The Minnesota Timberwolves have just selected the first-drafted NBA player (Spain’s Ricky Rubio) who was born in the 1990s. Rubio, the number five pick, just donned his Minnesota hat and sat down with ESPN’s Mark Jones for an obligatory “you’re rich now, how are you feeling” TV chit-chat. Jones, predictably, asked Rubio about the Lakers’ Pao Gasol, another Spanish player, and Rubio gave him an athlete’s stock response about being his own man and having his own style. This is the kind of disappointing television that results from a 24-hour sports news cycle. Had ESPN wanted to make the mini-interview interesting, Jones would have instead asked, “Ricky, Michael Jackson died of a heart attack today. As an 18-year old, do you even have any idea who that is? I’ll give you a hint: He did not play in the NBA.”

Remarkably, though, the NBA draft moves along at a refreshingly brisk pace; would that an actual NBA game flowed so swimmingly. Compared with the monolith NFL draft, it’s a summer breeze. The NFL draft, like an octopus, stretches its news-tentacles from April outward, through those non-football months when people used to talk about baseball, golf, and tax returns. The draft itself, a two-day event, is a bit of an anti-climax, each player having been micro-analyzed as though they were applying to be FBI field agents.

The NBA draft pops its head out of the ground just a few days after the end of the Finals, contains only two rounds, and puts each team on the clock for only five minutes. It moves so fast that I barely have a chance to write anything about each pick. Well, that, and I hardly know anything about each pick. In a game where one player can turn around a franchise, fans actually have a right to get pissed and boo when their team makes a boneheaded move. The NBA draft also contains the potential for trades – real trades, featuring actual players and not just future draft picks. Guaranteed contracts mean teams are always looking to cut payroll or add a missing piece to the puzzle. Today, the big trade involved Shaquille O’Neal, who will be playing alongside LeBron James in Cleveland next season. That’s the first thing I want to discuss.