The Magic will do anything to get inside the top three picks in this year's NBA Draft. They'll even carry a doll around with hopes of grabbing the No. 1 pick in Tuesday night's lottery.
Team co-founder and senior VP Pat Williams will keep a Lil Penny doll close beside him for good luck, hoping it will be the difference between landing a superstar-in-waiting and picking in the bottom half of the Top 10.
“I’ll keep that very, very, very close," Williams told the Orlando Sentinel. "We don’t want anybody running off with that, so I’ll have that in my possession the entire evening. It’s our version of a lucky penny. We’ve tried everything in the past: lucky coins, four-leaf clovers, rabbit’s feet, Lucky Charms cereal. We’ve taken everything up there.”
The Magic have an 8.8 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick this year.
“We put the finest minds we’ve got on this one and this is what they came up with,” Williams joked.
Lil Penny was made famous in the 1990s when Penny Hardaway became a star for the Magic alongside Shaquille O'Neal. The doll was in Nike ads alongside Hardaway and O'Neal and became one of the decade's more popular collectors' items from the NBA.
It also reminds the Magic of a time when they landed superstars as they had the No. 1 pick in back-to-back years in 1992 (O'Neal) and '93 (Chris Webber). Perhaps the Magic believe the memory could spell a high pick for them this time around.
