2003 NBA Draft Analysis

ferrari77 · Jun 23, 2013

Great piece I saw on Sportscenter today.
The video and the article w/it.

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There aren't many things in professional sports that live up to the hype. The 2003 NBA draft was one of them.

Excitement was building for over a year -- first among league executives and then among fans -- about the new blood on its way. And boy, did the league need it.

The NBA was in a recession. With Michael Jordan retired, for good this time, and a scarcity of marketable young stars, fan interest had waned. Outside of the Los Angeles Lakers and their stars, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal, the league didn't have many national draws.

The 2003 NBA Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and New Jersey Nets were the lowest rated in history, losing more than 50 percent of the audience from just five years earlier when Jordan won his last title with the Bulls.

There was a belief, or at least a hope, that a new generation of stars could turn things around, and the 2003 class had several promising candidates.

LeBron James was the first high school basketball player whose stardom had already reached to national level thanks to several magazine covers and games broadcast on ESPN before he'd even turned 18 years old. Carmelo Anthony catapulted into the spotlight by leading Syracuse to the national title as just a freshman. A tough Chicago kid named Dwyane Wade also made a name for himself in the same NCAA tournament, leading Marquette to an improbable Final Four run and completing one of the greatest performances in tournament history with a triple-double against Kentucky.

It wasn't just domestic players, either. With Dirk Nowitzki becoming a superstar and Yao Ming a superstar in the making, teams began jetting off across the world to try to find the next international star, and a 17-year-old with bleach-blond hair named Darko Milicic became an obsession for many who did.

"When you've been around long enough you get to where you know it when you see a potential franchise player," Miami Heat president Pat Riley said. "We all knew there were several special players in that draft. You could feel it. And we all wanted them."

With so much talent to be had, draft positioning became a major storyline of the 2002-03 regular season, with fans and media alike keeping a close eye on the bottom of the league standings. With so much interest, the usually mundane draft lottery -- in which the league reveals the order of the teams with the first 13 picks -- became a major TV event. And on the night of the draft itself, several teams made decisions that charted a course for the league over the next decade.

It's now been 10 years since those events, and the people involved all have stories to tell. Some of the memories are fond. Some are disastrous.

LOTTERY DAY
Click to expand...

It's a long read so here's the link to the rest of part 1 and part 2

http://espn.go.com/nba/draft2013/st...-history-1/an-oral-history-2003-lottery-draft

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2003 NBA Draft Analysis

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