Things were a lot different when I sat down for my draft journal last season. For one, I was covering the Hornets then. This year, I'm obviously more interested with how the Sonics fare. Second, I was not a father last year. The ClarkPupp was just a growing fetus who had made his mother's belly button disappear. As such, there will be a new character distracting me from my task at hand, and Angie XY will need a new nickname now that her abdomen is back to normal. (For the record, the canine family has to end here. If you think about it really hard, you'll understand why.) Finally, and most importantly for the rest of this journal, there was more drama at the 2006 draft about what order the players would go, but less drama in all.
In 2006, Andrea Bargnani, the Italian seven footer I had been touting for months, was eventually the first selection by Toronto, but there was doubt up until the moment it was announced. As of this morning, any question of who Portland would take first is gone. Ohio State's Greg Oden will go first.