The NBA Lottery Isn't Rigged

But it says something that this many fans feel that way

I’m not a “Rigged!!!” guy. Never have been, don’t aspire to become one. But times like Monday do make you wonder. How many times can an unlikely team land the first overall pick under, shall we say… suspicious conditions?

The Dallas Mavericks, of all teams, now have the distinct honor of drafting Duke star Cooper Flagg. That may strike you as weird, if you’ll recall that this is the same team that was widely panned for not only trading their 26-year-old superstar, Luka Doncic, but for getting back an oft-injured, 32-year-old center in return. Oh, and Max Christie.

They made this deal with a level of tunnel vision that remains utterly confounding to me, and now, with the first pick in hand, they’re kinda getting bailed out. Sometimes that happens.

However much it may feel that way, what this does not mean is that the lottery is somehow rigged. It just isn’t. There are a lot of reasons for that, starting with the kind of crazily complex Powerball-esque process that decides the winning combination, and would generally be a trickier thing to rig than, say, an envelope.

The bigger and better reason to pump the brakes on any conspiracy theories is the power structure of the NBA. Though it might not always feel that way — and that’s by design, I think — it’s always worth reminding ourselves: the NBA is only partly in charge of its own business. Adam Silver and co. serve at the pleasure of the NBA’s 30 owners. Any decisions of real consequence have to go through them. The league often acts more like an intermediary between the players and owners than some kind of executive branch.

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. To repeatedly and unilaterally rig the lottery in favor of some franchises, and therefore against some other franchises, constitutes a ‘decision of real consequence’ in my book. If the owners had real suspicions that the league had done this — and not once, but multiple times — I can’t see them standing pat on it.

And sure, maybe you could twist yourself into some kind of logical pretzel wherein the owners are in on this, and they’re constantly cutting deals as to who would get what pick when, trading those like they trade their picks after they’re drawn, but I have a lot of trouble believing it could all be this tidily under wraps.

Could the league go rogue despite it all? Maybe! Maybe they just felt really strongly than Tim Duncan should be a San Antonio Spur, and Shaquille O’Neal should be an(?) Orlando Magic, and Greg Oden (who, you’ll recall, everyone thought was going to be great) should be a Portland Trail Blazer, and KAT and then Anthony Edwards should both be in Minnesota, and so on and so forth.

That would be a crazy number of small-market coups for a league that we’re told, time and again, is out to get the little guys. Basically: if they are in fact rigging this, they could be doing a much better job.

So I happen to think this is all pretty unlikely. It’s never, or at least very rarely, the NBA deciding to do this or that anyways. It’s the owners. The best argument against the conspiracy is, ultimately, the involvement of a bunch of self-interested parties. I don’t see it.

And yet! By the odds, this is among the craziest results we’ve ever had. The Mavericks had a 1.8% chance at #1. They jumped ten spots to get there. In recent memory, only the 2008 Bulls drafting hometown hero Derrick Rose — they had a 1.7% chance that year — and the about-to-get-LeBron-again 2014 Cavaliers, who also had a 1.7% chance that year, got a mulligan after whiffing on Anthony Bennett the year before.

Going further back, the most statistically improbable winner was in 1993, when the aforementioned Magic got to pair Shaquille O’Neal with Penny Hardaway (by way of Chris Webber, that is). They also jumped ten spots.

So this is like that. Except, once again, just like what happened with the New Orleans Pelicans quite recently, a team that traded their superstar player to the LA Lakers got the first overall pick as their consolation prize. Given the size of the Dallas market, and the general rancor over the Luka Doncic trade, it’s enough to make a lot of fans wonder.

And I get that. This is insane. All sober reasoning aside: what the shit, man? Are you serious? It’s all gonna work out for this guy? Pull off the worst trade in modern history, if not ever, and you get gifted a new future for your franchise just like that? Where’s the justice in that?

Don’t shoot the messenger, but there is none. This is just something that happened. And there’s no easy answer for how to “fix” this. At the end of the day, the NBA needs to set a line for the bottom-feeding teams’ chances at the top overall pick. That’s inevitably going to look a little arbitrary. There just needs to be a number.

Right now, it’s 14%. The three worst teams in the league have the same chance at it. Before the Process Sixers ruined tanking for everyone, the single worst team had a 25% chance and it went down from there. (And that’s the primary legacy of that team, by the way, which tells you all you need to know about how trusting the process ended up going for them.)

On a year when the “right” team wins the top pick, that 14% figure — which is really 42%, collectively — will seem entirely fair. On a year when the “wrong” team wins it, that 14% is thought to be impossibly low. How are the worst teams supposed to get better, we ask, if they can’t get these picks?

I don’t know. It’s a very fine line between rewarding incompetence and allowing for too much in the way of generational basketball wealth. But I also don’t think that the NBA is itself responsible for the fortunes of its worse-off franchises. It’s not their fault that the Hornets, Wizards, and Jazz suck. Going out on a limb here, but that’s their fault. Them and bad luck.

Make no mistake, the league would like to see everyone be competitive. Parity’s good for business. You’d like for everyone to be relevant, and thus, for every fan base to be engaged. That’s ideal.

But since that isn’t happening anytime soon, the NBA — again, really meaning ‘NBA owners’ — will have to decide whether it makes another change to the lottery odds. My guess would be no. The last change was a drastic measure in response to the aforementioned Process Sixers. They wanted to discourage tanking so much — and let’s be real, this wasn’t strictly a Sixers issue — that they were willing to accept outcomes like this if it meant that the worst teams in the league wouldn’t actively try and lose.

This was what everyone agreed to. They agreed to the possibility that this could happen, and while it still wouldn’t be likely, it would be closer to a 1-in-50 chance than some one-in-a-million moonshot.

So here we are. Just like that, Dallas pulls the winning ticket. They’re back. It’s like they won the lottery or something.

🏀 That Tatum injury was awful to watch. As a fellow St. Louis prep school dork, I feel a fraternal bond to that guy, so it really sucked to see that happen and immediately understand that he would be missing for a long while. All the best on his road to recovery. With that being said, the Knicks had them beat before the injury happened. They played a friggin’ stinker on Wednesday night, so that’s not to excuse that, but I do have to admit I’ve been very impressed with the Knicks, and even more impressed with the Pacers. Should be a great series.

🏀 Which is nice, because the rest of the Eastern Conference appears to be self-destructing right now. Boston’s future is looking super foggy all of a sudden. I expect the Cavs will run it back — I think they should — but they can’t feel good going into the offseason. And then there’s the Bucks, who could very well end up dealing Giannis this summer. Yikes.

🏀 And the other side of the bracket is looking pretty feisty right now. I’ve loved watching the Nuggets find themselves again in this series, all after firing everybody and riding into the playoffs with 5.5 guys. Oftentimes, when I watch guys like Peyton Watson and Julian Strawther out there, I get a pretty good sense for why Michael Malone wasn’t that into it. Other times — like last night — you can see the benefit in letting those guys get some run every once in a while. Here’s to Game 7s!

⚾ Have the Red Sox already poisoned the well with Rafael Devers? I honestly can’t decide whose side I’m on with this one. For those unfamiliar, Devers played third base — not very well, I might add — and was a little miffed when the Red Sox signed a third baseman to replace him on the hot corner this offseason. Devers has been playing DH since, which is fine by him, but he’s come out to say publicly that he will not play first base. Not gonna happen. Which might ultimately end in him getting traded? I don’t even know anymore. Just seems like this could’ve been handled before any of this ended up in the news.

⚖️ NCAA President Charlie Baker says he’s open to a federal commission on college sports, as suggested by that other President of ours. Trump says he’d name Nick Saban to run the thing, which doesn’t sound like the worst idea in principle. I figured Saban might be getting bored by now. In my humble opinion, I’m not sure more committees and commissions are what this situation calls for. But hey, if that’s what moves this forward, then Roll Tide I guess. The NCAA will just be glad to have the attention they’ve been asking for for years.