Lottery holds meaning for Jazz

Last time he traveled to Secaucus, N.J., to play the lottery, Kevin O'Connor did not exactly plan on a life-altering experience.

The Jazz had a 0.5 percent shot — five-out-of-1,000, to be precise — at landing the No. 1 overall selection in the 2004 NBA Draft.

It doesn't take a salary-capologist to determine there is a better chance of casinos coming to Salt Lake City than there is of overcoming such stacked odds.

Tonight, however, is different.

O'Connor is at NBA Entertainment Studios in Secaucus again, and this time the Jazz's senior vice president of basketball operations likes the franchise's 11.9 percent chance — 119-in-1,000 — of claiming the top pick.

Only three other teams — Atlanta (25 percent), New Orleans (17.8 percent) and Charlotte (17.7 percent) — have a better shot.

"This year," O'Connor said, "I'd like to be more serious about it."

That is because the outcome of tonight's NBA Draft Lottery holds serious meaning for each participant.

Faring well tonight might not guarantee instant turnaround for a team like Utah, which went 26-56 in the 2004-05 season. But it is certainly favorable to losing the lottery, and slipping to as low as No. 7 rather than rising to as high as No 1.

"Sometimes it doesn't have a whole lot of impact," O'Connor said. "Sometimes it has impact that can set a franchise back a long way."

O'Connor recalls 1997, when the Boston Celtics went into the lottery with the highest likelihood of landing the draft's first pick — and were leapfrogged by the San Antonio Spurs, who had 43 fewer chances out of 1,000.

San Antonio took Tim Duncan at No. 1 overall in '97. Boston, which slipped to third behind Philadelphia, took Chauncey Billups.

Duncan went on to become a two-time NBA MVP, and the Spurs won championships in 1999 and 2003, with hope alive for yet another this year. The Celtics were out of the playoffs from 1996 until 2002, and Billups was traded before his rookie season was done.

With Duncan, O'Connor said, "I think Boston would have been a different franchise over the course of the last six, seven years."

That assertion, it should be noted, assumes the Celtics would have taken Duncan had they wound up No. 1. Even teams picking first, though, can see their selections go awry.