In less than a week, the Thunder will know their fate for this year's draft. The results of the NBA's draft lottery will be unveiled on May 19th, but in the meantime, the focus will be on who the team sends to represent it on the made for TV event and the minister who talked about his thunderwear. When it is all over, those will probably be the happiest memories from this portion of team history.
That's becase the lottery is a spiteful mistress. Teams that fail miserably during the season clutch to the hope that the losing will end up with them lucking into the one player they need to turn their franchise around. The problem is: even the team with the worst record in the league has a 75% chance of getting screwed.
Remember, one in four, that's best case scenario.
For the Thunder, at least most fans of the team, winning the lottery is the only hope of satisfaction. That's because hometown hero Blake Griffin is the big prize that all fourteen teams involved in the lottery hope to secure. The problem that leads to is that as only the 4th worst team in the league, there is an 89% chance Oklahoma City is unhappy on May 20th. Our resident expert on percentages, Dean Blevins, informs me that those are bad odds. Truth be told, the Thunder have a better shot at falling to #6 (which is worst case scenario) than they do of moving up from #4 (which is the status quo).
Making matters worse is that this is a craptastic draft class. It was awful when every player that could possibly enroll was tossed around as a possibility. Now that the deadline for early entrants has passed, it's even worse. Guys with upside potential like North Carolina sixth man Ed Davis, Sooner combo guard Willie Warren, and the current foreigner compared to Dirk Nowitzki (Donatas Montejunas) chose to screw themselves and wait a year to try their luck in what should be a much deeper draft pool. Maybe they should have asked Tyler Hansbrough about how well his decision to do the same a couple of years ago worked out.