Eagle-eyed fans decoded at least part of Giannis Antetokounmpo’s personal All-Star draft board during Sunday night’s festivities.
For the first time, the game itself was immediately preceded by a live draft with two team captains. Previously, the draft was done remotely by the two captains well before the game. That meant that emcee Ernie Johnson and TNT cameras had full access to what was happening on stage during the draft process.
Antetokounmpo actually brought a notebook to the stage that he used to guide his selections. At one point, a TNT camera got a zoomed-in look at the notebook, though it was still difficult to read.
— CJ Fogler 🫡 (@cjzero) February 20, 2023
It did not take long, however, for fans online to rotate the image and reduce the brightness so they could read some of the names. That meant that Antetokounmpo’s entire reserves list was there to be parsed through.
It looks like Giannis has Julius Randle second to last among the reserves in his All-Star draft notes pic.twitter.com/BLG2KOCQ9w
— New York Basketball (@NBA_NewYork) February 20, 2023
Giannis did mostly stick to the board. The first two names listed are Damian Lillard and Jrue Holiday, and those were ultimately his first two picks. He did also have Ja Morant listed third among the reserves despite Morant’s status as a starter, which helps explain his hilarious on-stage blunder.
Domantas Sabonis, Julius Randle, and Jaren Jackson Jr. were the bottom three names on the list. Sadly, the angle of the image makes Antetokounmpo’s list of preferred starters more or less unreadable.
Not that it did much harm here, but this is the risk you run when you have information like this somewhere a camera might pick up on it. It’s happened to NFL teams before as well.
