You'll hear it on every talk show and every nightly sportscast, at every table in every sports bar: The Wolves are perpetually, hopelessly unlucky. They got jobbed again by the lottery gods, or the NBA conspiracy, which is apparently dedicated to landing the huge San Antonio market in the NBA Finals.
It is time for the whining to stop, and for the Wolves to do what so many teams before them have done -- stiff-arm the excuses about bad luck and make a smarter pick than their competitors.
We learned Tuesday that the Wolves will select third in the upcoming draft. This was not the best or worst of possibilities, just the biggest possible tease.
As the crowd at NBA City restaurant screamed at the possibility of the Wolves landing one of the top two picks, as the lottery show went to commercial and the tension built, you had to figure the Wolves would land the third pick.
They did, and virtually everyone with a mic or mouse says this dooms them to another mediocre or disastrous pick, because we all know that there are only two franchise players in this draft -- Memphis guard Derrick Rose and Kansas State forward Michael Beasley.
I prefer Beasley. Most prefer Rose. Here's what we have in common: We're all probably wrong.
That's what history tells us, and those who ignore history are bound to take Paul Grant again.
Yes, Beasley and Rose look like the best college basketball has to offer. We have talked ourselves into believing they are sure things, but there is a problem with this presumption: We are making final judgments on 19-year-old kids who have excelled, considering the current state of college basketball, against other 19-year-old kids.