Inside the Secret Room

A view from lockdown as the Trail Blazers secured the No. 3 overall pick.

CHICAGO — The fun part was watching the spectacle unfold and knowing what would happen.

I watched ESPN's telecast of the draft lottery results with about 50 people, give or take—a combination of other media members, team front-office executives, league staffers and Ernst & Young officials. We had all known the results of the lottery—that Victor Wembanyama is going to San Antonio and, for your purposes and mine, that the Trail Blazers moved up from the fifth-best odds to the No. 3 overall pick—for about an hour by the time the rest of the world found out.

I watched Brandon Roy's face on the lottery dais as the No. 5 envelope was pulled with a Detroit Pistons logo on it. In his mind, and everyone else's in the room, there was still a chance he'd go 2-for-2 as the team's lottery rep. I knew that was the case, and so did the rest of us in the room, but we couldn't tell anybody.

Before we were escorted into a repurposed ballroom at McCormick Place, anything in our possession that could be used to communicate with the outside world—phones, Apple Watches, computers, even just simple digital recorders—were taken from us and placed in sealed FedEx envelopes with our names on them.

Another reporter asked me as we were waiting to be let in if this was the most security I'd ever seen at an NBA event. I answered no, but only because I covered a game in my former life on the Bulls beat that then-President Barack Obama was set to attend, and that involved a Secret Service sweep. But this was close.

Once we were all locked in the room, Byron Spruell, the NBA's president of league operations took the stage to spell out the rules.

I've covered the lottery before. Usually, it's nothing more than being in the audience for the big reveal that's shown on TV ahead of Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals. This year, I was lucky enough to be one of the handful of reporters invited into the sequestered room to watch the top four picks be drawn. The league likes to have reporters in there to vouch for the integrity of something that's been the subject of "Frozen Envelope" jokes for almost four decades.

Here's how it works: 14 ping-pong balls, labeled sequentially with the numbers 1 through 14, are fed one-by-one into a machine, after being held up so everyone in the room can verify the number and see that everything is above board. Then, the balls go into a hopper to be jumbled up and four are spit out randomly at 10-second intervals. The numbers on the balls are read aloud and matched to the team with that assigned combination. Then, the four balls that were drawn are fed back into the hopper and the process is repeated three more times for the other three picks.

If you want to know how overboard the league goes in making sure the outcomes aren't influenced, the staffer who calls out every 10 seconds for a ball to be drawn has his back to the machine so he can't see the numbers.

The conspiracy theories are fun, but having seen the process in person now, I can tell you unequivocally: it would be impossible for the league to rig this thing for any outcome even if they wanted to.

In the days leading up to the lottery, when I told people I was going to be in the room, those who have already done it would tell me it's actually pretty boring. I actually found the whole thing fairly captivating. We were all given packets listing out every team's full set of combinations, so we could follow along on our own. There will always be tension in this kind of room, because teams want to get the No. 1 overall pick every year. But when the thing that's at stake is the most game-changing prospect the sport has seen since LeBron James, it's a different level. Lives will be changed because of what happened on Tuesday evening.

The winning combination for San Antonio was 14-5-8-2. The combination 14-5-8-3 was assigned to Portland. That's how close things came to the Blazers getting Wembanyama.

The air came out of my corner of the room when San Antonio's name was called. Everybody in the league dreamed for months of landing Wembanyama, and members of 13 teams found out in that moment it wasn't going to be them.

The process actually took longer than expected. After San Antonio, Charlotte and Portland were revealed to be the top three, the final combination took three tries to avoid repeating. Another combination assigned to San Antonio came out of the machine, which was thrown out. Then, another combination for Charlotte. Finally, Houston was nailed down as the fourth team.

And then? We were all free to mingle for the next hour while it was revealed on TV, but we still didn't have our phones.

Assistant general manager Sergi Oliva was the Blazers' in-room representative, and he was in a pretty good mood after the names were drawn. The disappointment of not landing Wembanyama was there, yes, just as it is for every other team in the room besides the Spurs. But Tuesday was an unequivocal win for Portland. They entered the night slotted in at fifth and moved up to third.

Since Portland was the only team outside of the four worst records that moved up, the order was chalk until right before the first commercial break. (By the way, Detroit moving back from the worst record in the NBA to the No. 5 overall pick is brutal.)

"You're tracking it," Blazers general manager Joe Cronin told us after the lottery. "Eight held court, then seven, then six. When five hit, it's like, 'OK, we jumped.' And then we're going to commercial while there's another round to go. That jump up is a rush."

Cronin and his team have options now. We'll get into those options in the coming days and weeks. My early read is the same as it's been for weeks: they are not at all closed off to the idea of moving the pick now that they know Wembanyama will not be a Blazer. The front office is staying in Chicago this week for the predraft combine, and then they'll start bringing prospects to Portland for workouts. Any trade that happens involving the pick probably won't happen until the Blazers are on the clock.

Last year, the Blazers executed one of the most blatant tank jobs in recent NBA history and, for all that embarrassment, dropped back a spot from the sixth-best odds to the No. 7 overall pick. They're thrilled with Shaedon Sharpe, so it can't be looked at now as a bad outcome. But the night of, it's not what you want.

What happened on Tuesday was the opposite result of the same process. This year's stretch run was almost as painful to watch as what they did last year. But this time, it was rewarded. Not with the home run that No. 1 would have been, but with a stand-up double.