Tonight's NBA Draft will make a handful of young men into instant millionaires and household names in their new teams' cities. The basketball contract is merely the beginning, as there will be endorsement deals, commercial acting, clothing lines and — if they're especially ambitious — an attempted rap career. The NBA is littered on all sides with players who dabbled in the hip-hop game, but the ratio of attempts to success is way off-kilter. Save for the platinum status of Shaquille O'Neal's Shaq Diesel, most of attempts at rap have ended in sadness. To wit:

» Kobe Bryant: He just won his fourth championship and is a former MVP, but his rhyming skills left a lot to be desired. He cut one track called "K.O.B.E." that featured Tyra Banks and that he performed on NBA TV and dropped in on a few cuts with 50 Cent and Beanie Sigel (all around 2000), but couldn't get his hip-hop career going.

» Tony Parker: The San Antonio Spurs guard put out a French-language rap album called TP in 2007 (Parker is originally from Belgium). Apparently he's not a bad MC, but since we don't speak French, we have to assume he's just reciting pie recipes or talking about kittens.
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