Oceans Never Listen to Us Anyway

I’m not exactly sure when I started to love the NBA Draft. My passion for basketball, especially on the professional level, began at an early age—I still remember my first Blazers game, a comeback playoff win against the Kevin Johnson/Tom Chambers/Jeff Hornacek Phoenix Suns, a wild, uptempo fight that must have ended at least a few hours after my bedtime. I was six-years-old at the time, just mature enough to make it through the whole game but too young to understand the complexities of the Suns’ poor pick and roll defense. But the first draft I can really remember watching came a few years later, in 1992, when Shaq and Alonzo Morning went one and two and Harold Miner was the first player unfortunately anointed “the next Jordan” by the fickle sports media. Baby Jordan, he was not; in fact, on the list of miniature NBA doppelgangers, he falls somewhere behind Baby Shaq and the beloved Lil’ Penny.

Sometime after that, the draft became a ritual; dad would take the afternoon off from work, mom would order pizza and buy plenty of chips and salsa, and I would sit in front of the TV, in complete rapture, writing down the order and every statistic imaginable: height, weight, jersey number, points scored. For some reason I was particularly enamored with knowing where each player went to college, one of those seemingly random bits of knowledge that only true basketball junkies and stat-heads give two shits about. To this day, I probably can’t place El Salvador on a map, but I know that Shawn Respert went to Michigan St. Those sunny June afternoons pleased my parents, too; my young mind was shaped by basketball statistics, and I quickly learned to apply everything I memorized off the back of a basketball card to the classroom, where math was my thing until high school introduced things like functions and derivatives that had nothing to do with calculating Cliff Robinson’s three point field goal percentage.

As I got older, some of my allegiances and interests changed, but the draft was still there. In middle school, when video games became so advanced that you could create your own player, I would take my list of first round picks and dutifully try to create the perfect virtual replica of every player, from Elton Brand to Wally Szczerbiak. Most teenagers wanted to put themselves, and their friends, into the game. I just wanted to make sure that the Minnesota Timberwolves’ roster was perfect. In high school I started hosting an NBA Draft Party, inviting my friends—some basketball fans, some novices—over to watch the broadcast, mock the suits and bemoan every bad Blazers pick. When I spent the summer of 2006 working on campus in Los Angeles, I reserved the rec room TV six weeks in advance. When the Blazers came out of the draft with both Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, I was the happiest dude in L.A. Draft the stache, my ass.

Around that time, I started telling people that draft day was my favorite day of the year—it’s easily better than any birthday (don’t have to worry about getting older) or Halloween (I know what my costume will be every year!), a personal holiday for a certain type of nerdy basketball fan who likes the offseason more than the Finals. If you want to think of it in a Christian sense, the draft is like Christmas, only with trade rumors instead of presents and Jeff Van Gundy as a bald, angry Santa Claus.

When I moved to New York six weeks ago, I realized that I didn’t have to find a bar to watch the draft—I could buy tickets and go, as long as I figured out how to navigate the Jersey subway system to make it out to Newark. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Scoop Henry, flew out to New York for a few days, but I still hesitated on buying tickets, holding onto the minuscule possibility that I might be working that day and wouldn’t be able to make it to Jersey by 7 pm. So instead paying ridiculous Ticketmaster surcharges, I went to Craigslist, hoping to find two cheap tickets and save a little bit of dough for a few $8 Miller Lights at the Prudential Center concourse. Most of the deals seemed pretty decent—$70 for two upper level tickets, $120 for a better line of sight—but one in particular was too good to believe: $100 for two tickets to “The NBA Draft Experience,” including VIP entry, a backstage tour, and a meet-and-greet with Hall of Famer (and Brooklyn playground legend) Chris Mullin. I instantly emailed the guy, who verified that the tickets were still available and the whole package was real. Scoop and I went all the way to the Upper West side to meet him, where he handed us a Pee Chee folder with the tickets, complete with directions to the VIP entrance and info on the schedule printed on a very official-looking American Express letterhead. We headed to Jersey on a high, but still unsure if we just bought into an elaborate scam.

At 4:30, we entered the side VIP entrance, tickets in hand, and walked up to the security table. Our tickets were scanned, and then an over-friendly American Express exec asked me for my name.

“Uh, Michael Mannheimer,” I muttered, realizing that my name wasn’t going to be on the list. “But I bought the tickets off Craigslist, so…”

The exec looked at me and frowned, surely the barer of terrible news.

“That’s not going to work.”

Groan. But, oh, I knew the dude’s name! It was on my phone.

“Matthew Green!” I shouted.

“We have a Richard Green…” she responded, trailing off.

“Yeah, that’s his dad.” Total lie, but I didn’t know what to do. For some reason she bought it, and suddenly we were handed lanyards, whisked to the elevator, and escorted to one of the arena’s luxury suits for free food and drinks and a clear view of the stage.

The next few hours still seem like a dream. We went on a backstage tour of the arena, took pictures on the stage, sat down at the greenroom where the players and their families wait to hear their name called. We overheard David Stern test out the microphone at his podium and make fun of Stuart Scott and Van Gundy (“Look everybody, it’s Jeff Van Gundy dispensing wisdom at his pulpit! If you have a problem with the refs, talk to Jeff”). We ran into Duane Martin (Above the Rim, anyone?) and walked right past Brandon Jennings and Serge Ibaka, who were just there to chill and look good, I guess. We saw rabid fans and hangers-on scream for Jimmer. And then we met Chris Mullin, the white guy on the Dream Team, and chatted about the early ’90s Blazers and life as an ESPN commentator. He wants the Warriors to keep Monta.

The funny thing, sadly, is that the actual draft was pretty uneventful—not many trades or awkward suits, just lots of smiling Europeans and Deron Williams jerseys, spilled Budweisers and Isiah Thomas jokes. Things got murky after drinking a few beers, but sitting in the arena, booing the Knicks pick and watching the players walk from the stage to the designated interview area on the floor, I felt at peace. Who cares if Nolan Smith doesn’t pan out? The draft will always be something I get excited about, if I’m unemployed or writing for my hometown’s alt-weekly or moving to New York in search of a new adventure. I might be grown up now, basically an adult, but the draft is still here to remind me what it feels like to be a kid.