Friday, June 29, 2007

Thoughts on Last Night's NBA Draft

Like most NBA drafts, last night's made for great television (at least until things seemed to slow down dramatically with picks beginning in the 20s). There are excellent draft recaps today by Chad Ford, Bill Simmons, Marty Burns, and Charley Rosen. Jeff Clark and Henry Abbott also ran an excellent draft chat on ESPN, and its transcript is worth checking out.

To me, the most interesting development was the Milwaukee Bucks selecting Yi Jianlian at #6, even though Yi's agent, Dan Fegan, did everything he could prior to the draft to dissuade the Bucks from taking him. And that's because, according to the Associated Press, Yi "wanted to play in a city with a strong Asian influence . . . there are about 27.5 thousand people of Asian descent living in Milwaukee, population 605,000." Yi would have been selected by the Boston Celtics at #5 , but the team decided to trade the pick for Ray Allen. So will Yi demand a trade from the Bucks? According to Sun Qun, the editor of China's top basketball newspaper Pioneers, the answer is no and he managed to take a shot at American players in explaining why:

Yi probably will not say 'No' to the Bucks. He is not American. He respects the NBA very much.
In addition, there have been several excellent pieces over the last week that touch on how the law connects to the NBA draft, including Ted Miller's column in the Seattle Post Intelligencer on how the NBA's new age eligibility rule affected Spencer Hawes and the University of Washington in last night's draft (and my thanks to Ted for his kind words of my research and of Sports Law Blog), and Oscar Robinson's column in the New York Times on how the NCAA should revisit its eligibility rules on players who declare for the NBA draft.

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