For Wall, maybe staying in school isn't such a bad idea

John Wall is considerably more savvy about his future than Tim Tebow seems to be, once you accept the notion that "savvy" is a synonym for "prepared for how much it might suck."

Tebow, we've covered ad nauseam. The nation has covered Tebow ad nauseam. In fact, the best way for Tebow to enhance his image beyond its current double platinum with a side of weird friends whispering in his ear is if he were to say, "You know, I know how much people talk about me, and frankly, I'm pretty sick to death of the subject of me, too."

They would be throwing parades.

John Wall might find it a bit hard to move with the weight of a bad franchise on his back. (AP)

Wall, on the other hand, has a pretty good idea of his next step. It's the New Jersey Nets. And unless the Nets have some secret way of coaxing LeBron James to wherever the hell the Nets are planning to play in, Wall is about to be the one thing you would never wish on any basketball player.

Doug Collins.

Collins, the self-same eternal coaching and broadcasting candidate you know and love today, was the fellow picked by the Philadelphia 76ers to remove the acrid taste of their 9-73 record in 1973. In what we can now see was a pretty thin draft class, Collins was listed as the designated savior for the worst team in NBA history.

And how thin was that class, you ask? There were more coaches to come out of the 211 players selected than Hall of Fame candidates, and the best player in the group, George McGinnis, went 22nd, also to the Sixers. McGinnis, of course, came from the ABA, but he's still a draft pick for Philly's purposes.

We can give you the full list, but suffice to say that Philly had two players taken in the first round and three more in the second. Yes, there were only 18 teams back then, but five of the top 32 players is still five of the top 32 players.

And of those five, three were still there when the 76ers reached the NBA Finals four years later -- Collins, McGinnis and the redoubtable Caldwell Jones, also an ABA fugitive.

In short, there isn't really a historical comparison for Wall, in that those 76ers got better with a talent-laden but collapsing rival league as its spur. Unless the D-League is planning a hostile takeover, Wall is on his own.

Well, pretty much. The Nets have a second pick in the first round as part of the Jason Kidd deal, but that doesn't look right now like much more than something in the mid-20s.

In short, John Wall will save the Nets or be doomed trying, and that's only if the Nets can keep the lottery from being snatched out from beneath them.

Of course, the Nets are in greater flux than any other team except for that four-win thing. They have a prospective new owner in Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov. They still have Jay-Z as a partner. They may eventually get their stuff together as regards the Brooklyn arena, though that's by no means a lock. They are trolling about the Amar'e Stoudemire rumor mill. And they are drooling over James like he's the blue plate special at Don and Charlie's.

But Wall's the guy they can get now without anything more involved than staying their miserable course and not getting screwed by a weighted ping pong ball.

And Wall knows the Nets.

"They're not very good," he told Dick Weiss of the New York Daily News two Nets losses ago. "They're what, 4-40? I watch SportsCenter every night."

Beyond that, he did not share, ever the crafty politician at a time when the source of his first truly enormous paycheck is still up for grabs.

He should know, though, that while Collins had an eight-year playing career, it ended early because of a knee injury, always the great unstated backhand from fate (see Oden, Greg), and Collins wasn't part of the 76ers world championship team in the early '80s. He did coach the early Jordan Bulls, plus the post-Bad Boys Pistons and the Thoroughly Irrelevant Wizards. He did get the court at Illinois State named after him, which is not likely to be one of Wall's rewards at Kentucky.

Anyway, this is Wall's future -- trying to resuscitate the worst team in the world, maybe with LeBron James but probably without him. Maybe he gets lucky and cheats the odds, but the other thing we keep hearing is that this draft isn't a whole lot better than the '73 draft. Maybe while the two gentlemen have little enough in common save basketball, he is living in Doug Collins' world and doesn't even know it yet.

And Doug Collins has an OK life. He just spent a lot of time as a first-round pick with too big a load to carry. Kind of like John Wall will -- because the alternative to New Jersey is probably Minnesota or Golden State, and they don't even have the LeBron carrot.

In short, John, welcome to the adult world. It's huge and shiny and even limitless -- right until the day you arrive. Then you're a Net, and well, you know the rest.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.