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Shock-ing news: Time to junk the draft lottery
Published: 4/15/2012 2:00 PM
Last Modified: 4/15/2012 2:00 PM

Here are words you didn’t hear last year: “With the first pick in the 2011 WNBA Draft, the Tulsa Shock selects Maya Moore of Connecticut.”

Here are words you won’t be hearing Monday: “With the first pick in the 2012 WNBA Draft, the Tulsa Shock selects Nnemkadi Ogwumike of Stanford.”

Tulsa “earned” the right to pick first in the 2011 and 2012 drafts. The Shock posted the league’s worst record in consecutive years, going 6-28 during an inaugural season in Tulsa and 3-31 last season.

This isn’t the NFL, where worst drafts first. The WNBA is under the umbrella of the NBA, which uses a weighted lottery system to determine who picks first.

The NBA once had an NFL-type system for determining draft order. Blame Hakeem Olajuwon for the change. During the 1983-84 season, NBA teams were accused of intentionally losing games to increase their odds of securing the top pick (Olajuwon).

The NBA went to a lottery system the next year (when the Knicks “won” Patrick Ewing) and the WNBA uses the same system as big brother. Teams with the worst records have the best odds of drafting first, but nothing is guaranteed.

For instance No. 1: The Shock wound up with the No. 2 pick last year. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Lynx drafted Moore and won a WNBA championship.

For instance No. 2: The Shock hoped to draft first, but instead settled for the worst possible outcome for lottery participants and instead will draft fourth.

New Shock coach Gary Kloppenburg -- can you blame him? -- wonders if the WNBA lottery should be scrapped.

“I don’t really know if our league needs a lottery because it’s such a short season,” he said.

“By the time you figure out ‘let’s try to tank it and get the first pick,’ you are 20 games into the season and the season is almost over.

“The NBA, it’s such a long season. With 82 (regular season) games, it probably did happen. At the end, they just started probably trying to lose to get the No. 1 pick the next year. Now they have their lottery, so it doesn’t really help you that much (to lose).”

Kloppenburg suggested the WNBA should look at doing away with the lottery because the league has good parity right now. Parity wasn’t contagious in Tulsa, but he said even the Shock didn’t have a “major drop-off” in talent.

“I think that’s the neat thing with our league,” Kloppenburg said. “With a 12-team league, you can get a really good, competitive league, so every night anybody can beat anybody. I think we are pretty close to that in the WNBA.”

Junking the lottery system might have given Tulsa the star power to gain access to the parity party.


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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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