The NBA Draft Lottery is Tuesday night. It’s a big event in the midst of the league’s playoffs, with 14 teams hoping to get lucky and pick at or near the top of the June 22 draft. Pingpong balls will determine who picks when and who can nab whom.
Everything you need to know about the NBA draft lottery
How to watch it, how it works, who’s got a shot, and who the winner is likely to pick.
When is the 2017 NBA draft lottery?
Tuesday, 8 p.m. ET.
Streaming and TV channel for the lottery
ESPN on your television. WatchESPN on your computer, or the WatchESPN app on a smartphone or tablet.
NBA draft lottery odds, 2017
Lottery odds are determined by the league standings. The worse a team does, the better a chance it has to wind up with the top pick, and that principle holds throughout the lottery. Every team that misses the playoffs (so 14 of them) gets lottery pingpong balls and has at least a sliver’s chance to pick first overall.
The full list of lottery odds is available here. Each team’s percentage chances of getting a top-five pick stack up like this:
Team | 1st pick | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th |
|---|
There are a few little quirks here. If the Lakers fall out of the top three, they have to give their pick to the 76ers. (There’s a 53 percent chance that happens.)
Also, the Pelicans will have to give their pick to the Kings if they don’t leap into the top three. (There’s almost no chance that happens, so the Kings should be good here.)
If the Kings finish ahead of the Sixers, Philadelphia can swap forward. (This probably won’t come up either.)
How the NBA lottery actually works
It’s a little confusing at first, but the process is straightforward.
There are 14 lottery teams, and 14 pingpong balls are put into a machine that makes them bounce and fly around. They’re mixed for 20 seconds, and a first ball gets drawn. Then they’re mixed for 10 seconds and another ball gets drawn, and so on and so on. Eventually, four balls form a numerical combination, and the team that owns that combination gets the first pick in the draft. That’s the process for the top three slots, and then the draft order is determined by the standings, in reverse.
There are 1,001 possible pingpong ball combinations. The way teams get better lottery odds is by having more combinations assigned to them. That’s the primary way bad teams are advantaged in what’s otherwise an entirely random exercise. The other way is that teams can only fall so far. Lottery rules guarantee a top-four pick for the team that finishes with the worst record in the NBA, for instance.
The team that finishes with the best record in the lottery — i.e., the best team left out of the playoffs — has just a microscopic chance at the first overall or a top-three pick. But there’s less randomization the farther down you go. The Heat, for instance, are almost certainly going to wind up with the 14th overall pick. They also had the 14th-worst record in the league this season. They could jump into the top three, but their odds of moving from No. 14 are less than 2 percent.
Wait, why do the Celtics have the best odds?
Short answer: because the Nets messed up.
Long answer: because the Nets really messed up.
In the summer of 2013, Brooklyn made a splash trade with Boston. The Nets landed veterans Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce (along with Jason Terry and D.J. White) from the Celtics. They gave up Gerald Wallace, Kris Humphries, MarShon Brooks, Kris Joseph, Keith Bogans, and unprotected first-round picks in 2014, 2016, and 2018. It was a haul.
The Nets did one other thing, though. They gave Boston the choice to swap first-round picks in 2017, so if the Celtics had a worse pick, they could simply trade places. Fast-forward four years, and the Nets finished the 2016-17 season 20-62, while the Celtics had the best record in the Eastern Conference. So, yeah, Boston will swap.
“Today, the basketball gods smiled on the Nets,” team owner Mikhail Prokhorov said upon acquiring Garnett and Pierce. The quote hasn’t aged well.
Who are the top NBA draft prospects this year?
See each team’s odds of winning the 2017 NBA draft lottery, and everything else you need to know. Here are several scenarios for how it could shake out:
Two point guards are showing up at the top of most mock drafts: Washington’s Markelle Fultz and UCLA’s Lonzo Ball. Fultz is regarded as a higher-upside athlete, while Ball gets lauded for his outrageous ball-handling and passing ability. Both should turn into excellent NBA players, and they’ve got a little rivalry going already.
There are some other names you should definitely know. Kansas forward Josh Jackson will go early because of his athletic potential and great defense, even though he was uneven on offense during his lone college season. Duke small forward Jayson Tatum really came on at the end of the college season, leading the Blue Devils to an ACC tournament win before an early March Madness exit. A few other point guards, Kentucky’s Malik Monk and NC State’s Dennis Smith Jr., are ultra-athletic.
Here is an entire mock draft, just for you. One thing you will not see in it is classic post-presence big men near the top of the draft. Arizona power forward Lauri Markkanen is a 7-footer, but he’s going to go early because he can shoot and handle the ball, not because he’s going to pound around the basket all night. Gonzaga’s Zach Collins, who came off the bench as a freshman last season, might be the first center picked, and he might not come off the board until somewhere around the 10th pick.
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