12-01-2025, 12:58 PM
The Stein report last night feels like something fed to him from the team. Basically, there's no advantage to being in the top 4 going into the lottery. The smarter play is to let the chips fall where they may (especially since featuring AD probably costs you some losses) and hope for the lotto luck to continue for those outside the top four earners of ping pong balls:
There have been seven NBA drafts since the league office, hoping this measure would curb tanking, installed flattened odds of 14% each for the teams with the three worst records to win the No. 1 overall pick. The odds to win the lottery before the change were 25% for the team with the league's worst record, 19.9% for the second-worst team and 15.6% for the third-worst team.
How is the system working?
It doesn't seem to be discouraging tanking much at all ... not when teams from lower down the lottery ladder keep landing top-four selections.
In those past seven drafts ...
* We've seen 15 teams jump up into the top four to seize more than half of the 28 available picks in the lottery's upper reaches despite having anywhere from the fifth- to the 11th-worst record in the league.
* Of the 35 teams in that span that have posted the league's fifth- through ninth-worst records, we've seen 12 — better than one in three — move up to get a top-four selection.
* The last two lotteries, furthermore, were won by the teams with the 10th- and 11th-worst records leaguewide: Atlanta (2024) and Dallas (surely you remember what happened in May).
* The team with the league's worst record has won zero lotteries since the new system was installed in 2019. The last three of those teams, in fact, fell as far as they possibly could in the lottery process to the fifth overall pick: Detroit twice (2023 and 2024) and Utah this past June.
These are exactly the kind of outcomes, mind you, that league officials would point to and say: See? This is why it's a bad idea to tank. The problem there: Teams like Memphis, Dallas and Sacramento that are falling far short of expectations this season and pivoting to the notion of, uh, prioritizing draft positioning don't necessarily have to worry about "catching" the Brooklyns and Washingtons in terms of losing. History says they'll have a decent shot at lottery glory just by making sure they have a ticket.
There have been seven NBA drafts since the league office, hoping this measure would curb tanking, installed flattened odds of 14% each for the teams with the three worst records to win the No. 1 overall pick. The odds to win the lottery before the change were 25% for the team with the league's worst record, 19.9% for the second-worst team and 15.6% for the third-worst team.
How is the system working?
It doesn't seem to be discouraging tanking much at all ... not when teams from lower down the lottery ladder keep landing top-four selections.
In those past seven drafts ...
* We've seen 15 teams jump up into the top four to seize more than half of the 28 available picks in the lottery's upper reaches despite having anywhere from the fifth- to the 11th-worst record in the league.
* Of the 35 teams in that span that have posted the league's fifth- through ninth-worst records, we've seen 12 — better than one in three — move up to get a top-four selection.
* The last two lotteries, furthermore, were won by the teams with the 10th- and 11th-worst records leaguewide: Atlanta (2024) and Dallas (surely you remember what happened in May).
* The team with the league's worst record has won zero lotteries since the new system was installed in 2019. The last three of those teams, in fact, fell as far as they possibly could in the lottery process to the fifth overall pick: Detroit twice (2023 and 2024) and Utah this past June.
These are exactly the kind of outcomes, mind you, that league officials would point to and say: See? This is why it's a bad idea to tank. The problem there: Teams like Memphis, Dallas and Sacramento that are falling far short of expectations this season and pivoting to the notion of, uh, prioritizing draft positioning don't necessarily have to worry about "catching" the Brooklyns and Washingtons in terms of losing. History says they'll have a decent shot at lottery glory just by making sure they have a ticket.