Four players found near-perfect fits in 2006 draft

	With a international-friendly front office and city to call home, Andrea Bargnani's transition to the NBA should be a smooth one. AP

NBA players measure things just like the rest of us. Your neighbor has a higher-paying job, or a bigger home, or a lower handicap, it rankles you just a bit. Similarly, players who got picked in the lower portion of the 2006 NBA Draft on Wednesday night are looking up at their brethren in the single-digit heaven and feeling just a bit of envy.

But what's far more important than having a scarlet draft-pick number emblazoned on your chest, defining your worth as a player and as a human being, is this: Is the team you wound up as property of at the end of this head-spinning night a good fit for you? Is the team management stable? Is the coaching staff ready and able to help you to develop your skills and teach you the ways of the NBA? Does the team play a style that you will be able to fit into, and are there veterans there who will take you under their wing and explain basketball and life situations so that you can understand them?

The answers to these questions won't come in a rush. They will be answered over the long days and nights of training camp and an 82-game season. But at first blush, there are a few players who seem to have hit two lotteries on draft night: first, that they got picked in the first round of an NBA draft and are instant millionaires (hooray!), and second, that they have landed on teams that fit them in important ways and should accelerate their development. These situations are so good, the fit so seemingly perfect, that I dare say these players could spend the majority of their careers with these teams.

Andrea Bargnani, Toronto Raptors

Let's start where the draft began, with the first overall pick. The 20-year-old who helped Benetton Treviso to the Italian League championship has never played outside of Italy, so which NBA team ends up drafting him? The Raptors of Toronto, a gleaming international city that might not have quite the savoir faire of old Montreal but leans a lot closer to cosmopolitan than most NBA cities. To make Toronto even more welcoming, the Raptors recently hired the GM of Benetton, Maurizio Gherardini, a highly respected name in international basketball circles and the man who nurtured Bargnani's abilities from a young age, to be a team vice president and assistant GM.