Updated throughout the day with quick takes from staff.
Welcome back from Memorial Day Weekend! The NBA Draft Lottery is Wednesday, and thanks to a benevolent coin flip, the Golden State Warriors have 72 percent odds of keeping their pick. In the event that a team in the No. 8 position or lower leaps into the top three, the Warriors would lose the pick to the Utah Jazz.
The Warriors do not really like those odds, and according to ESPN's Marc Stein, have engaged in trade talks with the Jazz to ensure Golden State keeps the pick. Yes, the Warriors are going to potentially give up an asset to eliminate the 1-in-4 chance they lose the No. 8 pick in the draft.
It's a brilliant decision for both sides.
Dan Rubenstein and college basketball expert Nick Fasulo discuss which players hurt or helped themselves by their performances in the 2012 NCAA Tournament. Dan and Nick talk about Michael Kidd-Gilchrist's soaring stock (as well as future NBA role), Dion Waiters impressing off the bench for the Syracuse Orange, Bradley Beal's innate sexiness and so much more. Feel free to impress your friends with your insider knowledge and sweet evaluation skills and remember: you heard it here first.
The Twitter highlight of Sunday night: Jay Bilas, college basketball analyst and aficionado of NBA Draft pick body parts, revealing his appreciation for the works of Young Jeezy and Rick Ross. Or his account was hacked.
The excellent staff of CBS Sports' Eye On Basketball blog put together a list of items the NBA should attend to while it's already working out this labor stoppage thing. One of Royce Young's suggestions is to kill the second round of the NBA Draft. (I know, a little part of you just died, right?)
Most second rounders don't make it anyway, but there are always five or six that are quality pickups for a team. Some get signed, some don't. And the ones that don't end up going to Europe or the D-League, sometimes because they're a small forward and were picked by the Heat. If the contracts aren't guaranteed anyway, what purpose does the second round really have other than it's decent TV?
Just decent? What second round are you watching? Three arguments for keeping the second round are below.
No wacky NBA story is ever complete until Charles Barkley weighs in, and Jan Vesely's kiss of his girlfriend at the 2011 NBA Draft is no exception. Vesely himself may be tired of all the attention the smooch received, but it was a kiss on live TV, dammit, and the news cycle will not stop until Barkley makes his opinion known.
Finally, Barkley has done just that. In a radio interview with Mike Lupica for ESPN Radio New York, Barkley said that the kiss was all about girlfriend Eva Kodouskova trying to prove a point.
When Tanguy Ngombo, Congolese by way of Qatar, was drafted by the Minnesota Timberwolves, basketball fans couldn't help but laugh. Of course David Kahn's team picked the draft's most obscure player. Jeff Goodman, who'd broken news of just about every pick in the entire draft, called him "some guy named Ngombo" ... while breaking news of the pick.
But apparently we were laughing at the wrong thing. As the Indianapolis Star's Bob Kravitz writes, it's funny that Ngombo and Nigeria's Chukwudiebere Maduabum were picked because their "names are a series of clicking noises." For some reason it's also distressing that these players were picked instead of homegrown Americans.
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Tanguy Ngombo may have been the Internet's biggest revelation, or one giant prank pulled over the heads of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Earlier this week, DraftExpress floated his name and noted the Minnesota connection. He was the hidden gem, tucked away in Qatar and deemed worthy of a flier by the Timberwolves. So Minnesota pounced, buying the rights to the 57th pick from Dallas to draft 21-year-old Ngombo. And the Internet rejoiced.
Except there was one small problem with the pick, and it may be the most David Kahn thing ever.
Jordan Hamilton found himself sliding fast during the 2011 NBA Draft and nobody was quite sure why. Finally, with the 26th pick in the draft, the Dallas Mavericks ended Hamilton's misery and snatched him up, sending him to Portland where he was then shipped to Denver as part of a three-team trade. But why did Hamilton fall so far, nearly ending up on the outside of the first round altogether?
Who is Targuy/Tanguy Ngombo? Well, he played in Qatar and nobody, outside of few a savvy Internet people, knew who he was. The ESPN broadcasters shrugged and laughed while Jeff Goodman tweeted this:
Some dude named Ngombo has been taken by Portland at No. 57 - per sources.less than a minute ago via TweetDeck 
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Jeff Goodman
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Welcome to the end of the draft, where the hidden internationals surface suddenly.
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