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Congratulations to the INSIDE HOOPS braintrust fo winning the coveted "best mock draft" award. Your prize is being invited for some streetball hoops in Lille, France, followed by a few beers in one of the nearby bars, provided you pay for transportation to France and accommodation.

Here is how I proceeded:

COMPETITORS:

None of the French sports papers or web sites have NBA mock drafts. So, this is not quite an international award just yet. Maybe in a few years when the NBA has expanded to Europe. Competition was tough, however, with, as far as I could see, the last versions of each of the following mock drafts: - CNN Sports Illustrated site, June 22
- ESPN.com, June 23
- Foxsports.com, June 22
- Dime Magazine (on foxsports.com), June 22
- InsideHoops.com, June 21

RULES AND RESULTS:

The compounded error. In your mock draft, calculate the difference between your draft position and the actual draft position of each player. For example, you had Ben Gordon going 7th, he went 3rd, so the error is 4.

We are considering that the second round doesn't matter, for several reasons. First, second round means no guaranteed money. Second, many mock drafts only cover the first round. And third, I simply didn't want to bother. So, if a player is dropped to the second round, the error is 10, no matter what. For instance, InsideHoops picked Anderson Varejeo going 27th, but he went second round, so it doesn't matter who took him, you got 10 error points.

And here it is:

InsideHoops.com: 106
CNNSI.com: 128
Foxsports.com (Sean Deveney): 124
Dime Magazine: 119
ESPN (Chad Ford & Andy Katz): 129

Sacrebleu, it s not even close! InsideHoops easily wins this, despite giving out its final mock draft version earlier than all other competition!

COMMENTS TO INSIDEHOOPS.COM:

So did you pull this off? Well, as usual, some guys fell on draft night (Podkolzine, Ramos), and some got picked earlier than expected (Araujo, Swift). But in those case, every mock-drafting journalist got burned. However, overall, InsideHoops made fewer big mistakes. You were the only ones to predict that the Trailblazers would take Sebastian Telfair at 13. All the others had him going much later. On the other hand, everyone fell in love with Russian SG Sergei Monya, pegging him as a 12-15 pick.