The NBA lottery is unlike anything else in sports

The NBA draft is unlike any other draft in professional sports. In other sports, the draft order is based on records from the previous season. So the team with the worst record will secure the first pick of the first round, and the team that won the championship will have the last pick in the first round.

This seems fair enough. After all, shouldn’t the garbage teams have the opportunity to pick the best prospects?

Not in the NBA. The NBA has this thing called a draft lottery. The lottery is used to determine the order of the NBA draft. This is how it works.

There are 14 teams that do not make the NBA playoffs each year. These are the teams eligible for the lottery. There are 14 balls placed into a machine. Each ball has a number ranging from 1-14. Four balls will be drawn out at random to create a number combination. There are 1,001 four-digit number combinations that can be made, and all but one combination are assigned to each of the 14 lottery teams.

The number of different combinations each team is assigned is determined by record. The three teams with the worse records each have an equal number of combinations and have the best odds to secure the number one overall pick.

All 14 balls are put into a lottery machine and spun and mixed for 20 seconds. After 20 seconds, the first ball is removed. The balls are mixed again for 10 seconds and a second ball is removed. This is repeated two more times until a four-digit combination is created. The team with this combination has the first pick in the NBA draft.

This process is done three more times until the top-4 picks are set. After that picks 5-14 of the lottery are determined by regular-season record.

The three teams with the worst record in the league each have a 14 percent chance at the number one overall pick. The team with the 4th worst record has a 12.5 percent chance, 5th best has a 10.5 percent chance and so on so so forth all the way down the team with the 14th best record that has a 0.5 percent chance to secure the number one pick.

The lottery’s purpose is for entertainment, and to tries to deflect teams from tanking for a high pick every year until they have a team good enough to win.

Although teams do and will continue to tank for high picks, the lottery has at least made the NBA draft more fun. It is cool for fans of a team that’s bad but not that bad to have a chance at a super good college prospect.