It’s a very bad time to be the worst team in the NBA

After a season of toil and struggle, you finally did it: you finished with the worst record in the NBA. Visions of the No. 1 pick, the glittering crown jewel of the draft class, dominate your thoughts.

But will that pick actually be yours? The answer very much depends on when your team occupies pro basketball’s basement. (Yes, there are a lot of unsold Andrea Bargnani jerseys down here. Take one! Take four if you want!)

Congratulations! These are the only two seasons in NBA (OK, technically it was the BAA back then) where having the worst record absolutely, without limitation, guaranteed you the first pick in the draft. You did it!

The lottery hadn’t been instituted yet, and draft picks were assigned in reverse order of record. But there was one catch: territorial picks, which allowed any team to forfeit its first-round pick, no matter where it was in the order, to claim any player within a 50-mile radius of the team’s home arena. That rule allowed Philadelphia to give up the third pick to claim Wilt Chamberlain in the 1959 Draft; the Lakers used a territorial pick in 1962 on Gail Goodrich even though they had the second-best record in the league.

The NBA didn’t count those territorial picks within the draft order, though, so I guess you can take some comfort that you still technically have the first pick even if the player you wanted isn’t there? Yeah, you’re right. Not all that comforting.

For nearly two decades, the NBA’s lottery system was extremely simple: you took the worst team from the East and the worst team from the West, and flipped a coin to decide which one of them got the first pick. (Loser got the second pick). Those coin flips were what made Bill Walton a Blazer instead of a Sixer, Ralph Sampson a Rocket instead of a Pacer, and Magic Johnson a Laker instead of a Bull.

The worst team in the league won the coin flip in 10 of these 19 seasons. This was a reasonably fair way to award the first pick, though it lacked the drama of some almost-good enough-for-the-playoffs team leapfrogging to the top. Worst case, you’re still in position to draft a really good player.

Worried that the coin flip approach pushed franchises to tank hard, the NBA adopted a lottery system where every team that missed the playoffs had an equal chance of winning the first-overall pick. At the time they implemented this system, only seven teams had a shot at winning the lottery.

The 1988 Clippers were the only franchise to win the first pick with the worst record under this system. The 1985 Knicks had the third-worst record the year before when they won the right to draft Patrick Ewing.

It’s a truly awful time for you to be the worst team in the NBA, when the league doesn’t even slightly improve your odds in acknowledgment of your accomplishment. You’re probably far worse than the team that just missed the playoffs, and nobody is coming to help you.

This season had the same lottery structure as ‘85-88, but there were nine teams that missed the playoffs and thus had equal odds of winning the top selection. That meant the 15-win Heat and the 40-win Bullets were on the same lottery footing, the most extreme and hilarious anti-tanking system possible. The Kings won this lottery, and then they spent the pick on Pervis Ellison, who played 34 games with them and got a not-very-nice nickname from Danny Ainge before Sacramento traded him.

The 1990 draft was the first time the lottery odds were weighted in favor of the worst teams, though, as you’ll see below, the difference for the team with the absolute worst record wasn’t all that pronounced. (It was much less pleasant for the best non-playoff team, which saw its chances at the first pick drop from 11 percent in 1989 to 1.5 percent in 1990.)

This system gave us the biggest lottery upset in NBA history when the 41-41 Orlando Magic got the first pick in 1993 despite a 1.52 chance of that prize. The 11-71 Mavericks dropped all the way to fourth. If you can avoid it, don’t be the worst team in the NBA in the early ‘90s. The fashion is questionable at best, and your lottery odds are fairly unpleasant.

This is the lottery you’re probably most used to, where the NBA takes 14 ping-pong balls and draws four of them, and through preassigned math gives the worst team 25 percent of the possible combinations. It took a decade for the worst team to get the first pick under this system, but the Cavaliers got LeBron James out of it, so I guess it was fine?

For the last four drafts under this system, the worst team won the first pick. For the 10 before that, neither the worst team or the second-worst team got it. Ostensibly, the modifications to this system were — you guessed it — to discourage tanking. I suspect the Timberwolves, who won 17 games in 2011 but lost the first pick to the Cavaliers by way of the 32-50 Clippers, didn’t need the lesson.

Still, so long as you’re mentally prepared for shocking disappointment, this is a pretty good time for you to be the worst team in the NBA!

Worried again that teams had incentive to tank, this time because of the weighted lottery system, the NBA lowered the odds of the worst team getting the first pick from 25 percent to 14 percent. Those were also the odds assigned to the second- and third-worst teams.

That’s right: the NBA has found a way, through the dark power of math, to put you, the worst team in the league, in a worse position than the old envelope system. I’m sorry you find yourself here.

We can definitively say 1989 is the absolute crummiest time to be the worst team in the NBA. Under no circumstances should you travel back to this specific year in basketball history and be terrible.

But 2019 isn’t all that much better, either. Sorry, tankers.