The End Of An Error

How This Week's NBA Draft Serves As An Epitaph To A Deceased Conference

The four horsemen of the TV apocalypse are shouting their way through another hours-long telethon along the banks of the East River as I write this essay.

That’s because the bloated NBA Draft is back in all its delusions of grandeur, expanded to two days to force some 6’7 forward out of Baylor to squirm for an extra two hours on national television.

This made-for-TV spectacle, while short on actual, on-court, meaning, does do a good job of reinforcing what the chosen few that still love college basketball have come to know — that everything good has a shorter shelf life than initially expected.

The End Of An Error

As the title of this post alludes to, this year’s NBA Draft is really the siren song of the Pac-12 Conference, with players from Colorado (Cody Williams, Tristan da Silva, KJ Simpson), Cal (Jaylon Tyson), USC (Isaiah Collier and [likely] Bronny James), Washington State (Jaylen Wells), Arizona (Pelle Larsson) and UCLA (Adam Bona).

For those of you that aren’t good at arithmetic, that’s at least nine players from a 12-team conference that’ll ply their talents in a league with 450 athletes suiting up in total.

Should each of those nine make an NBA roster this fall (which is far from certain), the Pac-12 will have two percent of the league’s total pool of players in this year’s class alone.

From the blue-blooded hallows of Tucson and Westwood to the hope springs eternal outposts of the Palouse, the soon-to-be-departed Pac-12 put the money where its mouth was this year, basketball talent wise.

While most years would see such an influx of draft picks tacked onto a buzzword-laden press release, this year we’ll likely have to settle for the direct knowledge that we’ve seen the last class of prospects from a conference that’s produced NBA greats like Bill Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and so on.

Instead of an early summer victory lap, sports fans out West get another dose of “what could have been,” not unlike the yearly trip down memory lane that we’re forced to endure after the last team west of the Rockies gets upset by a double-digit seed on the men’s side of the bracket.

Instead of a celebration we’re left to muddle through what’s been a yearlong wake, with 10 members of our beloved conference absconding to greener pastures in hope that the bottom doesn’t fall out before they can snatch every last dollar possible from the television coffers.

At the end of the day, this week’s NBA Draft serves as another reminder of what we’ve lost and what we’ll likely never be able to replace.

It’s a reminder that the grass is never quite as green as it’s promised, even if those horsemen on the idiot box make an impassioned plea to that end.