But what happened on the first floor of the McCormick Place West Convention Center in downtown Chicago was hardly plausible. The reaction in the room when an NBA lawyer read out the winner of Monday night’s drawing was silence and disbelief.
Matt Ricciardi, the team’s assistant general manager and representative in the room, sat still at first.
When it came out a seven — 10, 14, 11, 7 — it dawned on Ricciardi how his life had just changed. He reacted meagerly, no doubt cognizant of the unwritten rule of the lottery room that celebrations remain muted, then turned to Portland Trail Blazers assistant general manager Andrae Patterson and shook his hand.
Those in the lottery room could barely believe it either. Incredulity was a common response. Many in the building agreed it was the most bizarre lottery they could remember. When the lottery drawing was televised on ESPN, with the people inside the room already aware of the results, there was laughter when the broadcast announced that the Mavericks had moved into the top four. It still barely seemed real.
23 comments
Honest question with hindsight: Is Luka for Flagg and AD a fair trade?
What are truly hopeless teams supposed to do? Im not exactly lucky to be a Hornets fan but at least i can fall back on Miller and Ball returning from injury and giving me something to cheer for. The Wizards and Jazz are hopeless and dropped to their worst possible picks. The lottery has been extremely cruel to my team over the years as we were one pick away from Shaq, Dwight, Cp3, Wemby, AD and LMA, and for as shitty as our team has been run, that lottery luck is the main reason why the team has been bad. Making the odds worse for teams because of the sixers pissing in the faces of the nba execs, and then watching them jump us has me losing my goddamn mind.
on one hand, it is kind of satisfying having watched blatant tank jobs fail miserably.
on the other hand, Mavs getting Flagg should just not be a possibility.
The league has to do something about teams like the Hornets, Wizards, and Jazz getting screwed over. Limit the lottery to the top 7 teams or something. This is absurd.
> “When I see Zack Kleiman (general manager of the Grizzlies), I’ll thank him for kicking our butt,” Ricciardi said with a laugh. “Ja Morant, too.”
“bizarre”
I feel like the lottery should only be for the bottom 3 or 4 teams or something. This is just too much.
Why are the Jazz, Hornets and Wizards even NBA teams at this point? Clearly the league doesn’t care about them.
Very bizarre. So bizarre that it was in fact totally fake.
I am not a conspiracy theorist but this has the ingredients of a “wink wink” job. Why do franchises “luck” into the top spot following massive trades?
Truly bad teams should have more favorable odds.
it’s not just that the mavs, with the lowest odds at 1.8%, jumped up. it’s that it happened in the year when they traded luka to the lakers. so you’re talking about a joint probability, which makes it overwhelmingly suspicious
Doing a live lottery ball pick solves every issue. It’s way more hype too.
Reward the Lakers with a superstar and Silver gives you #1. Pelicans did it and now Dallas.
It’s always so funny to me when people rail against tanking from teams like the hornets/wizards/jazz. They will never in a million years attract an all-nba level talent to their team in free agency, and anyone they acquire in a trade will ask out in a couple years anyway. Like sure they could play everyone for 82 and go 33-49 or something so they can get the 10th pick and keep drafting role players, but idk why people think that’s so much nobler than trying to actually get top talent in the draft. Sure a team can draft a booker or a mitchell every once in a while, but short of doing that I don’t know what paths to contention people actually see for the actually bad franchises in the league. Meanwhile, the spurs blatantly tank every 20 years and get handed hall-of-famers for their 1 year of being bad and constantly move up in the draft, but that’s fine I guess?
Being in the finals the year before should preclude you from the lottery. Remove all those 1% chance and let the true dogwater franchises have a chance for once. (I say this as a Pels fan hoping Zion does something this year finally)
Didn’t the Hawks win the lottery last year with very similar odds? We’ve seen low odds teams win it before, like the Cavs at some point in the 2010’s. What I think is even more rigged than Dallas winning the lottery is SA shooting up to 2. Feels like they’ve landed picks better than their odds for 3 years now
Honestly, with the expansion of the playoffs to include the play-in, the 1-10 seeds in both conferences should now be excluded from the lottery. Teams should not be able to both compete for a place in the playoffs, and be eligible for the 1st round pick overall. The bottom 10 teams should be entered into the lottery, everyone else by seeding.
Federal investigation needed.
Small markets teams should sue the NBA.
Thanks NBA. I will never believe in the integrity of sports ever again.
If you got screwed by the lottery just be glad you didn’t screw yourself like we did. We traded our franchise player and still don’t even have a pick here lmao
It’s probably not rigged, but this is certainly the outcome you’d see if it were.
The Wizards, Hornets, Jazz, and Pelicans are not in the top NBA markets and they are all arguably more than 1 player away from contention. But put Cooper Flagg on a team that is in the nation’s #4 media market and already has Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving, Klay Thompson, and Derrick Lively, and you’ve got an instant contender and national story which is exactly what the NBA wants and needs from their domestic, great white hope.
IMO one of the FEW things the WNBA does right is their draft lottery.
They use the teams records from the past two seasons to determine who makes it into the lottery. The NBA should consider doing that.