The VICE Sports 2014 NBA Draft Meme Power Rankings

Let's face it, you don't have time to read in-depth "analysis" on any of this year's NBA draft prospects and you especially do not have the time to understand why any given team will draft any given player. No, not you and not in the go-go 21st century. Today's NBA fan on the go needs instant, image, infographic or .gif-driven niblets of factoids to chortle at on their smartphone while they commute to and from slaving away inside the bowels of Corporate America®'s salt mines and customer service centers. Lucky for you, VICE Sports' brightest most-readily available-on-short-notice NBA scribe spent weeks painstakingly researching cobbled together your guide to this year's most-memeable draft prospects and teams.

Are the players or team in question hot enough and viral enough to make BuzzFeed blush and say "OMG!"?Are you already more interested in what fav-star worthy thing any given lottery pick tweets than what impact they'll potentially have on whatever team drafts said player?If they had music to be introduced by, a la the NFL draft, what hot jam would it be?Upside?Tangible metrics of upside?Has the owner sent out an insane screed in Comic Sans font in the past five years? Has he somehow hamfisted himself into the role of "face of the franchise" even to the detriment of a franchise-altering talent?

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Shabazz Napier

This year's winner of the "Khalid El-Amin/Mateen Cleaves Memorial Trophy, presented by Gold Bond Medicated Powder;" dude's game needs to match how cool his name looks before GM's start visualizing in front of their bathroom mirrors Adam Silver announcing his name and their team in the same sentence. No upside, no meme, not worthy of even the most lukewarm of hot jamz. Is noteworthy only for calling the out the NCAA on being the festering dump of human garbage that it actually is.

The Chicago Bulls

The Chicago Bulls are basically your boss. Continually assuring you that this quarter your division is going to get the budget that "you have earned" and that now "the whole team can flourish," but in actuality you're ending up with Arron Afflalo (modestly larger budget) that is negated by amnestying Carlos Boozer (Whoops! All the budget went to the Shanghai office.) because no one anywhere wants Carlos Boozer. There won't be any fav-worthy tweets from whatever faceless cog gets drafted to fit into Thibodeau's machine, but you will relish in schadenfreude by fav'ing so, so many tweets from so, so many terrible, awful, borderline racist Chicago sports fans clamoring nonsense about "grit" and "Kevin Love" and somehow "Jay Cutler".

Los Angeles Clippers

Saddled with only the 28th pick in the first round, the Clippers earned their two B.E.N's by lancing the cyst that is Donald Sterling from the NBA's ass and replacing him with Steve Ballmer, aka: The Human Meme Machine. Watch:

Does this video have: Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine? Check.A burly, 6'5 executive for a Fortune 100 company jumping around the stage, screaming at the top of his lungs? Check.Pit stains? Look closely, they're there.A conference room full of some of the brightest computer minds in the world cheering along, not through enthusiasm for their company, but motivated by the terror of possibly being mauled by the shaved, dancing grizzly bear on the stage? Check.

Merely for the novelty, and for the fact that the Clips should be aggressively putting Ballmer out in front of the cameras (because the Sterlings), Steve Ballmer should come out to "Get On Your Feet" Thursday night. In spite of his imposing physique, Ballmer has negative upside. Crazy and wealthy go hand-in-hand and at least with Ballmer we can pretend, if only for a moment, that this high-octane sequence is his best crazy.

The Charlotte Hornets

Fresh off the franchise's second playoff appearance and debuting their hot new teal jerseys for the 2K14, the Hornets, what with two first-round picks, could make some interesting moves. Again, you don't have time nor interest in considering who they could draft. You just want to see the neat teal hat that the draftee will wear upon having Adam Silver call his name. This is what we all want/are interested in. Upside? Irrelevant. Hot jam for draftee to walk out to? "Fancy" by Iggy Azalea.

With all due respect to the I-G-G-Y and her boyfriend Nick Young, the continuing struggle for team owner Michael Jordan to not drown in his own ocean of denim means the team needs this jam and homage to Clueless more. The Hornets would be imminently higher on this list if not for being so strongly linked to Nik Stauskas, he of the basement of Adam Morrison and the ceiling of Josh McRoberts. Leopards don't change their spots and the former Bobcats will always draft the whitest dude available. But who knows, maybe Nik the Quick (patent pending) will be the one to put his name in bold (who dat, who dat).

The Cleveland Cavaliers

The NBA's very own version of rickrolling, the Cavaliers have yet again found themselves in the No. 1 slot. What keeps the Cavs' dumb luck from devolving into tedious and eye-rolling click bait is the fact that every season they find new and astonishingly clever ways to fuck it up/keep us all guessing. Will they roll the dice on the guy with all of the injuries? Trade down for Derrick Favors and Joseph Smith's skeletal remains? Somehow rip the fabric of time and space by drafting Anthony Bennett all over again? WE DON'T KNOW! Yes, much like disconnect between Rick Astley's voice and what he looks like, we still see the Cavs and we still don't believe it. Also, much like rickrolling, there are countless iterations for the Cavaliers to go with and that's why we all don't hate them for having yet another number one selection. Oh, and all of the losing. The Cavs always losing helps, too.

Jabari Parker and Andrew Wiggins

Like conjoined twins that will be separated upon being birthed on draft night, these two will be in each others' shadow for the rest of their careers. Both come prepackaged with the media game of a Hollywood starlet and both have been meme'd already in the past 365. Still, Jabari took his meme game to another level by giving one of his handlers the OK to leak a rumor about him dogging his Cleveland workout. Wiggins, as you'll surely be notified by your ESPN app, represents the Great White North's best opportunity for relevance/greatest import into the US since Drake! Tim Horton's!

Joel Embiid

Everyone's favorite Greg Oden-Lite or Anthony Davis-to-be, we are now at peak Joel Embiid, a level that can only possibly be sustained by the youngster having a brilliant and long career. Meme-wise, I am going to be incredibly disappointed if, when he's healthy and ballin' outta control, someone doesn't make a "Deal With It" .gif based around some awesome footwork/dunk combo that Embiid throws down on Dwight Howard's clownin' ass. Conveniently enough, "Deal With It" also suits Embiid's current lot just fine and, as evidenced by him selfie-ing outta control pre-surgery, Joel is gonna be just fine as a meme-maker. This is essentially all QED, but Embiid, if ever healthy, is the truth. We're at level orange for meme-worthiness already. If he were healthy his intro song would be Flocka's 'Hard in the Paint'. As is? We're rolling with Gambino's 'Sweatpants' … for now.

Nerlens Noel/Philadelphia 76ers

Not just a torn-ACL-with-a-flat-top, Nerlens Noel and whichever of the monsters fall to the Sixers at the third pick will be running the NBA's Atlantic sooner rather than later. While Basketball Twitter's hearts were set all aflutter with the release of the shelved Ben Franklin second logo, we can still all remember that one glorious afternoon in June of 2014 where we thought we would have the inventor of bifocals and the Franklin stove on our New Eras.

Dante Exum

An exotic Euro from deepest Australia (Melbourne is in the south!), Exum is the "x" variable in all algebra problems for the coming season. 6'6" with arms made from the branches of a redwood, Exum is all upside at this point and that's completely okay. He could be the dot com bubble of 2000 all over again and it won't matter. No, not to you, you are here for the most temporal and fleeting of facts and, well, if Exum is or is not on Twitter isn't even something to consider. His Q rating is through the roof according to Google Trends and that should be enough for you.