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David Stern left a great, but complicated, legacy that is part of the fabric of the NBA

By Phil Watson

Boston Celtics Red Auerbach NBA commissioner David Stern. Copyright 1985 NBAE (Photo by Dick Raphael/NBAE via Getty Images)
Boston Celtics Red Auerbach NBA commissioner David Stern. Copyright 1985 NBAE (Photo by Dick Raphael/NBAE via Getty Images) /
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Patrick Ewing David Stern. (June 18, 1985, photo via Getty Images) /

The lottery era’s choppy start

At the end of the 1983-84 season, the Houston Rockets — who had gotten the first pick in the 1983 NBA Draft and chose Ralph Sampson from Virginia — basically shut down for the last quarter of the season, going 5-16 and winding up in the coin flip for the top pick once again.

The flip went their way and the Rockets debuted the Twin Towers era of Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon, reaching the NBA Finals at the end of Olajuwon’s second season in 1986.

That marked the end of the coin flip era for the NBA, as commissioner David Stern and the Board of Governors settled on a new lottery system to discourage teams from openly tanking to improve their draft prospects.

But it didn’t go off without a hitch. When the New York Knicks won the first lottery in 1985 — and the right to pick Georgetown phenom Patrick Ewing — many cried that the fix was in, an accusation Stern never quite put to rest.

The lottery system had its flaws. At the time the seven non-playoff teams were each given a 1-in-7 change of getting the top pick (14.3 percent). Over time, there were complaints from the owners of the poorest teams — some of which had been among the poorest teams for years, such as the Los Angeles Clippers and Golden State Warriors — that the new system was unfair to them.

Thus began the era of weighted lotteries and the incentive to tank was once again in vogue. The Philadelphia 76ers built their current contending club off blatantly exploiting the system with copious amounts of losses from 2013-14 through 2015-16, which eventually led to the current lottery weighting system.

If the idea was to stop tanking, then the initial lottery plan was frankly the best solution. You don’t make the playoffs, you get a shot at the top pick, with no extra rewards for losing better than the other non-playoff clubs.

But once the system was transformed to once again reward teams for failure, tanking would rear its ugly head with regularity.