As Rachel Nichols reported, the NBA has no plans to televise the ballyhooed All-Star draft or even release the draft order.

This is dumb. Look: I get the fretting from players, the league office, and the players' union. Being publicly ranked is uncomfortable. No one wants to be last pick, even from a player pool that represents the best 5 percent of the world's best basketball league.

But the NBA announced a bold move to juice up a dead exhibition, and they basked in the tittering buzz that followed. Would players feel obligated to pick their teammates? How aggressively would Klay Thompson guard Stephen Curry? How would the captains -- presumably including LeBron, the premier NBA historian among active players -- sort the league's superstar hierarchy?

Fans salivated over the drama, and the NBA welcomed their salivating. The idea worked.

You cannot congratulate yourself on that reception and then walk away from everything behind it a few months later over some vague concern from unnamed players -- or their representatives -- about ego bruising. The NBA conceived the draft precisely to create these dramas. They are the entire purpose of it. If you aren't going to release the draft order -- or televise the selections -- there is almost no point to the draft, aside from the possibility of teammates facing each other. (Also: It will leak anyway.)

The NBA could change course between now and the draft date. This also could be a one-year soft phase-in -- an attempt to ease players into the concept before going full tilt.

There are even wishy-washy workarounds. Perhaps each captain could make eight picks apiece, leaving six unpicked guys the league would then randomly assign -- so that no one suffers the indignity of being last pick. A more extreme step: Prohibit captains from selecting teammates, just as the league's 30 head coaches are banned from voting for their own players when they pick reserves.

I don't like that idea -- again, it undercuts the whole idea of the draft -- but if it nudges stakeholders in the right direction, maybe it could be useful this one time.

Long term, either make this a thing or scrap it.

on the uproar of agreement on your post NO ONE GIVES A FUCK1 208-203