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Scenes from the WNBA Draft Lottery, AKA the Breanna Stewart Sweepstakes

There is one transcendent, franchise-making player in this year's WNBA Draft, and four teams in the lottery.
Photo by Eric Bolte-USA TODAY Sports

In the moments after the 2015 WNBA draft lottery results were announced last Thursday, San Antonio Stars head coach Dan Hughes thought about his father.

"He's the reason I got into the WNBA," Hughes said, idly fingering the diamond-checked tie his father gave him; the gray suit he wore with it, also a gift from dad. "I'd been a Division I assistant for 16 years, and he said, 'I heard about this new league. Give it a try, maybe you can be a head coach!' I interviewed, didn't get the first one, got the second one. And here I am. He got to see it before he passed. I've been thinking about Dad tonight."

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That night, at ESPN studios in Bristol, Connecticut, there was nothing to do but dream. The fate of four WNBA franchises, no less than one third of the league, hung in the balance. It wasn't just that the four teams who finished out of the WNBA playoffs—the Connecticut Sun, the Atlanta Dream, Hughes's San Antonio Stars, and the Seattle Storm—were in particular need of star power on and off the court. There was also the fact that Breanna Stewart, a true generational talent of the kind that franchises are built on, would be there for whichever team the ping-pong balls favored. The Seattle Storm, which had the best chance at a win, ultimately proved to be the lucky team.

Read More: Does Isiah Thomas Really Deserve Credit For The New York Liberty's Success?

In conversations with a dozen coaches, players, and league officials, the comparison I heard every time to Stewart was Elena Delle Donne, of the Chicago Sky. It was made without hesitation, and during a season in which Delle Donne won the MVP and performed at a level seldom seen in league history.

Consider a statistical comparison between Stewart's just-completed junior year and Delle Donne's junior season. The two players had virtually identical effective field goal percentages, with Stewart checking in at 56.7 percent, and Delle Donne at 56.2 percent. Stewart did it with lower three-point and free throw percentages, which means two things: she's already ahead of Delle Donne on efficiency in the lane, and if she improves from beyond the arc, which often comes a bit later for players, she might reach, or even surpass, the lofty standard already set by the best offensive player in the WNBA.

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Add to that Stewart's already excellent passing skills—and block and steal rates that surpass Delle Donne—and it may simply be that Delle Donne is the comp because we don't actually have anyone to compare Stewart yet. Stewart's collection of skills—which is best collectively described as an ability to do virtually everything on the court, offensively and defensively—is formidable enough to make a contender out of any team she joins.

All she does is win. Also presumably studies as needed. — Photo by John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports

Put her in Seattle, and she could devastate defenses, keyed by a backcourt with this season's top pick, Jewell Loyd, and veteran great Sue Bird. Connecticut could pair her at forward with 2014 top pick Chiney Ogumike and this season's All-Star guard Alex Bentley. San Antonio could place Stewart at the three, snugly between tough forward Sophia Young and shooting guard Kayla McBride. Atlanta would slot her on the opposite side of the floor from Angel McCoughtry, allowing both Stewart and McCoughtry, who is something like the Carmelo Anthony of the WNBA, a chance to face single coverage most nights. The common denominator in all this wishcasting is Stewart, who can defend threes, fours, and fives, and whose offensive game will play anywhere on the court. The real-world analogues to this sort of lottery victory stretch to nine digits.

In this draft, then, there was no ambivalence, and no doubt as to the name that would be called first—the mystery was which team would get to do it. "I know Stewie a long time," Hughes said, "what she brings to the court. I like her. So yeah, I let myself think about it a little bit. But I also thought about if we don't get it. So I did a little bit of both. But she's honestly one of the really special players that I've gotten to know through the years. She would've been amazing."

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There's also the business component to Stewart, and four teams in dire need of the boost last enjoyed by the Sky after adding Delle Donne, and the Mercury after adding Brittney Griner.

The Sky's average attendance jumped from 5,573 in 2012 to 6,601 in Delle Donne's rookie year, and has climbed slightly each year since. In Phoenix, 7,814 fans per game the year before Griner arrived jumped to 8,557 in her rookie year of 2013, then 9,557 in her second season, and then a league-best 9,946 in the 2015 regular season.

"I really look it as welcoming somebody to the league," said WNBA commissioner Laurel Richie, who delivered the Seattle Storm's good news on live television. "Because who knows if that player is going to stay in one place her whole career. She'll have an impact wherever she goes. I look at it across the league… it lifts the whole."

The last WNBA Draft class that mattered this much had these people in it. — Photo by David Butler II-USA TODAY Sports

The Storm, for their part, is ranked eighth in the WNBA in attendance, having dropped each year since 2011, the year after their last WNBA title. San Antonio, temporarily displaced from the AT&T Center for renovations, dropped precipitously. Across the league, there's often been a similar attendance lag after such an absence, as happened when the New York Liberty spent three years in Newark during Madison Square Garden's renovations. The Dream continue to hover near the bottom of the league in attendance; they were ninth in 2015.

Perhaps no team was wishing as hard for Stewart as the Connecticut Sun, who were tenth in the league in attendance, as it happens, and stood to add a talent who'd come to University of Connecticut, vowed to win four national titles, and already delivered three of them. "We've been obviously thinking about this for a long time," Sun CEO Mitchell Grossinger Etess said when it was over. "If we'd had a generational UConn player, it would have been much better. But if we'd had a generational player [period], it also would've been much better. And if you'd gotten the No. 1 pick, we could've said tomorrow, 'Hey, you can make a deposit for season tickets [in 2016].'"

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As it shook out, he was left with nothing but those could-have-been's and the third pick. Etess's family owned Grossinger's, the Catskills hotel that inspired Dirty Dancing; it felt a bit too on the nose that he'd literally placed himself in the corner of the media room after losing out on Stewart.

"For some reason, I had a feeling that we might get lucky and move up at least a spot," Etess said. "I don't know why, I just had an innate feeling, we'd been unlucky during the year, maybe something would turn around and go our way. But as it turned out, it was exactly at the odds, which is how things turn out." A reporter pointed out that the CEO of a casino knows such things. Etess laughed. "I should know, right? Things don't turn out like that."

Despite a new system implemented earlier this year to discourage tanking, the Seattle Storm and the San Antonio Stars had found themselves in a pitched battle on the final day of the WNBA season for the worst two-year record, with neither team in any danger of making the playoffs. A 59-58 final went San Antonio's way. Had it been the Stars who lost, they'd have had the ping-pong balls Thursday night that ultimately delivered Stewart to the Storm.

When you go to the floor for the (ping-pong) ball. — Photo by Marilyn Indahl-USA TODAY Sports

"I'm just the coach, so I'm going to coach whoever we get," the Storm's Jenny Boucek said, smiling, when asked if any offer on the face of the earth could convince the team to trade the No. 1 pick. "But I'm gonna say that's pretty unlikely." Boucek pointed out that, with Stewart, "a quarter of our players would be UConn players." Etess, whose Mohegan Sun crowds always cheer loudest for former Huskies, was standing nearby. No one ever said the lottery was kind; few even say that it's fair.

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As for the single game that changed her franchise, Boucek said she hadn't reflected upon it at all.

"I try to stay in the moment," Boucek said, treating the loss that earned the Storm the top pick like, well, a loss. "I will go back and study every game, and our team, and how we can get better."

As for Hughes, it was clear that he'd thought about the game, and how its outcome might have helped his team get better. His cheeks went tight when I brought it up, and he said he'd decided that his job is to win basketball games, even if playing slightly worse on the final day of the season could have delivered a transcendent star to San Antonio.

"You've got to understand what your culture is," Hughes said. "You've got to step up and say, 'This is what we're about. This is what we do.' And I'll just leave it at that. We're built to do things the right way. And whatever the right way means, I think that's why we have a great relationship with our fan base, that's why we have a great culture. We can't deviate from that culture, and not be true to who we are."

All that aside, does that make it harder? Hughes, the man who believes he was fated to come to the WNBA, paused to consider it. "Well, those are all hypotheticals now," he finally said. "Fate will take its own course with us."