The Portland Trail Blazers, owners of the 13th pick in the 2008 NBA Draft, came within one number of beating the most insurmountable odds. Good luck charms in tow, General Manager Kevin Pritchard watched as a sequence of numbered ping pong balls were removed one by one from a hopper at the league headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey.

First came 11, one of the Blazers’ numbers. Then nine, another Blazers number. Then 13, the third number in the Trail Blazers’ sequence. If the next number out of the hopper was 12, the number one pick in the draft would have once again belonged to Portland.

But it wasn’t meant to be. A ball with the number seven was removed, and the Chicago Bulls were awarded the first pick. The Blazers, just one number away from pulling off the biggest draft buster in the history of the lottery, ended with the 13th pick.

“…we hit three out of the four ping pong balls,” Kevin Pritchard said afterwards. “I was getting pretty excited. That was for the number one pick, so we got pretty close, but no cigar.”

“I was talking to [Assistant General Manager] Tom Penn and, you know, we don’t make luck our policy. We were happy to get lucky last year, but we are going to have to work hard and make some good moves and good things to take this team to the next level.”

“I think you’ve got two players at the very top that are very talented,” Pritchard said, “and we all know those two players. And then from about three to 20, you’ve got a bunch of players, some are better than others in terms of their ability to make a quicker impact, but I do believe at 13 there are impact guys, and I think it goes down to about 20.”

“We will explore trading [the 13th pick] and see what it brings and evaluate that versus the actual pick itself,” he said. “We’re going to look at every option that we possibly can.”