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And, so what do you say to Heat fans, if they fail to win the lottery after 67 losses? According to David J. Berri, the same thing you could have said to Grizzlies fans, who watched the seventh-worst team (Portland) earn the right to draft Greg Oden in 2007, while the worst-in-NBA Grizzlies slipped to fourth. And the same thing you could have said to Blazers fans the year before, when their team slipped from the first lottery seed to the fourth spot, as the fifth-worst team (Toronto) ascended to the top spot:
Tough luck.
"I don't know how you deserve the No. 1 pick if you are the worst team," said Berri, an associate professor at Cal-State Bakersfield and a co-author of The Wages of Wins. "To say, 'I deserve the top pick, because I was more incompetent than anyone else.' What kind of argument is this? You are not owed something here. You made bad decisions. You get what you get."
Berri notes that, if the Heat played in Europe, it might get something worse than the fourth overall selection.
It might get demoted.
"It's a quandary unique to North American sports," Berri said. "In Europe, they don't have this problem, because if the Heat was in Europe, it would be playing in the National Basketball Developmental League. They would have promoted some other team from the second division."
As in European soccer.
"Then Miami wouldn't be doing that anymore," Berri said, of possibly creating conditions to lose on purpose. "The revenue loss would have been so huge, Miami would have been trying to win every single game. In U.S., the teams are fixed, they know they're fixed, know they're not going anywhere. In Europe, they don't have any draft, they can sign whoever they want to sign."
In the NBA, teams must wait on pingpong balls before they learn who will be dunking balls in their arenas next.
The wait ends Tuesday night, in Secaucus, NJ.
"By doing things probabilistically, with the draft lottery, that creates theater," said Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of Business. "This is an entertainment industry, and the NBA's staff expenses for something that rates as well as the playoffs is zero dollars. If I were running the show, I would have clowns on unicycles juggling flames."
To see that in person, it might be worth renting Pat Williams' condo.
Kobe Bryant hit a baseline jump shot with 4.2 seconds left and the Los Angeles Lakers wrapped up a six-game road trip by holding on to beat the Raptors 94-92 on Sunday, their eighth victory in nine meetings with Toronto
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Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
Ryan Callahan scored for the fifth time in four days and defenseman Ryan McDonagh snapped a second-period tie to lift the New York Rangers to a 3-2 victory over the Washington Capitals on Sunday.
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