FanHouse MouhamedSene

FanHouse fixes a decade of draft-day blunders in Revisiting the NBA Draft.

It's hard to blame the Toronto Raptors for taking a 7-footer with 3-point range and the ability to play three positions. That's what Andrea Bargnani presented as the No. 1 pick. There was no clear-cut top choice. The 2006 NBA Draft was filled with unproven early entries, a couple of seasoned seniors and raw big men looking for a big payday.

So the Raptors took the player they thought had the best upside. Hey, the NBA Draft is about development these days, right? Nobody in this supposed weak draft was supposed to be an All-Star anyway, right? No one told that to Brandon Roy, who was passed up by five teams and traded by another. Finally, the Portland Trail Blazers, still ringing from a reputation of bad guys, car racers and dog fighters, had a franchise player in their hands, and he was from nearby Seattle.

Lots of young players and their surrogates come up with potent excuses for initial failure in the pros. Every October, dozens of recent rookies and disappointing draft picks claim rebirth and renaissance, with the nod aimed at "maturity" or "hard work" or "an opportunity from the team."

Those may, in some ration, be legitimate statements. But Seattle's Mouhamed Sene's explanation seems more... real.

Sene alluded to "personal problems" during the interview and admitted to family troubles in his native Senegal. His family remained in his childhood home in Thies, but they began receiving threatening phone calls and break-ins after Sene entered the NBA.

Projected to earn more than $4 million in his first two years, Sene was becoming the target of jealous adversaries, and he moved his family three hours from Thies into a more affluent neighborhood. With his first NBA check, Sene began building them a new home.

Athletes get credit for their ability to compartmentalize their personal struggles; knowing your family is in danger of being murdered cannot be compartmentalized. And the way Gary Washburn of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tells it, the Sonics front office didn't make things warmer stateside: Sene spent training camp last year not understanding a word that came out of Bob Hill's mouth. (In fairness, Chris Wilcox couldn't understand Hill either.)

Washburn alludes that maybe the drafting of Sene got most of Seattle's basketball staff axed. I'd argue the seeming inability to help the spate of foreign players the staff drafted adjust to American and NBA life got them fired. (That, and Robert Swift.) That's the things with projects... you have to work on them to get to completion. Don't most people learn that making dioramas of the French & Indian War in third grade?