My reaction to being bamboozled by the city of Dallas on Draft Lottery night twice in sixth months.
Not to be overly dramatic, but the Draft Lottery could not have gone any worse for the Toronto Raptors. Like, what the actual [expletive] was that?
For my sanity and well-being, I did not watch the lottery live. Well, in all honesty, it was one of my best friends’ birthdays, and he planned a dinner, so I was occupied. I assumed the Raptors would hold par at pick No. 7 and be done with it, so there I was, sipping too much wine than is probably acceptable for a Monday night while other Raptors fans experienced the crash out of the century. At around 7:30, I assumed the entire ordeal would be over and decided to check on how the Raptors did. I shouldn’t have looked.
The first tweet I saw was a fake account telling me that the Raptors got the No. 1 overall pick, producing a gasp. It took me all of .2 seconds to realize I had been Centel’d, before continuing to scroll to the next tweet: Blake Murphy’s matter-of-fact declaration that Toronto had drawn the ninth pick. NINTH. Leave it to Blake to kill my buzz (kidding, hehe love ya Blake).
It took another few scrolls for my worst fears to be realized. Not only had Toronto fallen to the No. 9 pick, but the No. 1 pick went to DALLAS. The Dallas Mavericks. The “made the actual worst trade decision in sports history” Dallas Mavericks. Sickening. I felt like I was experiencing Deja Vu.
Dear reader, if you know me, you know I am a fan of a little basketball league called the Women’s National Basketball Association. A league in which one of the best basketball prospects of all time entered this season as the number one draft prospect — a player I had been following her entire college career, Paige Bueckers.
On a fateful December Night, I settled in to watch the WNBA Lottery. While my Toronto Tempo were not yet participating, I was hopeful Bueckers would end up in Los Angeles, personally. Yet, it was the Dallas Wings that snuck up in there and secured the No. 1 pick despite not having the largest odds to do so. Crushing, fr. A Bueckers jersey in the Sparks’ classic gold and purple????? Instant add to cart. It was not meant to be.
This time around, I had more skin in the game, as the Toronto Raptors were on the block. With the 7th-best odds, they only had about a 7.5% chance to get the No. 1 pick. Not nothing, but not the best either. Hell, I would have taken a top-four pick and been happy, or even just the 7th pick and been happy. After years of this team’s half-tank effort, I wasn’t expecting too much and knew Washington or Charlotte had a better shot at that coveted first pick.
What I certainly was not expecting was to be BAMBOOZLED by the city of Dallas a SECOND TIME in six months. Tell me how the Mavericks franchise completes the world’s most EGREGIOUSLY DUMB TRADE, tries to gaslight their fanbase into thinking it was the right thing to do, and gets rewarded IMMEDIATELY with Cooper Flagg. After they JUST got Paige Bueckers?!?!?!? Make it make sense, because it doesn’t.
The Mavericks only had a 1.5% chance at drawing No. 1, on top of it. That makes the Raptors’ 7.5% odds look AMAZING. The Mavericks didn’t even have a chance to tank before being rewarded with the No. 1 pick in a year with Cooper Flagg as a prospect. It’s infuriating.
I’m a conspiracy theorist about two things in this world: All-Star Voting and Draft Lotteries. There’s no way the All-Star voting process is not rigged to benefit the league’s most profitable players. In the same vein, there is something SO fishy about Dallas getting both Bueckers and Flagg in the same year. Different team ownership aside, just generally WTF.
What does Toronto need to do to get some good juju? Are we literally in basketball purgatory until we get graced with Juju Watkins on the Toronto Tempo? That has to be the endgame, right? Why do the Raptors keep getting the most terrible luck? I mean, all it took Dallas was trading Luka Doncic, meanwhile the Raptors have dealt with a relocation to Tampa Bay, being sued by the Knicks, a betting investigation, too many injuries to list, and the Drake/Kendrick fallout. WE DESERVED a top-four pick! Certainly more than Dallas did!
Give me a few weeks to crash out about the No. 9 pick, and I will be fine, but I will not get over the Mavericks getting the top pick. I would be less mad about the 76ers getting it, and that’s saying a lot. They can’t keep getting away with this.
If I had a nickel every time the city of Dallas was awarded a generational No. 1 draft pick, despite fraudulent team decisions, I’d only have two nickels — but it’s weird it happened twice, right?