David Aldridge | Stakes are high, and King's job may be on the line this time

SAN ANTONIO, Texas - Here, they know that your whole life can change with the bounce of one Ping-Pong ball. The Spurs have been wretched exactly twice in the last two decades, and got David Robinson and Tim Duncan as their reward, and the championships have flowed like honey ever since. Without its two seven-footers, this franchise almost certainly would not be playing in a gleaming new building, and would likely have moved, if not folded.

"Did that get us over the hump? Yes," Spurs owner Peter Holt said yesterday. "The timing was very fortuitous."

Such are the stakes when a franchise big man is available. When the NBA conducts its annual draft lottery tomorrow, there will be two - Greg Oden and Kevin Durant.

Boston's coach, Doc Rivers, is so intent on keeping up with the goings-on tomorrow night that he's taking his cell with him to his daughter's graduation. "And I told my wife I'm not putting it on vibrate, either," Rivers said.

Oden and Durant have franchise-turning potential, to be sure. They are the stuff of which fans dream - and advocate that their team lose on purpose in order to have a better chance of getting them. We have been over that ground, so we will not trod upon it again. Suffice it to say, the collective fortunes of Ed Snider, Billy King and Mo Cheeks could be quite different Wednesday morning.

King's, mainly.

This is all about what King does now. He can't pass this off any longer on Allen Iverson and Larry Brown fighting, or Pat Croce trying to buy Snider out, or Jim O'Brien alienating people. King has about a year, starting tomorrow, to turn this thing around for real, or he should go.

King has been excoriated for not being able to reproduce the supporting cast that helped Iverson get to the NBA Finals in 2001, and he has been excoriated for trading for Chris Webber, and he has been excoriated for getting rid of both of them this year in order to, as he famously put it, change the culture.

If I'm Mrs. King, I'm looking into excoriation insurance.

But King now has three first-round picks in a draft that is once-in-a-generation deep. Yes, the rebuilding will go much easier and faster - like an electron in the Superconductor in Waxahachie, about four hours north of here - if the Sixers defy their 0.7 percent odds of getting the first pick and their 0.83 percent chance of getting the second pick.

The likelihood, though, is that Philly will stay where it is, picking 12th, 21st and 30th in the first round. And King must turn those picks into something special. If he keeps them all, he has to get two starters, minimum - players that have a chance to become stars, or better.

"I think any time you're in this job, there's pressure," King said recently. "What I tend to do is rely on my staff. And I'm confident if you go back the last five years, we've done pretty good in the draft."

The Chicago Bulls got to the second round on the strength of players who are still on their first contracts - guards Ben Gordon and Kirk Hinrich and forward Luol Deng. They dealt Eddy Curry to get another young talent, forward Tyrus Thomas, and drafted another developing player, guard Thabo Sefolosha, last year. That's five players who aren't making any real money yet, and that's what allowed them to lay out $60 million for Ben Wallace last summer.

If King keeps the picks, he has to come up with similar talent.

If King uses the picks to move up into the top five - and there may be a couple of teams that are looking to move out - he has to be sure that Brandan Wright or Al Horford or whomever he targets is worth the gamble.

If he decides to trade a couple of the picks, they have to turn into a young veteran with upside. Would Dallas - which doesn't have its first-round pick - be willing to part with, say, a Devin Harris in order to get its hands on some prime, young big man?

I have given King the benefit of the doubt all these years because of the unique circumstances of trying to build a team around a 6-foot shooting guard with practice issues. Iverson's talents were such that it was worth putting off rebuilding for a while if you could find players willing to sacrifice their numbers for his shots.

But he is gone. The excuses having followed him to the Rockies as well.