The NBA was set ablaze when the Dallas Mavericks won the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery three months after trading away Luka Doncic and setting their franchise on fire. If there was ever a way to convince people the Lottery was rigged, this would be a great example.
The way the Lottery is conducted now makes it impossible to achieve certain results, and the new Lottery odds are supposed to deter teams from tanking, even if that doesn’t always stop teams from doing so. And it seems the NBA Commissioner is happy a tanking team didn’t get the first pick.
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Adam Silver recently appeared on FS1’s “Breakfast Ball” where he discussed the Mavericks winning the first pick.
“We call it a ‘Lottery’, and I think some people think it was a one in a million chance that Dallas was going to win. Remember, the worst-performing team had a 14% chance at winning [the first overall pick], which means there was an 86% chance they wouldn’t get it. Dallas had roughly a 2% chance, so the losingest team had a 7-times better chance. 2% is 2%, it’s going to happen. When people say, therefore, that the lottery is broken, I have a different viewpoint, which the purpose of the Lottery is to disincentive teams from tanking. Here, you had a team that was clearly trying, whatever people think of that [Luka Doncic trade], they were trying to win, then Kyrie [Irving] got injured, then Anthony Davis got injured, and so then they found themselves in the Lottery.”
It’s too early to tell if the recent lotteries will stop teams from tanking, as the Atlanta Hawks won the 2024 Lottery with small odds too. It’s a tough position to be in for the NBA, as they don’t want teams to tank, but they want to increase parity, and it’s hard for smaller market teams to get better without high draft picks.
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