Lo and behold, it turns out that something with a “lottery” at the heart of its concept leaves itself wide open to all manner of conspiracy.
The NBA Draft Lottery happened Monday evening, and the Dallas Mavericks walked away with the ultimate prize: the top overall pick of the 2025 NBA Draft.
That result has left fans voicing frustration with the league — including some echoes of the dreaded “boycott” word.
To start at the beginning: The “draft lottery” is a concept that NBA bigwigs concocted to dissuade teams from “tanking” (intentionally losing games by holding out healthy players, playing worse players bigger minutes, etc.) to procure a higher draft pick.
According to the league, the “system will level the odds at the top of the NBA Draft Lottery so that the teams with the three worst regular-season records will each have a 14 percent chance of winning the lottery. In the pre-2019 structure, the top seed had a 25 percent of winning the lottery, the second seed had a 19.9 percent and the third seed had a 15.6 percent.”
The actual process is a convoluted affair involving 14 ping-pong balls being drawn in combinations of four. There are 1,001 different possible combinations that will determine the draft order, and the Mavs had a lowly 1.8 percent chance of getting the right combination to walk away with the top overall pick.
(In fact, the odds are even half of that, because Dallas had to win a coin flip with the Chicago Bulls to get exclusive rights to the 11th-best odds in the draft. Both the Bulls and Mavs finished with identical 39-43 records this past season, which was good for the 11th/12th spots in the draft lottery.)
That alone wasn’t enough to spark outrage. There have actually been three teams in history with lower odds that won the draft lottery before, as noted by ESPN; the Orlando Magic won in 1993 with 1.52 percent odds, while the 2014 Cleveland Cavaliers and 2008 Bulls both won the lottery with 1.7 percent odds.
The outrage stemmed from two things.
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First, the rest of the top three picks rounded out with the San Antonio Spurs at two, and the Philadelphia 76ers at three. Not a single one of the four worst records last year — and therefore, theoretically, the four best odds to win the draft lottery — snagged a top-three pick.
Adding insult, many fans pointed out that the draft lottery wasn’t doing its job of re-stocking the worst teams when the Mavs (they deploy three future Hall of Fame players), the Spurs (they already have back-t0-back rookie of the year winners) and Philadelphia (another All-Star laden team in a big market, like Dallas) were the ones benefitting.
Second, the Mavs were involved in one of the most talked-about trades in NBA history — and not for good reasons.
In February, the team traded Slovenian wunderkind Luka Doncic for aging-yet-brittle star Anthony Davis and some other parts, a move that gutted the Dallas fan base, while simultaneously re-energizing the Los Angeles Lakers, the team that acquired Doncic.
(The trade was lambasted enough that apparently even President Donald Trump talked about the trade.)
The move was so poorly received by Dallas fans that it had an actual financial impact on the team.
The Mavericks are expected to lose “dozens of millions” in revenue this season after trading Luka Dončić to LA.
“It’s a decision that probably will cost the franchise nine figures over the next several years.”
(via @espn) pic.twitter.com/eqyiDfAiha
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) April 9, 2025
The perfect salve — or make-do for the more conspiratorial-minded? A gift-wrapped number-one overall pick in a year in which Duke’s Cooper Flagg, seen as a generational talent and easily one of the best domestic prospects in years, is available.
And those conspiratorial minds won out, at least on X:
Ratings were down, so the NBA gave Luka to the Lakers, and then gave the #1 pick in the NBA Draft to Dallas as compensation. Disgusting corruption.
And you can’t even argue it. The odds are too low of all of this lining up the way it has.
Completely rigged.
— Mitch (@MitchCK_) May 12, 2025
One post on social media platform X, with over 14,000 likes and 500,000 views, claimed that “you can’t even argue it. The odds are too low of all this lining up the way it has.”
(Indeed, it’s a statistical anomaly for none of the three best teams with the best odds to even be in the top three picks.)
“Ratings were down, so the NBA gave Luka to the Lakers, and then gave the #1 pick in the NBA Draft to Dallas as compensation,” the X post stated. “Disgusting corruption.”
It added: “Completely rigged.”
Other social media users were threatening more drastic action.
I’ve been trying so hard not to boycott the NBA… I love basketball. The NBA was a huge part of my childhood and I’m not even American, but the “lottery” today might be the last straw. This is so rigged. It’s not worth my time or my money.
— Jonny Linehan (@jlinehan9) May 12, 2025
“I’ve been trying so hard not to boycott the NBA,” one X post with over 3,000 likes and 100,000 views stated. “I love basketball. The NBA was a huge part of my childhood and I’m not even American, but the ‘lottery’ today might be the last straw.
“This is so rigged. It’s not worth my time or my money.”
It doesn’t take much effort to find a deluge of similarly angry remarks across all social media.
This entire debacle — speculative frustration or not — is the last thing a league that’s already struggling with a myriad of PR issues needs.
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