There’s an art to picking out tomatoes.
You have to pick it up, but don’t over-squeeze it. Look for bruises as it rests in the palm of the hand, and hope it feels heavy for its size. Then give it a smell near the stem. It should have an earthy aroma about it.
Now, imagine having to do all that on a Zoom call only.
Welcome to the 2020 NBA Draft, where there’s a handful of promising prospects, but bruises a plenty.
“I disagree that it’s a weak class,’’ Bulls executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas said earlier in the offseason.
While Karnisovas seems to be in the minority in that opinion, there are growing numbers on his side. Several NBA decision-makers told the Sun-Times over the last week that they agreed with Karnisovas’ assessment on this season’s draft lottery pool.
There’s talent to be found, but it’s just now having to use unique ways of finding it in the wake of the coronavirus shutting down the usual draft evaluation process.
“I like the players,’’ Karnisovas said. “I like a lot of players that are in our range. I think we’ve done a lot of work studying. The excitement is coming from studying those players and interviewing them and looking at the video. So I think we’ll add a good player to our roster next year.’’
Maybe, but the first step will be finding out where the Bulls’ range is.
That happens on Thursday, with the draft lottery scheduled for 7:30 p.m.
Where the Bulls currently sit if everything stays the same? The all-too familiar No. 7 spot, where they have ended up choosing for three straight years.
The chance of a fourth? How about 19.7%?
The hope, however, is that rolling quadruple sevens won’t be the case. Like they did back in 2008 in what turned out to be the Derrick Rose draft, the Bulls had a 1.7% chance to jump from No. 9 to hitting lottery gold and landing the top pick.
The rest was history. Or history until Rose’s knees betrayed his meteoric rise, and his eventual disappointing fall from what was supposed to be a legendary career with his hometown team.
But that’s old regime discussions.
With Karnisovas and general manager Marc Eversley headlining the new regime, the hope is sevens are behind them … no matter what the numbers say.
The chance the Bulls have of landing No. 1 Thursday is 7.5%. No. 2 is 7.8% and No. 3 is 8.1%.
All said and done, the Bulls have a 32% chance to land in the top four.
Coincidentally, there seem to be four prospects that differentiate themselves from the rest of the players in the draft.
Landing in that top four means having a shot at either Anthony Edwards, James Wiseman, LaMelo Ball or Deni Avdija. By no means are any of them considered generational players like Zion Williamson and Ja Morant were in last year’s draft, but they are definitely the tomatoes with the least amount of bruising.
The Bulls have a 34.1% chance to fall back from seven and land No. 8, a 12.9% chance to get No. 9, and then a 1.3% chance to drop all the way back to 10.
The good news is the same player that a team may have wanted at No. 5 could very well be sitting there at No. 10, just because that second draft tier is almost preference only with very little difference from a talent standpoint.
So what do all those percentages and odds really mean?
NBA scouting departments — especially the one belonging to the new-look Bulls — are about to really get tested.
