Who Deserves To Win The NBA Draft Lottery?

Despite what a pair of suspicious NBA owners have whispered to Pablo Torre, I don't believe that the NBA rigs the draft lottery. Certainly, it makes a sort of cockeyed, intuitive sense that the league would want to reward the Dallas Mavericks with a generational prospect in Cooper Flagg, for inexplicably giving their marquee superstar to the league's marquee franchise, thus increasing its sale value; or for the league to fortify the San Antonio Spurs' status as international darlings by giving them Victor Wembanyama. But the league clearly has more to lose than gain from stacking the deck. Also, a committed cork-boarder could engineer a post-facto rationale for any lottery outcome having been rigged: The Orlando Magic got Paolo Banchero in 2022 because the league was doing Disney a favor amid tumbling stock value; the Atlanta Hawks got the first pick in 2024 as part of an outré attempt at election-rigging.

However, I think the NBA should rig the lottery. On a recent episode of Zach Lowe's podcast, Lowe raised the idea of the draft order being assorted in the basketball equivalent of a papal conclave. I love this idea. The concept of the lottery, with its recently flattened odds and the tweaks sure to come after this summer, is that by partially decoupling draft order from win-loss records, the league can discourage tanking. This is always going to be an imperfect solution as long as the two are connected at all: The incentives are too powerful, especially when one player can change the fortunes of a franchise so dramatically—and can do it on a sharply below-market contract for up to five years.

If the NBA were to openly rig the lottery, however, different virtues (other than proficiency at destroying one's on-court product) could be rewarded. No longer could the worst teams in the NBA ensure better draft picks by losing a ton, nor would they jump through any of the strange hoops possibly being set up for them next year, such as counting wins toward draft position after a certain date. No, a rigged system could reward abstract values such as honor, virtue, and suffering with nobility.