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Last Monday was the NBA draft lottery, another unforced error for the NBA when the Dallas Mavericks won the lottery. The top four picks rewarded some teams that created their disappointing seasons and once again give another Western Conference team the top pick, so after settling down and collecting my thoughts on this here are my winners, losers, and some ideas on how to improve and make the lottery feel important like it did decades ago.
Winners
- Nico Harrison, Daryl Morey, and Incompetent Front Offices
The biggest winner or winners from last week’s lottery were polarizing GMs Daryl Morey for the 76ers and good old Nico Harrison of the Dallas Mavericks. The two franchises made terrible roster decisions this season, leading to huge disappointments. By luck or something else (I’ll elaborate in another piece), they were bailed out with getting the top four draft spots.
Regarding Morey and Harrison, nothing is off the table, including them trading the picks for win-now veteran players, especially in the Mavericks’ case. Regardless, the outrage from this lottery resulted from these two teams lucking out this year with the number one and three picks.
- San Antonio Spurs
Somehow, the Spurs always come out better from the NBA lottery, and this year’s draft may be another big draft for the franchise. While they did not get the number one pick, the Spurs are in a good position to do two dynamic moves on draft night. One move is San Antonio possibly enticing Dallas to swap spots, giving the Spurs the number one pick and somehow landing Copper Flagg to pair with two of the last three rookie of the year winners in Stephon Castle and Victor Wembanyama, setting up a promising future in the West.
The other move that I feel is more realistic would be the Spurs offering an overwhelming haul to the Milwaukee Bucks to acquire Giannis Antetokounmpo. This would put the Spurs in immediate contention in the Western Conference and in the future.
- Philadelphia 76ers
Technically, I covered this earlier, but the 76ers are winners from the lottery. The storied franchise gets a blessing with the number three pick where they can draft a promising prospect in either Ace Bailey or VJ Edgecombe establishing a new era for the team, or make another hail Mary attempt to salvage the process by trading the pick to get another big name to maximize this closing window with Embiid and George. Regardless, things look much more hopeful in Philadelphia now compared to a month ago.
Losers
- Tanking Fan Bases
Now we get to the losers from the draft lottery, and without question, the suffering fan bases of the Wizards, Jazz, and Hornets’ hopes were dashed last week. While I am not a fan or supporter of blatant tanking teams, the balance of talent, especially in the Eastern Conference, where the Wizards winning the lottery would have been superb for the NBA. The flattened odds have shown that rewarding continuous tanking is unlikely, but still crushes those fan bases’ hopes of getting any star player to play for their teams, let alone stay past their rookie contracts.
- Adam Silver & The NBA
Adam Silver and the NBA’s overall image took another massive hit after this year’s lottery; the results just gave the many detractors of Silver more ammunition after this NBA season that has not been kind to the commissioner. I know I will sound like a broken record, but Adam Silver has to put his foot down and do something at this point to salvage and bring back much-needed credibility and positive traction for the NBA before it’s too late.
- The Lottery Itself
The final loser of this year’s lottery was… the NBA Lottery itself! The point of having a lottery in sports is the pageantry and drama of it all, seeing the ping-pong balls and tension throughout the process. Making the lottery some over-the-top double secret procedure is goofy and unnecessarily complicated. A potential simple fix is showing the hoop and ping-pong balls to decide the picks on live TV. This would be a start in the right direction to making the lottery feel like a big calendar event for the NBA again.
Here are some possible ideas to improve the draft lottery and process, making it easier to follow, intriguing, and sensible. My first idea is to alternate the lottery winners. So, one year, a Western conference team wins the lottery; therefore, the following year, they can’t win the number one pick again, but an Eastern conference team does. Finally, this would distribute the star power in the NBA instead of making the East a running joke like it has for years.
My other idea would be penalizing teams in the draft lottery for consecutive years. This could serve multiple purposes in eliminating the tanking culture/approach to building a team (Thanks Sam Heinke) and incentivize teams to make an honest go of the regular season. For example, say the Jazz are in the top 5 of the lottery for 2 years in a row, then their odds of obtaining a top-three pick drop significantly every year after, where the high pick they could get is towards the bottom of the lottery (11 to 14).
Is this a bit extreme? Probably, but it also elevates these teams to do something with the growing amount of talent throughout the NBA, not throwing away a season with pathetic basketball on display for numerous month, and at least try to compete throughout the year, because tanking in any way, shape, or form will no longer be rewarded.
But I’m just a lifelong basketball nerd, so what do I possibly know? What I do know is that the NBA has a huge credibility image problem that has to be improved in order to showcase the league’s amazing wealth of talent at the moment and going forward in the best ways possible.