Washington Wizards' president of basketball operations Ernie Grunfeld will attend tonight's Draft lottery in Secaucus, New Jersey.

His team has the third-highest chance of landing the number one overall pick, a 15.7 percent probability.

As he and his basketball people look to put all their skill and resources into rebuilding the Wizards into winners, Grunfeld looks forward to not coming back to Draft lottery night again.

"It's not a feeling I want to get used to," Grunfeld said.

The Wizards are prepared to choose from among the top talents who have made themselves eligible to enter the NBA next season.

Once their Draft position is locked in, the Wizards basketball operations people will begin to fine tune their preferences and run through various scenarios.  They will also begin to explore the possibility of dealing the pick.

"We're going to do our research and use every tool available to us to evaluate what we have, and what's out there for us," Grunfeld said.  

In a Draft that may not have a franchise player around which to build, the due diligence process becomes much more demanding.  

It becomes that much more challenging to find a player who can increase the team's win total, and a piece who will be important to the team's future.

"We feel we can get a solid player or have a solid asset," Grunfeld said.

Grunfeld is not necessarily evaluating players on position.  "We don't have a glaring need," he said. "Last year, we needed a point guard so we went after one in Gilbert in free agency."

The 19-year-old, 7-fee-tall Russian, Ivan Chiriaev, has opted to play in Europe and wait on the NBA.  

"At this time, it is better for Ivan to play in a developmental situation ? probably in Europe," his agent Bill Duffy of BDA Sports said.

The Toronto Star evaluates Chiriaev this way:  "With passable ball-handling and shooting skills but not nearly the overall skills necessary to even hope for an NBA tryout right now, Chiriaev is free to catch on with any team in any European league."

"Ivan is a young man with an excellent future because of his size and skills," Duffy said.  "He is, however, not physically ready to compete at the NBA level."

The 6-foot-10 Maurice Shaw has made himself eligible for the Draft.

Shaw spent a season at Lincoln in Tacoma, Washington, then enrolled at Bridgeton Academy in Maine, an all-male preparatory school.  Shaw averaged 19 points and 11 rebounds per game at Bridgeton, leading his team to the Class A New England tournament semifinals.

Shaw is now back in Tacoma with his family, training with a few former college players for a pre-NBA draft combine next month in Chicago.  "It was real hard, but it made me better."

At Bridgeton, Shaw was surrounded by discipline, work ethic and elite basketball players.  Three of his teammates are NCAA Division I signees.  He also played against teenagers who opted for the Draft, including Durrell Wright and Jackie Butler.

"At an open gym, my game ... I was playing real good, hitting the 3-pointer. I stepped it up a lot," Shaw said.  "Right now, (the NBA) is a 50-50 situation. If I go into it with a positive attitude ... I don't want to act like I know everything, because I don't."

The pool of underclassmen entering the NBA Draft is filling up.  Only 14 underclassmen entered the Draft in 1990, compared to 34 in this year's Draft as of yesterday afternoon.  The deadline to declare for this year's Draft was 11:59 P.M. last night.  The league will release the complete list this week.  

Early entrants make the teams' pre-Draft preparation and Draft-day choices far more challenging.  "This is going to be the toughest draft to analyze," said Marty Blake, the NBA's director of scouting, "and I've been doing this 52 years."

The flood of youth also boosts the likelihood of increased trade activity all the way up until and through Draft night.