Hopeful No. 1 pick Wall would face heavy load with Wizards

CHICAGO -- The presumptive No. 1 pick of the Draft stepped into the media session in the ballroom on the second floor of the downtown hotel on a beautiful Thursday afternoon along the river and settled into a chair at a table near the back, where cameras, notebooks and microphones waited to be fed.

Yes, he would be thrilled to go first on June 24, John Wall said.

No, he does not know if he will work out for other teams just in case or show off for the Wizards and the Wizards only, the dynamic Kentucky point guard said.

Yes, he can co-exist with Gilbert Arenas even though both need control of the ball to be successful, Wall said.

All very quaint, all very predictably fluffy.

But this is not typical. These are the Wizards, a franchise desperate to rebuild its tattered image, a team anxious for a public relations boost, a roster hoping to re-start the climb up the standings. And it's a 19-year-old, one season removed from high school, who will probably have to lead the charge.

The Wizards won't jam him into that role, of course, preferring to minimize the immediate pressures, especially the non-basketball pressures. But that's what it will seem like.

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Every No. 1 pick inherits a measure of burden. Just not with an organization like this, hoping to come back from a nightmare of a season. Arenas and Javaris Crittenton got lengthy suspensions for bringing guns into a locker room, Arenas got a felony conviction, owner Abe Pollin died and, ultimately, a roster once thought good enough to challenge for the top four in the Eastern Conference was dismantled in trades.

Wall has to help everyone forget, that's all.

This is not just a top prospect going to a bad team, as often happens, with Blake Griffin to the Clippers last June and a long list of others in previous years. This is not even Kevin Durant to the SuperSonics in 2007, being asked if he could save professional basketball in Seattle. Those were bad scenes, but for the owners and for the city leaders. The team itself hadn't become a punch line.

The Wizards: punch line.

"But I can't worry about the things that happened off the court or anything that happened last year," Wall said. "They had a tough year. Lost games and they traded a lot of players. My goal is to go in there, be the point guard, win games and change the organization around."

Except the things that happened will be in the picture until the Wizards behave and play their way out of the rubble. Wall has to worry because he will be inheriting the situation, if the immediate post-lottery signals are correct and the Wizards pick Wall over Ohio State swingman Evan Turner.

"I'm comfortable with any role," he said. "The key for me is winning games. But you also want to help the community out. You want to do things like that for the team and what's going to make the team look better in any kind of way."

Basketball operations boss Ernie Grunfeld was quick to note how their fans deserve this after everything that happened. The team sold 400 new season-ticket packages in the 12 hours after the lottery win on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported. So this is heading in a good direction.

But there is still forever to go in the recovery process and the guy everyone will look to for hope is 19.

"It means a lot," Wall said of the encouraging box-office statement. "It's kind of like Kentucky. When I signed there, the fans were going crazy. It changed it. They thought we were going to win it all. They had a mindset for us to win games in. That's what I'm trying to do next year for any organization I play for."

Sunshine appears on the horizon.

Scott Howard-Cooper has covered the NBA since 1988. You can e-mail him here and follow him on twitter.

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