Revisiting our favorite NBA Draft conspiracy theories through the years

The NBA, above all else, is a vehicle for entertainment. Sure, there’s interest in maintaining the highest level of skill and effort in the sporting world, as there is in maintaining the integrity of the game, at least inasmuch as those two goals dovetail with the first and foremost priority: growing the worldwide batch of eyeballs trained on NBA content at all times by putting out an entertaining product. Keeping fans entertained is job number one.

This core tenet of entertainers everywhere, from circus freakshow artists to Taylor Swift and the like, lies at the heart of why the legitimacy of the NBA draft and the ever-evolving draft lottery mechanisms attached to it have been repeatedly called into question through the years. The league itself, as it plays second fiddle to the NFL in popularity in the U.S. and third to the NFL and MLB in terms of league revenue, has an inherent obligation to place maximizing entertainment ahead of the integrity of outcomes in its decision-making, at very least when the likelihood of public awareness of indiscretion remains below the league’s preconceived acceptable threshold.

Whether administrative thumbs actually tip the scales of player movements or draft priority is not the sort of thing a team-site web blogger or sports radio caller will ever be able to prove or disprove. As long as the answer to the simple question, “Who stands to benefit here?” is still “the NBA,” the league’s draft lottery will continue to be the sports conspiracy theorist’s best friend.

It’s easy to brush aside the roundball tin-foil hatters on each individual claim that “The fix is in,” but the kooks have been keeping the rumor mill humming for 40 years or more at this point.

The latest episode of NBA Conspiracy Theater culminated on Monday, when the Dallas Mavericks were awarded the first pick in the 2025 NBA Draft after entering the Draft Lottery with the 11th-best odds, just a 1.8% chance, to receive the pick. It came, of course, three months and change after the team dealt generational superstar Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a 2029 draft pick.

The reaction to that trade has been so overwhelmingly negative as to feed baseless conspiracy narratives left and right on its own: that the league may have dictated the move of an international superstar to one of its most popular teams in an effort to maximize his visibility, or that Mavericks ownership was actively tanking the franchise to make a move to Las Vegas more palatable, which would somehow align with the Adelson family casino business agenda. So, when the Mavericks moved up 10 spots to become the fourth-luckiest draft order jumpers in NBA history, it just added fuel to a fire that started burning in 1985.

This time, the conspiracy theorists are claiming the opportunity for Dallas to presumably draft Cooper Flagg comes as some sort of compensation from the NBA league office for the shady back-room deal to send Dončić’s generational talent to one of the NBA’s two most popular and internationally recognizable franchises at the trade deadline. In light of the questionable circumstances surrounding the Mavs’ newfound luck with the ping-pong balls that had fans and ex-fans alike muttering everything from “It’s so rigged” to “we’re so back” Monday night, let’s take a walk down NBA Draft Lottery Conspiracy Theory Memory Lane.

1985: Patrick Ewing to the Knicks

The 1985 NBA draft was the first to use the NBA draft lottery. The lottery was established out of concern that the Houston Rockets had been tanking (before that term had been officially coined in the world of sports) the two years prior, to draft Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon. The Golden State Warriors finished with the worst record in the NBA during the 1984–85 season and would have had the first draft choice under the previous system, a simple coin flip between any teams that held the worst record in the league at the end of the season. That year, Georgetown center Patrick Ewing was the clear favorite to be the number one pick in the draft.

During the first live televised draft lottery ceremony, the league used a system where sealed envelopes representing the teams with the worst records were mixed in a tumbler, and then drawn by then-NBA Commissioner David Stern one at a time to determine which of these clubs would get the first pick onwards. According to one of two popular urban legends at the time, when these envelopes were added to the tumbler, one envelope was put in forcibly and banged against the edge, bending the corner, while all the rest of the envelopes were set in gently, preserving their pristine corners. While there is no evidence to prove any of this, the New York Knicks, who finished with the third-worst record in the league that season, eventually used the first pick to draft Ewing. He went on to become a legend on the team and lead the Knicks to the 1994 NBA Finals, though he never won a title.

So was it a “bent envelope”? Or was it a “frozen envelope”? The second urban myth surrounding Ewing’s selection is that the Knicks’ envelope wasn’t bent at one corner, but that it was put in a freezer for a time before being stuffed into the hopper with the rest of the team’s envelopes. That way, Stern would know how to make sure the Knicks got the No. 1 overall pick by how cold the envelope was to the touch. Dan Patrick recalls both conspiracy theories in the video above.

2003-2014: The LeBron James Saga

Look. On face value, the result of the 2003 NBA Draft Lottery seems pretty legit. The Cleveland Cavaliers and the Denver Nuggets ended with the same terrible record in 2002-03 and, thus, held the same odds of receiving the first overall pick in the draft last summer. But it certainly raised eyebrows when Cleveland won the rights to select Akron’s own LeBron James, ensuring that “the next Jordan” got a storybook start to what would become an all-time great NBA career. Akron, of course, sits just about 40 miles south of Cleveland.

The 2003 Cleveland draft lottery win in a vacuum may not rise to the conspiracy level. However, when combined with ALL the LeBron-related draft shenanigans that took place from 2011-2014, it can lead conspiracy theorists to start start chain-smoking cigarettes, pinning up an elaborate collages of newspaper articles on their bedroom walls and connecting the dots with different colored strands of yarn.

Enter The Decision. The Cleveland story was nice and all, but the conspiracy theory went that the LeBron phenomenon would better serve league goals in a larger coastal market. James took his talents to South Beach before the 2010-11 season. Was a league orchestrated trade of the first overall pick in 2011 (which ended up being Kyrie Irving), plus Baron Davis, from the Los Angeles Clippers to the Cavs for Mo Williams Jamario Moon compensation for Cleveland’s loss in the sign-and-trade deal to Miami the year prior?

Or was that not near enough? What about making sure the Cavs got the number one pick in three out of four NBA Drafts from 2011-2014? The Cavs had just a 1.7% chance to jump up and and get the first pick in 2014 draft, but they did, and ultimately selected Andrew Wiggins with the first pick that year. Wiggins would then be used in a trade to bring Kevin Love to the Cavs.

Would that make up for the loss of the generational hometown hero? No? What about if James came back after winning back-to-back titles in a sexier, more international market to write an epic ending to his storybook start in Cleveland with a title for his hometown Cavaliers in 2016, with Irving, who in this grand conspiracy was payback to Cleveland for letting go of James in the first place, now playing Robin to LeBron’s Batman? Eat your heart out, Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

James himself has recently fanned the flames of conspiracy theories like these. In a March appearance on the Pat McAfee Show, he said the following, intimating his own belief that the league may have orchestrated or at very least influenced some of these larger-than-life draft moments.

“During the lottery drop, Cleveland got the No. 1 pick,” James said. “I just don’t think that was — what a coincidence. Let’s keep LeBron home. You know what? Patrick Ewing to the Knicks. Derrick Rose to the Bulls. I understand the assignment, guys.”

2008: Don’t forget about Derrick Rose

Injuries may have prevented Derrick Rose from realizing his full potential in the NBA, but just five years after James made his compelling debut, it looked like the league was trying to reproduce the LeBron the Hometown Hero story in a revival of the Chicago Bulls with one of their own.

Rose, who played his college ball at Memphis, is originally from the Englewood area of Chicago. The Bulls had been struggling since the Michael Jordan Era ended. Maybe one hand could wash the other, the Derrick Rose truthers will tell you. Rose took John Calipari’s Memphis Tigers to a then-NCAA record of 38 wins and a berth in the national championship game in his only college season and was a surefire, can’t-miss stud as the 2008 NBA Draft rolled around.

The only problem was that the Bulls had just a 1.6% chance on landing the first pick to complete the storyline, eerily similar to the one conspiracy theorists will tell you the NBA previously manufactured in another Midwestern market just five years before. The fact that injuries to Rose in subsequent years kept the play from putting the Bulls all the way back on the map doesn’t mean there was no conspiracy in the first place, the grassy knoll trolls will tell you.

2012: Anthony Davis to New Orleans

The New Orleans Hornets were a league owned team as the 2012 Draft Lottery approached. They were ultimately sold to Tom Benson, whose platform for ownership included keeping the team in New Orleans. The conspiracy theory here goes that the Hornets were given the first overall pick in the 2012 draft as a reward to Benson for staying put in the Crescent City. They ended up drafting one Anthony Davis, who factors into no fewer than three of the juiciest draft conspiracy theory nuggets on this list, with the first pick that year. Davis is like the “Smoking Man” from the X-Files who seems to appear, light a cigarette and say something cryptic every time conspiracy is afoot.

Stern, who was still two years from retiring as NBA Commissioner, had this to say (to NBC Sports) about NBA Draft conspiracy theories at the time:

“It has gotten enough sort of annual currency, that the one thing we want to do is even though we shrug it off and make a little fun of it, that we also make sure our process is about as airtight as it can possibly be and well reviewed and well viewed so there’s no problem.”

The same people pushing this conspiracy would also raise an eyebrow when telling you how interesting it is that Sterns tenure as commish spanned from 1984 to 2014, a tenure conveniently bookended by two of the most notable NBA Draft Lottery conspiracy theories on this list.

2019: Anthony Davis to the Lakers

It’s also remarkable how similar many of these conspiracy theory storylines are to each other. We must really be onto something, huh?

The 2019 arrival of Davis in LA played out in circumstances similar to this year’s Dončić-to-the-Lakers story — except that the Pelicans were, unlike the Mavs, able to command a king’s ransom from the Lakers in exchange for the superstar they sent out West in 2019. The trade sent Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Josh Hart, the draft rights to De’Andre Hunter, two first-round picks, and a first-round pick swap back to the Pelicans that year.

Then, after a gruesome 2018-19 campaign, the Pelicans won the 2019 NBA Draft Lottery for their trouble and took Zion Williamson, a one-year wonder out of Duke, with the pick. Some of these similarities, including Davis’ presence in the middle of it all, between the 2019 draft lottery conspiracy theory and this latest one centering around Dončić, Davis (again) and Flagg, are downright eerie.

Never mind the fact that it takes much more than mere coincidence to prove conspiracies like this. Never mind the fact that if any or all of these conspiracy theories are true, that means the NBA front office is perpetrating actual fraud against a group of 30 unwitting billionaire team owners and their ownership groups each year — or that all 30 ownership groups are in on the fraud cabal and willing to let the strings of roster machination be pulled by someone other than themselves or the people they directly hire. To put it lightly — it’s not likely at all.

Is the NBA Draft Lottery system rigged? Has it been for 40 years? Or, was the Mavericks’ latest stroke of luck in moving up to get the first pick merely a reversion to the mean for one of the two franchises (Dallas and Minnesota) that has historically been the least lucky with their ping-pong balls? Do a confluence of intersecting coincidences point to a grander conspiracy at hand? Or, can you just chill?

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