If the NBA Draft Lottery is rigged, where will we land?

[NUMBERICA]

randomness also results in some bizarre outcomes.

Correct. Kind of underscores my point.

I think they should try something different that better finds the overlap of achieving parity, competitiveness, fairness, and transparency.

-the team with the worst record cannot get the 1st pick (to put a trampoline at the bottom of the race to the bottom).
-regulating how often teams are allowed to get to the top-3 of the draft (to stonewall any incentive for teams to try to do multi-year tanking)
-a limited lottery for the worst teams, not all non-playoff teams (giving a play-in team a high-lottery pick works against parity and giving them a chance to incentivizes tanking out of the playoffs/play-in)
-1st tiebreaker in draft order is head-to-head record, with the better pick going to the winner of the matchup (to dissuade tank battles)

The lottery as it has been used does far more harm than good relative to something more intentional.

 

[NAOS_pt2]

please retitled the thread to say "Put your tinfoil hats on, and then indulge your dumbest conspiratorial feelings."

 

[SoberasHotRod]

I'm so seriously hoping for 1st, but I think it'll be 4th. I think the league will give it to the Spurs again this year. The NBA has been suspiciously trying to help them be good again since the Wemby draft.

Spurs moved up 2 spots 2 years ago, and then moved up 1 spot last year. This year, they have 2 chances to move up from 8th, and 14th. Putting Wemby, Castle and Flagg together would set them into a promising start again for their franchise. I'm quite suspicious of the league regarding the Spurs. The media and comments on X are starting to say stuff like Spurs will get it again this year, and such because of Wemby. I feel it's either Spurs or Nets that'll get Flagg.

But I'm still being quite optimistic about the Jazz's chances for 1st, and NOT being delusional about the Spurs. But hey, NBA or the NBA gods, we've never had a 1 number pick before, please give us Cooper Flagg!

Why would the league want to create a super team when they just put a bunch of rules in place to discourage super teams?

 

[TheGoldStandard]

Why would the league want to create a super team when they just put a bunch of rules in place to discourage super teams?

New tv deal and pressure to get high ratings. It is a business, not a sport. If the Jazz get the #1 pick, I'll change my tune. When Dallas gets it, we'll all know why.

 

[infection]

I have a much larger post I started making in another thread about lottery conspiracy. Eventually I’ll get around to posting it, but at least for now, I really don’t see a compelling reason for the league to intervene in any way that has a high return guarantee (at least relative to other likely outcomes). It’d be more likely they’d intervene to prevent certain outcomes rather than to orchestrate a specific outcome. That’s not to say I believe either are likely. Anyways, the rest will have to wait for my tl;dr but I don’t see stacking SAS with more talent as being a good return on investment, and I don’t see Brooklyn, despite being in a big market, being any kind of guaranteed return. If I were looking to boost the value of the league generally, it would be more strategic placement, and while markets do relate to revenue, they’re only correlative and not the end-all-be-all of league-wide profit.

 

[LogGrad98]

randomness also results in some bizarre outcomes.

Frankly the statistics bear out the 5th pick for us, that is the way the probabilities shake out as designed. The single pick we have the greatest probability of getting is the 5th pick.

 

[SoberasHotRod]

New tv deal and pressure to get high ratings. It is a business, not a sport. If the Jazz get the #1 pick, I'll change my tune. When Dallas gets it, we'll all know why.

I'm not sure what you are getting at? Why would the league want Dallas to get Cooper Flagg?

Also, are you saying that the league will make more money if they create a super team in San Antonio? Why do you think that?

 

[LogGrad98]

Why would the league want to create a super team when they just put a bunch of rules in place to discourage super teams?

Plausible deniability. It is the foundation and bedrock of any good conspiracy theory.

 

[infection]

Let me give different scenarios, all hypothetical and don’t pertain to this moment but a vague generalization of the past 30 years:

1. The league throwing the Lakers a bone when they need to be on the upswing and land a big talent in the lottery.

2. The league throwing the Knicks a bone because “they’re a big market”.

3. The league trying to drum up more NBA interest in a huge NCAA state in NC.

4. The league doing a franchise like SAS a solid and giving a handout that leads to a couple decades of self-sufficiency and raising the overall competitiveness of the league.

These four scenarios show how the idea of “big market = money = favor them” isn’t the best way to view things, even if you’re conspiratorial. NYC is the largest sports market in the world. Despite that, the league pushing that ****** franchise would be dumping money down the drain. The Lakers on the other hand, despite periodic mismanagement, has a proven track record to stay relevant and give you good return. San Antonio, as well, despite being a small market, does a lot for maintaining competitive balance in the league. The league benefits from a late-90s Jazz. It’s like the employee who you pay decent, not great, but good value, they show up early, stay late, don’t complain, aren’t a squeaky wheel, and put their head down and go to work. That does have real value. The fact that you can get by without giving them a raise for multiple years is also appreciated, and exploited, but brings real value.

Tl;dr there’s nobody right now that doing a favor for them will have any kind of predictable guarantee of benefiting the league generally. If Silver was asked, I’d imagine he’d be less thrilled about the #1 going somewhere like Charlotte. I don’t think you’d get added value in Brooklyn. He probably wouldn’t even be there that long. There’s an argument that you could put someone like Flagg in Utah and it being similar to Wemby in SA.

Small market teams pulling their weight is actually important for the league and they obviously see that. It’s more when you’re head-to-head on certain things the golden children will always be the golden children (Lakers).

 

[Ferguson_Mellochill]

If the league is going to fix anything in this lottery, it will be where Cooper Flagg goes and maybe where Dylan Harper goes. Then maybe they’ll ask themselves if they want Philly to keep their pick or convey it to the Thunder. The situation in Dallas is a train wreck, but it shouldn’t be enough to give them Flagg to solve it.

The tin-foil hat theory would be that the league would put Flagg in a major east coast TV market, like Brooklyn, in order to protect the value of their tv deals and appeal to casual fans.

I think the league would let the Jazz have #3 though, maybe even #2.

Good candidates to move up this year would be BRK, TOR, UTA, PHI.

 

[David Hume]

Dear colleagues, we must temper our psychologies. All out "belief" in the unobservable (at least for now) postulate of lottery conspiracy is inconsistent with an empirical stance. One may suspect, one may wonder, but all out belief borders on metaphysics.

 

[jom2003]

For Cleveland to win the lottery 3 yrs out of 4 right after they lost Lebron was some real sketchy ****.

Also this one time when NOLA “conveniently” won the lottery when the league temporarily took over the franchise during their ownership change.

And someone explain to me why small market teams like Charlotte and Sacramento never won the lottery even once despite having the worst records in the league for the last 15+ years.