Sixers Get 12th Pick in Draft

Please welcome to the ranks of the Phillyist staff Mr. Chris Zakorchemny, who'll be helping us fill in the gaps in our sports coverage this summer. Chris found us (and we found him) through Flickr. Yay, sports! Yay, Flickr!

Where’s Pat Croce when you need him? Per usual, the 76ers are without luck, and ended up with the twelfth pick in the 2007 NBA draft.

But before we start to feel like the Sixers should have bailed last season and gone for a higher pick, take a look at the two worst teams in the league. Memphis, the worst team in the NBA, was handed the fourth pick, and an equally dismal Boston ended up with the fifth pick.

Meanwhile, the Portland Trailblazers, a team that finished ten games better than Memphis, and had a 5.3% chance of landing the top pick, came up the big winner. For all the information you’ll ever need on the draft, click here.

Worry not, Sixers fans. Every scout is saying that this is a deep draft, and there’s just a feeling that we’ll end up with a player that will have a quicker impact than last year’s thirteenth overall pick, Rodney Carney (6.6 ppg, 0.4 apg).

We still hold the twelfth, twenty-first, thirtieth and thirty-eighth picks thanks in part to the Allen Iverson trade with Denver. And of course, there’s always empty talk from owners about packaging picks, and players for whatever is best for the team, but we’ll just have to wait until draft night (June 28, 8 pm, ESPN) for the beginning of a new era.

And then we’ll just have to wait until the end of next year when Chris Webber and Aaron McKie’s contracts come off the books – which will roughly amount to $28 million according to hoopshype.com. Surely some of that money will go toward re-signings, but the prospect of bringing in a top-level free agent is a pretty tasty thought.

But for now, it’s just numbers without faces that hold the next level of success for this teetering franchise.

Image Credit: Flickr user pianoforte