Going into last night, I wasn't all that confident that the Bobcats were going to win the NBA Lottery. After all, the last team to have the league's worst record in the previous season and win the lottery was the Orlando Magic all they way back in 2004 (when they selected in front of the expansion Bobcats, selected Dwight Howard, and subsequently sent the Bobcats down a long and terrible road for 8 years). Not to mention, the NBA Lottery is rigged. So, needless to say, I didn't think the Bobcats were gonna win the Anthony Davis sweepstakes.So when the New Orleans Hornets (a team owned by the NBA since 2010) won the lottery last night, the fate of the Bobcats was lost in all of the cries of "conspiracy!!" The Bobcats now face a pivotal point in the history of the franchise. By receiving the second pick in the 2012 draft, the lose out on the only (according to almost everyone) sure-fire franchise player in this draft, Anthony Davis. The Bobcats now have to make a pick that basically NEEDS to be a foundation for the future of the team. They have zero guys to build around on it's current roster, so this pick needs to go a long way. Next year's draft most likely won't be one of the stronger drafts in recent history (actually it might be one of the worst in recent memory), so that make's this 2012 pick absolutely critical. Is that pick Thomas Robinson? Michael Kidd-Gilchrist? Bradley Beal? Andre Drummond? The pick better not be Harrison Barnes, aka The Black Falcon.
Whoever it is, it's a big choice. All of these choices are gambles. Robinson is a tad undersized for the PF position in the NBA, and he seems to like playing out on the perimeter a little too much. Kidd-Gilchrist is a bit of a tweener, and doesn't have a great jump shot, but you know you're getting a hard-nosed winner. Beal is a little skinny, but Chad Ford has said that he's "Eric Gordon meets Ray Allen." Drummond has all of the upside in the world and has been called a bigger Amare Stoudemire, but he has been accused of lacking effort at times and disappearing for long stretches.
So, all of these guys have question marks, but the question that I and the other 2,000 Bobcats fans are wondering is whether or not Rich Cho, General Manager of the Bobcats, can make a great pick, and hopefully change the trajectory of this franchise. This is one of the biggest picks in the short history of the team. A bust could lead this team into several more years of being a terrible team. So no pressure Rich, but we're all counting on you.
