NBA draft: 3 chaotic scenarios in the NBA draft lottery

The NBA draft is always a crapshoot, and thanks to recent lottery reform, that’s more true now than ever. Getting a good spot in the draft is hard, even if your team is so blessed as to be able to lose a ton of games, and drafting that franchise-altering superstar is even harder.

Thanks to the league changing the best odds for the worst team to get a 25.0 percent chance at the top pick to just 14.0 percent for each of the three worst teams, losing tons of games for the explicit purpose of tanking has ever been less appealing.

The NBA draft is always a crapshoot, and thanks to lottery reform, that’s more true now than ever. Let’s look at three possible chaotic lottery outcomes.

Unless you’re a fan of one of the league’s best teams at a given time, it’s that chaos that is most appealing about the league. As a result of the unpredictable nature of the NBA draft lottery, we’re going to lean right into the unknown and break down three possible outcomes.

These outcomes will be derived from simply hitting “Sim Lottery” on Tankathon.com, and we will focus on the first five picks. Fortunately for the purposes of this exercise, we hit interesting outcomes on all three spins and didn’t end up with anything even remotely looking like chalk.

A note before we begin; the Houston Rockets’ first-round pick in the 2021 NBA draft is top-four protected, which means that even though they’re going to finish with the worst record, if their pick ends up landing in the fifth spot, it goes to the OKC Thunder. This is, indeed, something of a spoiler.

Let’s take a look at the first scenario.