This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, July, 2020
The PBA League draft generates intrigue and excitement every year, but especially this year. Not only is the PBA League one of the most recognizable and marketable aspects of the PBA to casual sports fans (that is, those who are not already ardent bowling fans), but the PBA League draft, held on May 17 on FloBowling, was the closest thing to live bowling coverage we’d seen since the PBA World Championship on FOX more than two months prior.
The luxury of being able to simultaneously appeal to the devoted bowling audience and mainstream sports-fan audience is something the PBA is rightly unwilling to pass up.
In general, sports fans like sports drafts, particularly when they already know who the players are. The NFL and NBA drafts are popular in large part because the draft picks feature incredibly famous college students preparing to enter the workforce and fans want to see in which cities those students will earn jobs. With the PBA League, the players are already professionals and thus well known among PBA fans, allowing for hearty debates, tough choices and inevitable snubs.
This year, the natural appeal of the draft even received some coverage from mainstream, non-bowling media in addition to the intense scrutiny and in-depth analysis on all the new bowlers-talking-to-bowlers internet shows.
On the much-heralded Beef & Barnzy Show, the most popular of the bunch, Stu Williams (Beef) and (&) Chris Barnes (Barnzy) hosted 70 or 80 mock drafts leading up to the real thing, probably as a covert act devised by Barnes to create as many scenarios as possible to plan for what his team could do for real, but this is merely speculation.
Finally, after all the hype, discussions, mock drafts and predictions, the real draft happened.
Over the course of two hours, including two commercial breaks that featured no commercials, FloBowling put on a virtual draft, no easy task for a long-distance production with every possible bowler, team manager and host on standby to be inserted into the show.
As expected, the draft was full of the unexpected. Players, fans and analysts were surprised, fascinated and even outraged for some reason at some of the choices.
Amleto Monacelli, manager of the expansion Las Vegas High Rollers, was either lauded or excoriated for his roster with very few public opinions falling between. Monacelli chose François Lavoie with the first overall pick, notably passing on Sean Rash, who went second overall to Marshall Holman’s expansion Brew City Ballers.
Had Rash been selected by Las Vegas, would we have seen an Eric Lindros situation? Had Monacelli accepted a proposed trade from Silver Lake—a tidbit gleaned from manager Mark Baker by bowling pundit Phil Brylow during a panel discussion during the Beef & Barnzy post-draft show—what would that have meant for both expansion teams?
We’re quickly veering into the hypothetical, which is another reason sports fans like sports drafts: second-guessing. Whom should that team have picked? Why didn’t they take this guy when he was still on the board? Who was snubbed?
With two new teams this season, it means 10 fewer snubs. Still, we could’ve added 40 new teams and there would still be snubs.
In any endeavor with limited availability, there will be exclusions. And, just like the high-school basketball team, it’s not enough to say who was snubbed; one must also point out the person who was unfairly chosen over the snub, thereby pseudo-snubbing the unsnubbed.
Beyond the snubs and the pseudo-snubbed unsnubbed, we have the most egregious snubs: the snubs snubbed from the these-guys-were-snubbed lists. We won’t mention them here as that would only create a new list of further snubs.
We will, however, revel in some good news in the world: the PBA returned to television in June and the PBA League will be in Portland this fall to determine which post-draft roster is truly the best.