people get ready

portland and seattle 1 and 2? so who's willing to bet against Nike signing both oden and durant before the month is over? nobody? yea, i wouldn't either.

why is it everybody thinks that taking the best player available is the same thing as saying take kevin durant first overall? has it occurred to anybody that oden might actually be the best player in the draft? just a thought.

finally, can people please stop making the michael joran draft analogy? please? everybody says that it's ridiculous to pass on the next MJ, and that we all should have learned our lesson in '84

what i personally have learned since '84 (a tumultuous terrible twos for me, i remember it fondly) is that a dominant center ALWAYS pans out.

i don't care how many big man busts there have been, if you roll the dice on a talented dominant big and win, that equals championships. rolling the dice on talented wings is just as, if not more risky these days (name someone who's done what MJ did. what? nobody? curious....) plus even when they do pan out, it never guarantees rings (see tmac, vc, dirk, kg even, etc etc...)

in other words, greg oden is going to portland. no question about it, barring some sort of unforeseen deal breaker. at this point, i could make a cliched jailblazer joke. but i'm better than that, so you should be too.

.....

and for those of you who remember my NBA draft = dating analogy, i'm going to break this year's crop down into laywomans terms for the ladies.

greg oden is the professional student who is relatively well balanced in everything and is certainly going to be a rich ass dude who makes the world a better place, as well a dedicated family man. he might even end AIDS somehow, through either doing research or ridiculously generous philanthropy. hell, perhaps through both.

kevin durant is a performing artist who's about to make it huge. he's enourmously talented, and is capable of both winning a grammy and an oscar without people rolling their eyes. just enormous potential for greatness. and he's not even fake about it, he just happens to be really good at stuff in a way that seems almost unfair.

see, the difference between real life and the NBA now, is that even if kevin durant DOES end up winning a grammy, an oscar, a VIBE lifetime achievement award, and the nobel peace prize, he might still not necessary win a championship if he's on a crappy team, or surrounded by incompetent organizations. (see kevin garnett).

however, i just realized after typing out that comparison that most people would choose durant in a heartbeat.

i guess my analogy is somewhat flawed. dammit. back to the drawing board.