Way To Improve Your Nba Team

OVERRATED
Draft

The saving grace of a losing NBA season is the promise of the high draft pick to come. But when it comes to drafting future stars, not even the smartest basketball people on the planet know what they're doing. Here's how the 1997 draft lottery went:

1. Tim Duncan
2. Keith Van Horn
3. Chauncey Billups
4. Antonio Daniels
5. Tony Battie
6. Ron Mercer
7. Tim Thomas
8. Adonal Foyle
9. Tracy McGrady
10. Danny Fortson
11. Olivier Saint-Jean
12. Austin Croshere
13. Derek Anderson

Here's how it should have gone:

1. Duncan (1)
2. McGrady (9)
3. Billups (3)
4. Van Horn (2)
5. Thomas (7)
6. Bobby Jackson (23)
7. Derek Anderson (13)
8. Alvin Williams (48)
9. Fortson (10)
10. Mercer (6)
11. Croshere (12)
12. Maurice Taylor (14)
13. Kelvin Cato (15)

Seven teams passed on McGrady, who is one of the top five players in the league. (The Celtics, with picks Nos. 3 and 6, whiffed on him twice.) Every draft lottery has had at least one horrendous mistake. Milwaukee was guilty of one of the worst moves ever in 1998 when it traded the rights to first-round picks Dirk Nowitzki and Pat Garrity for the woeful Robert (Tractor) Traylor. If that draft could be done over, the first two picks would be Nowitzki and Paul Pierce, who went ninth and 10th, respectively. The draft is dicier than ever, now that it has been flooded with college underclassmen and players from high school, junior college and foreign pro leagues. Will the No. 1 pick last year, Bulls center Kwame Brown, ever become a better player than Spurs guard Tony Parker, the last choice of the first round? It's no sure thing.

UNDERRATED
Mid-Level Players
LAST SUMMER THE high-j profile free agent was Chris Webber: Sign him, the thinking went, and he'll win you a championship. Similar hopes will be raised in 2003 when Tim Duncan will be available. But if you want to turn around a losing franchise, you're better off shopping for middle-class value. The ugly truth about big-ticket free agents is that they usually aren't worth the money. Shaquille O'Neal is the only unrestricted free agent to lead his new team to a championship—and he didn't pay off until his fourth year with the Lakers, after Kobe Bryant had been seasoned. A majority of a team's budget is spent on two or three stars, but those players can't succeed by themselves. How did Detroit go from 50 losses to 50 wins last season? When he failed to lure Webber, Pistons G.M. Joe Dumars made do with trades for Clifford Robinson ($7.7 million), Jon Barry ($3.2 million) and Zeljko Rebraca ($3.5 million). Boston became a conference finalist because it acquired a couple of role players in Rodney Rogers ($2.4 million) and Tony Delk ($2.5 million). The lesson? When it comes to upgrading a team, the bargain bin is a more likely source of success than the big-ticket luxury item.