"Stu, please sit down. I asked you to come over. I have no other intention. I just want to know about the invitation list of Little Green Room."
After Stern hung up the phone on Phil Knight, he quickly sent for Stu Jackson, the league's vice president responsible for handling matters related to the draft.
"The invitation list for the first round of Little Green Room has been announced, and I have also made arrangements for the supplementary list for the second round."
Stu Jackson reported the work situation truthfully and explained in detail the invitation list for the two rounds of the Green Room to Stern.
The first round is James, Anthony, Milicic, Bosh, TJ Ford, Collison, Kaman, Wade, and Hinrich, which basically corresponds to the top 9 picks.
The second round of supplementary list is Jarvis Hayes, Michael Pietrus, Boris Diaw, Mazie Lampe, Marcus Banks, Troy Bell, these 6 people, just to make up for it. Complete the small green house roster of 15 people.
Usually one month before the draft, the league organizes (cao) camp (kong) the draft in order to be more prepared.
At the same time, in order to cooperate with the external media in jointly hyping the draft and lottery picks, we will proactively ask general managers of teams with lottery picks about their draft intentions, and then draw up and publicize the list of players officially invited to the draft green room.
Because teams with lottery picks have overlapping draft intentions, the number of first-round picks in the Green Room is often around 10, rather than exactly 13 (14).
Also because of the overlapping draft intentions, the NBA draft office usually sends staff.
Communicate privately with general managers of teams whose draft intentions overlap with those of other teams and ask them to provide a second alternative.
The league does this to avoid the situation where some general managers are not well prepared for the draft. When their first or even second pick is cut off by the previous team and they don’t know who to pick, they then go to the doctor in a hurry and choose something. An unexpected situation for messy players.
In order to ensure that teams with high picks can get higher returns in the draft.
At the same time, it is also to prevent a rookie with real potential from falling into a team that is not suitable for him.
As a result, the supplementary list for the second round of announcement by Little Green House appeared.
In order to increase the fault tolerance rate and to hype up the draft, the NBA draft office will select two NCAA stars with their own traffic to enter the 15-man roster of the Little Green Room.
That's right, today's Little Green Room invitation list is not as cheap as it will be in the future, and the number of places is limited to 15 people.
That is, 13 players who are favored by the general manager of the lottery-signed team, and 2 officially designated players.
Now Stern is taking the initiative to listen to Stu Jackson's work report, just because he wants to designate a player.
"Take out one of the places you proposed and add Doon."
Stern quickly gave Stu Jackson work instructions.
Stu Jackson also nodded immediately after hearing this, indicating that he understood Stern's thoughts.
Stern has been committed to promoting the globalization of the NBA. This is the only possibility for the NBA to overtake in a corner among the four major leagues in North America.
Basketball in Europe is not very popular and is far less popular than football. Stern intends to form an NBA team in Europe to break the current bottleneck.
The problem is that existing NBA team owners have basically expressed opposition.
They worry that traveling across the ocean to play games will seriously affect the players' condition and cause more injuries. It will most likely reduce the enthusiasm of local fans to watch the game and affect the team's income.
Therefore, the NBA can only further develop the Asian market in recent years.
However, due to political and economic reasons, the Japanese and Korean markets are not only open to the NBA, but also to the other three major leagues.
Since Japanese and Korean fans prefer to watch MLB (Major League Baseball), and the number of basketball fans is far less than that of baseball fans, Stern can only actively explore the Chinese market.
It is rumored that the number of Chinese fans is greater than the population of the United States. With such a huge basketball market, the NBA cannot miss it.
Stu Jackson praised Stern for his foresight, and then walked out the door to carry out the tasks assigned by Stern.
A few days later, with the announcement of the second round of invitations to the Little Green Room, there was quite a stir in both North America and China across the ocean.
If virtue is not matched, there will be criticism.
Duane is a mid-first-round draft prospect, but it is still a bit exaggerated to make the 15-man invitational roster of the Little Green Room.
You know, even though Yao Ming performed well in the second half of the regular season last season, North American fans still continued to question Yao Ming.
Not to mention, Du En's talent is far inferior to that of Yao Ming, and he also lacks hard enough game data.
After all, Yao Ming is dominating the CBA, producing impressive statistics that are convincing.
Duan is in the amateur league-NCAA, but he is just a little-known substitute for the Syracuse Orange.
Even with the wonderful performance in the NCAA finals, it was just a blast at best.
In the NBA, even as a substitute player, as long as the touch comes, it is common to give the football rights and score 30+ or 40+ in a game.
Therefore, Duan's performance in the NCAA finals did not have much to praise.
Americans are also used to being arrogant, so they are very suspicious of foreign players like Du En who suddenly appear out of nowhere and become a blockbuster without making a name for themselves.
However, for those NBA teams that were interested in using their first-round pick to select Duen, Duen suddenly transformed into a green room player, which shocked them.
The Bucks held the No. 9 pick in the first round and had the "voting" qualifications of the Little Green Room players, but Ernie Grunfield did not choose Dunn, but chose Hinrich.
This is mainly because Cassel's contract is about to expire, but Cassel did not choose to renew his contract with the Bucks in order to still win the championship and get the last big contract of his career.
For the future of the Bucks, Grunfield had to use the lottery pick to choose a more talented point guard.
Hinrich is defensive, organized, and has a basket. He is undoubtedly the best candidate for the Bucks at the first position.
The problem is, the team owner wants to draft Duane! For this reason, Grunfield also traded the 14th pick from the SuperSonics not long ago.
I thought I could sit back and relax, but I didn't expect that Du En suddenly entered the Little Green Room roster, which frightened Grunfield.
In order to ensure that he can get the most benefit in the next draft, Grunfield had to use a lot of contacts to find out the real reason why Doun entered the Little Green Room roster.
As a result, it was discovered that Stern had given the order, and then he realized that it was just a false alarm.
For other teams with first-round picks who were interested in selecting Duan, they just wiped away the cold sweat after learning the truth of the matter.
As for the other side of the ocean, the situation is completely different.
Originally, domestic fans did not pay much attention to this draft, mainly because the NBA player they were paying attention to, Yao Ming, had already returned to China.
These days, domestic fans are basically Yao Ming fans and Rockets fans. Few people pay attention to other NBA teams, let alone let them pay attention to the draft.
With Yao Ming returning to China and preparing for the Asian Championships, which is related to his quota for the Athens Olympics, it can be said that the attention of fans across the country is focused on the Asian Championships warm-up games that are being played and the upcoming Asian Championships.
Even the official media, like the fans, did not care about the upcoming draft and did not even send a reporter there.
That is to say, Stern, in order to attract the attention of Chinese fans, took the initiative to send people to inform the Chinese official media that another Chinese player, like Yao Ming last year, participated in the NBA draft.
In addition, Stern focused on marketing Duane's performance in the NCAA finals and his recent invitation to the Little Green Room.
Yao Ming entered the NBA as the No. 1 pick. Although he was invited to the Little Green Room, Yao Ming himself did not arrive at the draft.
The Little Green Room is an excellent opportunity to show your face! It would be such a shame if there were no Chinese players representing the Chinese people and walking around in the little green room of the NBA Draft!
Domestic fans pay so much attention to Yao Ming. In addition to loving basketball, they are just using Yao Ming to gain a sense of national pride and national identity that is relatively scarce in this era.
Domestic people care so much about the Asian Games and Olympic Games because they want to use sports to prove to the world that the Chinese are not bad!
At this time, someone else was able to play in the NBA, and like Yao Ming, was qualified to enter the Little Green Room.
In addition, Stern specially sent someone to send the edited highlights of Dunn's NCAA playing time to the official media, and used his connections to let the official media broadcast it, and the whole country was excited...
