Hello, Cleveland! You finally got it right by selecting Wiggins in the top spot

It’s getting to be a running joke in the NBA and a bad one at that.

Every year the draft starts, and there’s an announcement that the Cleveland Cavaliers are on the clock.

It happened again Thursday night at Barclays Center and everyone had to be wondering if the Cavaliers were finally going to make a No. 1 pick that mattered.

They haven’t made a No. 1 pick that has made a difference since taking LeBron James in 2003, and it’s not as if they haven’t had the practice. This was the third time in the last four drafts that Dan Gilbert’s team had the No. 1 overall pick. Now they had it t w ice in a row, marking the first time since Orlando took Shaquille O’Neal and t hen made a deal for Penny Hardaway that a team had won back-to-back draft lotteries.

But where Orlando parlayed those two overall No. 1 picks into a trip to the Finals in 1995 — just two Junes after the Magic turned Chr is Webber into Hardaway on draft night — no one is thinking that the Cavs are going to remotely match that.

For all of their top picks since James wisely left Gilbert behind and decided to go to Miami, the Cavs still have not made the playoffs. That’s with two No. 1 picks and two No. 4 selections, if you’re scoring. That’s what you call inept management, something you think you get only with Jim Dolan, but welcome to the world of Dan Gilbert, who can’t keep his hands off the basketball operations.

So here were the Cavs again picking No. 1, and no one had a clue what they were going to do in the hours leading up to the draft. Mainly because the Cavs didn’t know if they were going to trade down or use the pick on Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker.

But they ended up making the smart move by taking Wiggins. You hear a lot of people saying that this is going to go down as a great draft with a ton of future All-Stars. But Wiggins is the only player the scouts say has a chance to turn into a transcendent star. We don’t know about that, but there is no question that the Kansas swingman, son of former Rocket Mitchell Wiggins, is a supremely confident 19-year-old.

He came to the home of the Nets wanting to be the No. 1 pick and he was OK with the idea of going to Cleveland, even if Kyrie Irving likes to tell people back home in West Orange that he’s counting down the days when he can come join the Knicks in 2016. Irving, the first of the Cavs’ No. 1 picks in the post-LeBron era, has star talent. But he hasn’t made his teammates better, yet.

Now the Cavs take a shot on Wiggins, who knows he’ll be playing for a new coach, David Blatt, a big name over in Israel and Russia but with no NBA coaching experience.

“I’ve heard good things about him,” Wiggins said. “I’m coachable. I’ve never been on a team where a coach or a player never liked me. I don’t think it will be any problem or an issue at all.”

Wiggins exudes the kind of confidence all teams want to see in a player who is projected to do really big things. Parker, the son of another old NBAer back in the ’70s, Sonny Parker, was fine with the idea of not going to the Cavs and ending up with the Bucks. But Wiggins came to New York on a mission to be the top pick.

“When I heard my name, I was just all over the place,” he said, after being the first player to shake hands with commissioner Adam Silver. “I always wanted to be the No. 1 pick. That’s more of the competitive side of me. I just want to be above everyone else. I don’t want anyone to go ahead of me.”

No one did. Parker was next to go, and then Wiggins’ Kansas teammate, Joel Embiid, was taken by the Sixers. Nobody stockpiles centers who don’t play as rookies due to injuries the way the Sixers do, but Embiid is worth the gamble . . . if he recovers from foot surgery and can avoid future problems.

Even if Embiid had a pristine medical record, that didn’t mean that LeBron was going to run home to Cleveland to join forces with a rookie big man and Irving. James is through, forever, with Gilbert, as the Cavs will find out on July 1.

Here they made the r ig ht choice w ith Wig gins. Now we’ll see how brightly his star shines.