http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mN3OGRGybA
You can see the Knicks card got smacked into the tumbler when put in and the corner bent. When it was pulled, you can clearly see envelope bent on the corner. How did he know which one to smack into the side? Theories are that the card was frozen so that you could tell by feel. There were really no controls like they have in the current lottery system and this could have easily been fixed.
If by evidence you mean David Stern admitting it? No there isn't. But there is an obvious good outcome for the league if Ewing goes to the Knicks. You have to remember back then that even the Bird and Magic led NBA hadn't been taken to the masses like Michael Jordan did soon after. With nothing happening in their largest market, having Ewing in New York was something the league wanted badly.
He slammed the envelope into the tumbler? OMG, you mean he did exactly what gravity did to them when it was spun? Wow, it's a surprise that other envelopes weren't bent, oh wait, other envelopes
were bent. I guess that means Stern is even more clever than we thought.
Seriously now, lets try a little
critical thought, shall we? First of all, the envelope that hit against the bar did not have any significant bends on it that I could see when it was at rest. Also, other envelope corners hit the side of the tumbler when put in, which potentially mucks up their supposed plan right from the get go. All of this is irrelevant though considering that there's no damage that happened to those envelopes when they were placed in there that couldn't have been equaled, if not greatly exceeded, by mere gravity during the tumbling effect. In fact, if you watch the whole uncut version, there were other envelopes that had bent corners. The whole bent corner thing is so nonsensical, and it's exactly what happens when people suspend critical thought in favor of paranoid conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats.
(BTW, don't tell me that you were able to follow the exact envelope that hit against the bar all the way through the spins and into Stern's hand, because that's a load of crap.)
As far as the frozen envelope claim, it has no place in rational discussion since it can't be known without being personally involved in the process, but that hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from loving claims like that because they can't be disproved.
Um, you don't know what the league wanted badly, you can only speculate. The possibility that Ewing to NY was good economically for the NBA, does not make the draft being rigged any more likely. A possible motive to rig it (even when you ignore all the possible motives for it to be legitimate) does not make it a plausible claim. You can come up with BS like that all the time after the fact. It's nonsense.
