The NBA Draft Lottery is a weird, random, awesome spectacle

For me, the NBA Draft Lottery is appointment viewing. Every year -- even when my Knicks don’t have a pick -- I watch this event.

Calling it an “event” is strange, because pretty much nothing happens. By the time the cameras turn on, the results are already in. The ping-pong balls have already bounced. The accountant from Richguy, Richguy and Wealthman knows who has the No. 1 pick, as does whoever is in charge of stuffing the pretty placards with team logos on them into the big envelopes. But I watch.

Because even though this is somebody reading the results of a previously rendered random draw stretched out over a half hour and several commercial breaks, the NBA Draft Lottery is perhaps the best TV the NBA makes all year -- including the, you know, exciting basketball.

When leagues have a draft, there is a very good reason a guy has to get on a stage and say the name of the person who just got picked: Every team is trying to make spur-of-the-moment decisions about who they select, and it helps to have somebody officially announce who is and isn’t available. Sure, it’s 2015 and they could do it by just having every team turn on push notifications for Adrian Wojnarowski tweets, but you can see why they once legitimately needed it to be done this way.

With the NBA Draft Lottery, there is no good reason for any of this.

There is no need for somebody to say the picks in order. They could just flash the entire order on the screen, and they would get the job done.There is no need for the people on stage. These people have no effect on the proceedings. They are there solely so we can watch their reactions.

This entire TV production is all just for show.

But it’s a spectacular show. It starts slow, as the teams with low odds hear their names early, as expected. There’s stir of surprise and confusion when a team’s spot gets skipped, ensuring they’ll be among the top-three picks. The stakes are building, mounting, rising as we methodically crawl toward the top three.

There is a commercial break. We sit and stew. Then, with a few crisp tears of paper, we find out who gets No. 1.

Basketball is a complicated sport. We now have detailed data on every player action, every motion, every shot, that can tell us exactly what players are good at and how good they are at it. And yet still, there are vast disagreements and debates about how to best play basketball. And with the complicated nature of the NBA’s salary cap, there are huge complexities that make assembling a team to best play basketball very, very difficult.

For one night, all that goes out the dang window. The men in suits are helpless. There is no strategy they can use to make things work better. Their only weapons are hope and luck.

One team’s representative shrugs his shoulders. The other goes wild, celebrating the fact that they have been blessed by the odds. After minutes of nervous, televised waiting, there’s an enormous instant of elation, the pain of an entire crappy season of basketball washed away, validated in a second.

As a Knicks fan, I have spent days, weeks and months quivering in anticipation of that moment. Sure, the NBA could just do everything behind closed doors and tell us the results. But instead, they turned something completely unnecessary into a vehicle for jubilation -- or heartbreak.