Detroit Pistons: Where they stand in the NBA draft lottery

The Detroit Pistons put off a proper rebuild for just about a decade too long. Hanging on to tattered shreds of hope that they could sneak into the playoffs as an eight-seed and get a couple of home playoff games, it’s an organization that practically seemed to revel in its mediocrity rather than seeking a path out.

That’s all a thing of the past now. With the hiring of new general manager Troy Weaver, the organization clearly signaled a readiness for a hard reboot, and that’s what they’ve gotten. Weaver has turned over almost the entire roster, and thanks to a quartet of youngsters (a quintet if we throw Frank Jackson into the mix along with Killian Hayes, Isaiah Stewart, Saddiq Bey and Saben Lee), there’s hope for the future after just one season of doing rebuild things the right way.

As the season winds down for the Detroit Pistons, the NBA draft lottery looms larger by the game

The Pistons are 19-44 and their winning percentage of 30.6 is the seventh-worst in franchise history. It’s just a tick better than last season’s 30.3 percent, and ideally they will simply lose as many of the final 10 games on the schedule as possible.

They’re currently in a tie with the Orlando Magic for the third-worst record in the NBA, half a game better (worse?) than the surging Minnesota Timberwolves (seriously, three straight wins for that team) at 19-43. The Houston Rockets are untouchable in the No. 1 spot in the NBA draft lottery with their 15-47 record.

If you’re looking for a team that could lose out whether they want to or not, it’s this desolate Rockets team.

As for the Pistons, they’ve been plagued with signature wins over championship contenders like the Los Angeles Lakers and the Brooklyn Nets. Thanks to the fact that they’re a tanking team without tanking players, they’ve simply jumped up and surprised a lot of teams that should have been able to handle them with ease.

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That’s not an indictment on their tank, it’s more a reflection of the fact that the players on this team don’t have an ounce of quit among them, and taking them lightly is ill-advised even for the league’s best. It’s also a result of the kind of reconstruction Weaver conducted. He wanted hard-working, never-say-die players that Pistons fans would identify with.

Unfortunately for their lottery chances, that makes for a team just a little too good to ever be the worst in the NBA and thus the top dog in the lottery.

There’s also the fact that NBA draft lottery reform is in effect. Just a few years ago, the team with the worst record in the league had a 25.0 percent chance of winning the lottery and getting the No. 1 pick. Now, the two worst teams have a 14.0 percent chance, the third-worst has a nearly imperceptible drop to 13.3 percent, and the fourth-worst drops to 13.2 percent.

So if the NBA season was to end today (and you never know), and we ran the lottery 1000 times with the current standings, the Houston Rockets would take the No. 1 pick just eight times more than the Pistons.

As far as getting a top-four pick, the Rockets stand to do so 52.1 percent of the time, while the Pistons stand to get into the top quartet 50.0 percent of the time.

Once a team falls out of the top four in the lottery, that’s where things get dicey. The Pistons are 2.0 games ahead of the Cleveland Cavaliers in fifth, and No. 5 has a drastic reduction to 39.9 percent to get into the top four, and just 9.8 percent to get the No. 1 pick.

The top-end scenarios for a team in the top four are basically the same, while everything outside of it is a gloomier situation.

What happens if the Detroit Pistons don’t get a top-four pick in the NBA draft lottery?

Four is the magic number in the lottery for a lot of reasons. Stay in the top four, keep your top-end scenarios basically equal. Fall out of it, and your outlook for any particular spot or range of spots becomes a scattershot chance.

In addition, you can fall a maximum of four spots in the lottery from wherever your season-ending slot finds you. For example, the Houston Rockets have that 52.1 percent chance of a top-four pick, and the remaining 47.9 percent chance falls entirely on the fifth-pick, which is their single-most likely outcome.

The Pistons, now in fourth, could slide as far down as eighth if the season was to end today. So they have their 50.0 percent chance at a top-four pick, but they have a 6.8 percent chance to finish fifth, a 24.6 percent chance to finish sixth, a 16.4 percent chance to finish seventh and a meager (but not at all impossible) 2.2 percent chance to finish eighth.

So all the Detroit Pistons can do now is position themselves as best they can, hoping for some hard-fought losses (particularly upcoming games against the Minnesota Timberwolves and Orlando Magic). Once the bell tolls on the 2020-21 season, their fate is up to the NBA draft lottery gods.