Sideshow Robin and the Jersey Tank Job

I was going to take a full miss on the NBA Draft this year, but then the sports blogosphere alerts came and made this image available, and who am I to turn a gift Sideshow in the mouth?

This is Robin Lopez, who has definite Juwanna Mann potential, and as that's my third WNBA reference in the past five days, I will now check to see if my nuts are still on my body.

Yup.

But only just.

For anyone who doubts the power of the Association as a top 3 league, I give you this fact... between Anderson Varaejo, Yannick Noah and Lopez, you have over a 10% chance in any NBA game of seeing a live-action Simpsons villain getting rotation minutes. What more could you want, really?

(Why a miss on the Draft? Because it honestly seemed like there's not much here this time. Color me unimpressed when the world thinks that several of the players in the lottery will be career back-ups. Even the top 2 picks of Rose and Beasley have obvious and startling holes. Rose can't shoot threes or free throws, which makes him Rajon Rondo, who was drafted in the 20s a few years ago. Beasley has the ever popular character issues, was listed three inches taller than reality, and will be a defensive sieve. Yum! I should have definitely written another 1500 words on this to make the site's long-suffering non-Association fans scroll furiously. Or, well, not.)

There is also this... I hate, hate, hate it when a team announces to its fans that it is tanking the year before the year even begins. And that is the only way that you can spin New Jersey trading a genuinely good player (Richard Jefferson, who admittedly will never put up his Playing With Jason Kidd numbers again) for two guys (Yi Jianlin and Bobby Simmons) who can't play, won't stay healthy, and will both be out of the Association in 3 years or less.

It's clear that the Nets are just clearing cap space to go after LeBron James, not that this ever works -- seriously, Nets fans, you do know that you're just getting suckered into a multiple year wait for a free agent signing that isn't going to happen. When a fan base is told, before the year even starts, that there is no hope for the year, and that assets are being sold off just to have cap space, that's reprehensible. It's fraud to charge full price for the tickets. As a Sixers fan, I feel very strongly about this: every fan base deserves to have the potential for hope before a season begins. What is your hope if you are a Nets fan -- that Devin Harris is somehow going to become Chris Paul? That Jianlin will somehow not be horrible? That Nenad Krstic will come again to exact Gandhi II-like justice?

Maybe I'm overstating the case here, and that Marcus and Sean Williams will emerge to give the team an exciting young nucleus, or that Vince Carter will decide to care and be the elder leader of the team. (Chance of this happening: Zero.) But in the meantime, the Nets should cut ticket prices. (Chance of this happening: Zero.)