Fun With Photoshop

Tonight, the eyes of Sixerdom, and indeed the nation, will be riveted upon an elderly Jewish man playing bingo. It's possibly the most important day in the entire NBA calender, if not the entire history of civilization as we know it.

As my colleague tutkwon pointed out earlier, the odds aren't so good.

Thanks to their late-season surge and the tanking of certain teams that will forever go unnamed in the forum, the Sixers stand a 93.54 percent chance of picking 12th. Put it another way: under the current system, no team with the 12th pick has ever won the lottery. Or ever even moved up.

Which is fine, because history shows that there are plenty of impact NBA players available with the 12th pick. Players like 2005 12th pick Yaroslav Korolev, who averaged a whopping 1.1 points per game last year for the lottery-bound Clippers.

Or what about 2002 12th man Melvin Ely, who was so good on the Charlotte Bobcats that they traded him to the Spurs, for whom he has played a total of zero minutes during the playoffs.

And who could forget 1995 12th pick Cherokee Parks, who averaged nearly 4.5 points per game during a distinguished NBA career.

The rest of the list is hardly inspiring:

2006 - Hilton Armstrong
2005 - Yaroslav Korolev
2004 - Robert Swift
2003 - Nick Collison
2002 - Melvin Ely
2001 - Vladimir Radmonovic
2000 - Etan Thomas
1999 - Alek Redojevic
1998 - Michael Doleac
1997 - Austin Croshere
1996 - Vitaly Potapenko
1995 - Cherokee parks
1994 - Khalid Reeves

Shit. I hope Sammy has been putting in extra work with the voodoo incantations, doll puncturings, and sacrificial blood offerings.