A few people are asking how the mock draft will work so for those interested, I'll clue you in.
--Tomorrow morning I'll post a list of GM's (who have signed up in the post below) and their teams. At this point it looks like no GM will have more than two teams, which is good.
--We're going to give the GM's the weekend to study their teams and bone up on some of the potential draftees.
--The actual draft will begin Monday morning. The Blazers have the first pick. All Blazer picks will be decided by popular vote so there will be a thread up for all of you to vote on the selection.
--Around noon on Monday the rest of the draft will commence. Seattle will pick #2. I doubt we'll have much suspense for them and I probably won't even assign them a GM as they'll choose whoever Portland doesn't. Then the GM for Atlanta will be up.
--GM's will e-mail me their selections. I will post them and then e-mail the next GM that they're "on the clock". (There's no real clock though. It may take a while to get all of the selections in.)
--Portland is going to trade up in the draft to a place of my choosing, so there will be another popular vote involved before all is said and done. I haven't figured out what makes the most sense yet. You'll just have to be surprised, like real draft day!
--GM's will also be able to trade amongst themselves within reason. That last modifier is important to me. There's going to be an urge for everybody to pull fancy trades just to have them look cool and we're going to ask GM's to avoid that urge. We want the final mock draft result to resemble reality somewhat. But we might allow one or two trades to go through if they're simple and they make some sense. For these purposes I will function as the League Office, not only confirming that a trade is legal under the cap but also putting the kibosh on anything I think is too outlandish or will disrupt the draft too much. We'll probably give GM's a list of each others' e-mails if nobody minds so they can negotiate behind the scenes. All proposed trades must be e-mailed to me and approved before they're official.
It should be fun to watch the draft develop!
--Dave (blazersub@yahoo.com)