The draw was held in Chicago and the Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets and San Antonio Spurs were the three teams with the most ballots in the lottery: a 14% chance each. This Tuesday, the star of PSG, Kylian Mbappé, has approached the small pavilion of Levallois, on the outskirts of Paris, to watch the last match of the regular league of Wembanyama with the Metropolitans 92, his current team. Mbappé has been asked in which team he would like his compatriot to revive and the footballer has answered that he would like to be chosen by Gregg Popovich's San Antonio Spurs, with whom the also French Tony Parker won four championship rings.
Parker himself put Wembanyama through the roof a few years ago: "Victor is a unique player in the world, he is the best young talent in French basketball in the last twenty years," he said when introducing him as a center of Asvel Villeurbanne when he was 17 years old. In recent months, the accolades have been joined by current NBA stars. "It's an alien. No one has ever seen someone so tall and so fluid and graceful on the court," LeBron James said. "We have to prepare for this kid," Giannis Antetokounmpo warned. "He's a video game player," Stephen Curry said.
The draw consisted of introducing 14 balls in a machine, one for each team that has been left out of the playoffs and participated in the lottery. The first four balls define the default combinations assigned to each team. Although the result has been communicated in a special program in prime time, the draw as such has been carried out with all the secrecy possible in a room closed to lime and song an hour before. In that room were representatives of the teams, NBA officials, observers and some journalists who could not leave the room or communicate with the outside until the results have been made public.
The draft is an established system for balancing competition in the long run. Weaker teams have priority. Previously, teams chose in reverse order to their position in the table: only the first pick among the bottom of each conference was drawn. The problem is that the teams let themselves win to sink in the classification and have preference, a maneuver known as tanking. In 1984 the system was reformed to reinforce the chance component, so that losing a position did not guarantee an advance in the order of choice, especially in the first picks of the draft. It has been retouched numerous times.
In 2017, the current lottery system was established, applied since 2019, which accentuates randomness. Enter the pot the 14 teams that have been left out of the playoffs. The new system levels the odds so that the bottom three teams in the regular season standings each have a 14% chance of winning the first pick in the lottery. The fourth by the tail has a 12.5% choice; the fifth 10.5 per cent; the sixth, 9 per cent; the seventh, 7.5%... In the pre-2019 structure, the top seed had a 25% chance of winning the lottery; the second, 19.9% and the third, 15.6%. The ballots of the rest are distributed according to the positions in the classification.
Despite the changes, the temptation for some teams is still too strong and letting themselves win to have more chances continues to happen. The NBA imposed a fine of $ 750,000 (about 675,000 euros) on the Dallas Mavericks a month ago for winning against the Chicago Bulls in the game on April 7. The U.S. professional basketball championship said the fine on Luka Dončić's team was "for conduct detrimental to the league."
You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes on Facebook and Twitter, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.