CHICAGO — The slow draw of the ping-pong balls for the NBA’s Draft Lottery is always filled with tension. The 10 seconds between numbers feel interminable when the fate of 14 selections is on the line. But the results at least follow an order, a universal law of reason. Some team, in desperate need of talent after a sad season, is hoping for relief, and this is where it finds it. A reward, of sorts, for a team that deserves it.
Advertisement
But what happened on the first floor of the McCormick Place West Convention Center in downtown Chicago was hardly plausible. The reaction in the room when an NBA lawyer read out the winner of Monday night’s drawing was silence and disbelief.
The Dallas Mavericks — the franchise that spent the last four months of this season in ignominy after it traded away Luka Dončić — had won the 2025 draft lottery. Matt Riccardi, the team’s assistant general manager and representative in the room, sat still at first. He had followed the numbers as they were read and knew his team had a shot, but it was slim. The Mavericks came into the evening with a 1.8 percent shot at landing the No. 1 pick. The Atlanta Hawks won the lottery last year as a long shot, and their odds were twice as high.
Eight teams still had an opportunity to win the pick before the last ball popped out of the Smart Play lottery machine. When it came out a seven — 10, 14, 11, 7 — it dawned on Riccardi how his life had just changed. He reacted meagerly, no doubt cognizant of the unwritten rule of the lottery room that celebrations remain muted, then turned to Portland Trail Blazers assistant general manager Andrae Patterson and shook his hand.
The stakes Monday were no less than franchise-altering. Cooper Flagg, the Duke star, has been the consensus top player in this draft class for the last year and is a rare talent. At 6-foot-9, he has the potential to be a dominant two-way forward for years to come. Those years will likely be spent in Dallas. It’s an audacious sentence to write, one that would have served as a comical aside if it had been predicted just hours earlier. The Mavericks, for reasons karmic and rational, were a least likely option to land Flagg.
Those in the lottery room could barely believe it either. Incredulity was a common response. Many in the building agreed it was the most bizarre lottery they could remember. When the lottery drawing was televised on ESPN, with the people inside the room already aware of the results, there was laughter when the broadcast announced that the Mavericks had moved into the top four. It still barely seemed real.
Advertisement
The Mavericks just traded away one franchise player in February. They had Dončić and sent him to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis, a 2029 first-round pick and a three-month-long tailspin. That is the kind of decision that’s hard to recover from, the kind that has made GM Nico Harrison a pariah in his own city.
But here are the Mavericks now, bathed in luck all over again.
“A crazy year, for sure,” Riccardi said afterward, his voice hoarse, standing in front of his seat on the third level of a makeshift podium, a row usually reserved for the teams picking at the back end of the lottery.
In his hand, Riccardi held a packet of all 1,001 potential lottery combinations. Only 18 could do the Mavericks any good. He had put a blue and yellow sticker of an owl over that section. His Italian friends called him “il Gufo” — the owl — and he brought that gift from his 13-month-old son, Lio, as his good-luck charm.
But he was realistic about his odds of success.
“Yeah, 1.8 percent,” he said. “I think the Dallas fan base deserved this.”
It was, in a sense, a reward for a fan base that had been clobbered in recent months. The Mavericks traded Dončić, then watched Davis get hurt in his first game with the team and miss most of the season, then saw Kyrie Irving tear his ACL.
Their fortunes were sealed with another loss, a 14-point drubbing by the Memphis Grizzlies in the last Play-In Tournament game that kept them out of the playoffs. The Grizzlies went on to get swept mercilessly by the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round, while the Mavericks went home.
It turned out to be a blessing. That loss kept Dallas in the lottery, where its 39-43 record gave it the 11th-longest odds. Only the Orlando Magic had won from that spot before, in 1993. Now, the Mavericks have too.
“When I see Zack Kleiman (general manager of the Grizzlies), I’ll thank him for kicking our butt,” Riccardi said with a laugh. “Ja Morant, too.”
Advertisement
The Mavericks can now reset their franchise arc.
They no longer need to cram enough winning into whatever window they have with the 32-year-old Davis and the recovering 33-year-old Irving. The team can start to lure back the fans who abandoned them when Harrison traded Dončić. There is a new young star to put on billboards around the team and throw into commercials, one who, unlike Davis, is untainted by a trade that will live in infamy.
Harrison, pilloried in the aftermath of the Dončić trade, somehow got some salvation, though not forgiveness. In the end, that fateful trade also netted him the conditions to land Flagg.
“He traded Luka for Cooper,” one team executive said. “Bonkers,” said another. No one could believe it.
In Dallas, the No. 7 can be a lucky number all over again just months after the Mavericks traded away No. 77. All it took was a stroke of fortune so far-fetched that it drew shock across the league, and the sticker that carried it into the lottery room.
“Lio,” Riccardi said, “got us Cooper Flagg.”
The Spurs’ luck continues
Two years after they won the Victor Wembanyama lottery, and a year after they landed the fourth pick, the San Antonio Spurs got the No. 2 pick.
They were in the market for a dynamic left-handed point guard in February when the Sacramento Kings traded for De’Aaron Fox. Rutgers’ Dylan Harper, a dynamic left-handed point guard, is seen as the No. 2 player in this class, but some executives have already started wondering if the Spurs will take him or move the pick. Then again, there’s never such a thing as too many good players, especially if you also include Stephon Castle, the guard who just won Rookie of the Year.
That’s a good problem to have, and San Antonio will surely find a way to own it. But if you’re wondering if the Spurs will ever stop getting lucky, just know that it could have been an even better night for them.
Advertisement
As mentioned above, eight teams still had a chance to win the No. 1 pick before the last ball came out, but the Spurs had three potential outs. They had two extra because they won the Hawks’ pick this year from the Dejounte Murray trade. Here is the number, if it came out, that would have given each team the No. 1 pick:
Pelicans: 2; Nets: 3; Raptors: 4; Spurs: 5; Blazers: 6; Mavericks: 7; Bulls: 8; Kings: 9; Spurs (via the Hawks odds): 12 and 13.
Out came 7, and the Spurs had to settle for the second pick when another run of high numbers (12, 13, 11, 5) came out in their favor.
That’s a wrap from Chicago 🤩
See y’all in June….@Ticketmaster | #sponsored pic.twitter.com/PX0rmphLq1
— San Antonio Spurs (@spurs) May 13, 2025
Can you really rig the draft?
Nearly every year, almost without fail, NBA fans claim a conspiracy theory about the draft lottery. It’s almost a tradition of its own. This year, it seems, is no different.
What else could explain the Mavericks winning the lottery the same year they traded Dončić and while holding just a 1.8 percent chance to do so? Surely, it’s got to be rigged.
That’s pretty hard to do. We should know. Back in 2019, The Athletic spoke to magicians, illusionists, lottery machine experts, gaming officials and screenwriters and tried to see if it’s possible. The consensus: It ain’t easy.
Or as one NBA source said when they got on the phone to discuss that story: “So you’re asking about committing a felony?”
Sixers lose, then win
What a wild night for the Philadelphia 76ers.
They came into the night with the fifth-best chance at landing the top pick, but if their pick slipped out of the top six (which means two teams jumped into the top four and ahead of them), then it would go to the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Sixers either had to hope the lottery balls came their way and they got a top-four pick, or that no more than one team below them jumped into the top four.
Advertisement
So, what if both things turned out to be true?
The Mavericks (No. 11 lottery slot) and the Spurs (No. 8) won the first two picks in the draft. That did not bode well for the Sixers. That meant that they got pushed down two spots, to at least No. 7, and their pick was headed to the Thunder.
Then came the third drawing. The numbers — 3, 7, 5, 10 — came up for the Sixers. The pick was staying in Philadelphia.
Those watching on TV experienced it in another way.
When the Spurs did not get the No. 8 pick on the ESPN broadcast, which meant they were in the top four, announcer Kevin Negandhi said the Sixers lost their pick. That led to some grumbling in the room. When he offered a correction two picks later and said the Sixers were headed into the top four, that brought some laughter.
The man who had to live it in real time was Sixers assistant general manager Ned Cohen. He was the Sixers’ representative in the room. President of basketball operations Daryl Morey sent Cohen there because Cohen used to work in the league office, and he decided that was an appropriate background for that room. Cohen brought his own lucky charms, in case the connections weren’t enough: a piece of artwork made by his two toddler children with “Good Luck 76ers” written on it and a butterfly made out of beads by his daughter, an animal that carries luck within the family.
And he needed all of it.
“Poor guy,” Morey said. “Only after did I realize the roller coaster he went through, because by pick two, he knew we had to get three or four, and I think our odds had dropped to like 10 to 15 percent at that point. I’m doing the math in my head. I don’t know exactly. So I think he might have gone through the work. I think that it was worse for Ned and for Philly fans after Kevin Neghandi said we were out. It was almost the perfect way it went down given the tough year we had that, you know, we got what seemed to be just horrific news.”
The No. 3 pick of the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery goes to the Philadelphia 76ers.
🎟️: https://t.co/2q6vnc6AMW pic.twitter.com/JazVXkpBgX
— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) May 12, 2025
The Sixers instantly became one of the most interesting teams in the draft. They need an infusion of young talent with two injury-prone stars in their 30s in Joel Embiid and Paul George, but Morey could also decide to shop the pick to try to acquire a star player if one were to hit the market.
Morey was effusive about his plans after the order came out. He said the Sixers love this draft class, and the No. 3 pick would net a “tremendous player.”
Advertisement
“Our plan is to keep it,” he said.
Is the lottery doing enough for the worst teams?
In between spasms of confusion about the Mavericks winning the lottery, another topic came to the forefront: Was this another reason for lottery reform?
The conversation, however, came from the other end of the spectrum. While there has been plenty said about how, and if, the NBA needs to fix tanking and create incentives in the draft for teams to do less of it, there’s also discussion about whether the league needs to make it easier on its worst teams in the lottery.
The Mavericks, a 39-win team, just won the lottery from the No. 11 slot. Last year, the Hawks won despite the 10th-highest odds. The New Orleans Pelicans won with the seventh-best odds in 2019, the first year of the new lottery weighting.
But beyond those teams winning it, the worst teams did not get high picks, either. The lottery, after all, is supposed to help the weakest teams get better. Is it doing enough in that regard? Of the 28 top-four picks under the new lottery system, 15 have gone to teams that did not have one of the four worst records in the league (or pick in that lottery slot) that year.
The three worst teams each get a 14 percent chance at the No. 1 pick, but is that too low? The worst team has not won the lottery in the seven drawings under the current system, though the second- and third-worst have won four times collectively. This year, the 17-win Utah Jazz will have the No. 5 pick, and the 18-win Wizards have the No. 6 pick despite being passed by the Jazz as the NBA’s worst team on the last day of the season. One idea posited was to bring those percentages higher, somewhere between the 14 percent now and the 25 percent the worst team had under the old odds.
No redraw necessary
This last note is only for the hardcore draft lottery nerds.
The NBA got pretty close to getting the null-void combination in the drawing for the No. 2 pick. Of the 1,001 combinations available in the lottery, one is not assigned to a team. That combination is 11, 12, 13, 14.
The first three numbers that came out in the drawing for the second pick: 12, 13, 11. If 14 came next, no team would have won. (They would just re-draw; you can’t just have no second pick.) Alas, there came the No. 5 for the Spurs.
(Photo: Jeff Haynes /NBAE via Getty Images)
