It is lunchtime somewhere. So, welcome back to the lunch hour read of the Meat & Three. Every weekday I dive into a big picture topic and three things to get you through a quarantine spring. Saturday marks one month since basketball was last played. What a month it is has been. What are we missing the most? We also continue our NBA Draft data exploration. The era of the one-and-done is really impressive. A great podcast stream and, of course, the Stan Johnson photo of the day. 

THE MEAT: UNPREDICTABILITY 

A month ago, I sat in bumper to bumper traffic en route to the Georgia State Sports Arena for a quarterfinal game between the host Panthers and Sun Belt arch-rival Georgia Southern. 

Like most drives through the capital of the South at rush hour, the drive was a slow crawl. My phone was blowing up as conference tournament games were dropping like flies because of the coronavirus infecting the country. 

I wondered if I would be able to even see a game that night. Would anyone outside of the teams, coaches, game officials and other necessary people be allowed in? When I got to the arena, no one was being let in. There was chatter about the sold-out game being spectator-less. But the yellow coats opened the doors and we filed into the arena. It was half full that night. 

I think I watched some of the game but, truth be told, I was watching Twitter like a hawk. Games were cancelling. Things were happening. News was breaking. Life was changing right there in front of me. 

“This is the last live game I’ll watch for a while,” I thought about 10 minutes into the game. 

Georgia State won and the press conference with coach Mark Byington was strange. We knew we had to ask questions about the game but some of us in that room knew the conversation was futile. The season was over. College basketball died that night. But no one wanted to say it out loud. 

As I walked out to my car that night, the Southern team was standing around the bus with hot meals in hand. They were getting ready to drive to a hotel near the airport. They were flying to New Orleans the next day to play in the semifinals of the Sun Belt tournament. They were two games away from going to the NCAA Tournament, a journey the school hasn’t made since 1992. Georgia Southern cancelled their trip to New Orleans the next morning.

I drove north back to my place and turned on the TV just in time to see the Pelicans and Kings game get cancelled right before tip. Then, for hours, I sat there in front of my TV like you did. Scott Van Pelt and Baxter Holmes talked about the “Rudy Gobert incident” into the vampire hours. 

Adam Silver postponed the entire NBA season on March 11. Everything regarding hoops came to a halt soon after. Everything. 

I, like many of you, have rewatched some of the best sports of the last fifty years on various broadcasts or replays on different streaming platforms. It’s been a lot of of fun rewatching and reliving those moments. But we know the plot. We may have forgotten some of the details to the final outcome but we know who won. It doesn’t satisfy the reason any of us walk into a game. 

If we learned anything in the last month it is this - We love the joy of unpredictability.

We go to sporting events, concerts, movies, restaurants, parties because we love the anticipation of what’s about to happen. That’s the beauty of events. That’s the excitement of moments. 

I miss the rush of opening the door at Suwanee Sports Academy, or The Finley Center or Raleigh Convention Center or any of the venues that we were planning on using this spring. You just never knew who was going to own the stage. 

Would a chubby shooting guard start his story on this weekend like Zion Williamson did with the South Carolina Hornets a half decade ago? Will a sheepish and skinny 6-foot-7 wing gain confidence in every shot he took like Brandon Ingram did six years ago? Will a wild but athletic guard with dyed red hair catch our attention like Ja Morant did? Or will a 12-year-old kid fall in love with the game like we see so many times at our Georgia Cup?

I miss those wonders of weekends. You just never know what will happen. That’s why I’ve been coming back, week after week, year after year. I’m sure you’re the same. 

The joy of unpredictability has been replaced with the uncertainty of unpredictability. What a pivot that’s been. Will it make us savor our moments? We will appreciate magic that happens so often in sport? Perhaps. 

And perhaps part of the optimism of sport is why we love it - we just never know how a story will play out. Call me optimistic, albeit cautiously, the unpredictability of what’s next could be great. It may just take some time to get there. 

THE NOTE

My career in basketball started at the NBA Draft. I began my career in media covering the annual summer night of dreams coming true. I’ve always loved it. If you’re a hoophead, it’s hard not to like. It blends our college game with the pro game on one amazingly fun night. 

With the time inside and away from the court, I’ve poured into some data from the NBA Draft. I’ve gone back to 2000 so we have 20 years of data to sort through. There’s a lot to look at, a lot to think about and a lot to discuss.

Since 2010, here have been a total nine seniors taken in the lottery since 2010. Only four were drafted inside the top 10. They are: 

No. 10 Jimmer Fredette 2010 
No. 10 CJ McCollum 2013 
No. 9 Frank Kaminsky 2015 
No. 6 Buddy Hield 2016

Conversely, the NBA Draft has been about the youth movement over the last decade. There have been 66 freshmen selected in the lottery since 2010. 

Since 2010, the top three picks of the draft have been dominated by the one-and-done era. Of the 30 players picked in this span, 23 have been freshmen. There have been three sophomores, two juniors, an international player and one high school player taken inside the top three picks of the NBA Draft. 

Since 2014, there have only been two non-freshmen players that were selected inside the top three picks. They are franchise anchors. 

No. 3 Luke Doncic 2018
No. 2 Ja Morant 2019  

THE STREAM 

Let’s pivot from video to audio for the Stream of the Day this week. If you’re not a podcast listener, now is the perfect time to become one. This week’s streams are a run back of some of my most favorite listens over the last couple of years. 

The introduction to the Book of Basketball 2.0 podcast is really good. These 30 minutes is just good listening. Take good social distance walk and have a go with this. There’s a great anecdote on the secret of basketball.  

THE STAN JOHNSON PHOTO OF THE DAY 

I asked our guy Stan Johnson to send me some of his favorite shots from the 2019 season on our HoopSeen platform. We begin his gallery today in the Meat & Three.