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SALT LAKE CITY — The NBA lottery season is upon us once again. Tuesday night, 14 teams will be represented by coaches, general managers, fans and in some cases players, hoping to be the lucky charm for their team to land a top-three pick in June’s NBA draft. The 11 teams on the outside looking in will be left licking their wounds, wondering if their losing seasons benefited them much.
The Utah Jazz have the 12th best odds to move up in the lottery, with a 2.54 percent chance of moving into the top three. If the Jazz fail to move up, they’ll likely stay at 12, unless the Phoenix Suns (via the Washington Wizards) or the Chicago Bulls defy the odds and jump the Jazz in the lottery.
A common misconception about the lottery is that all 14 lottery selections are up for grabs on Tuesday night. The truth is only the top three spots can be won, and the rest of the picks are assigned by the teams' records the previous season.
For the past decade, the NBA and its fans have questioned whether the lottery does too much to encourage losing, forcing fans to suffer through several seasons of under-talented teams purposely losing games to better their draft odds, hoping to land a superstar.
The NBA, perhaps more than any other team sport, is impacted by the addition of a single top-tier talent to the roster, and superstars are traditionally found at the top of the draft.
Lottery defenders make a good argument that winning the lottery doesn’t yield the results that fans and management tend to believe. Since 1985, when the lottery was put in place, only two top overall picks have won a championship for the team that drafted them, coincidentally, it was the same team. The San Antonio Spurs' David Robinson and Tim Duncan became the first top overall picks to win a ring when the Spurs beat the New York Knicks in the 1999 finals. They won it again in 2003, and since Robinson retired, Duncan has gone on to win three more titles.
Lottery defenders are right, tanking does nothing to guarantee championships, but that doesn’t mean the lottery is working. More than a tanking problem, the NBA has a parity problem, and the lottery is doing little to fix it.
Since the year 2000, only five different states have seen an NBA championship. California has the most, with six total, comprised of five from the Los Angeles Lakers and one from the Golden State Warriors. Texas has five, with four belonging to San Antonio and one to Dallas. The Miami Heat have given the state of Florida three, while Detroit and Boston brought one each to Michigan and Massachusetts.
Of the 16 championships, 14 belong to warm-weather states, and eight belong to states with no state income tax.
To increase the odds of winning the lottery, teams aren’t just encouraged to be bad, they’re encouraged to be really bad. See the Philadelphia 76ers, who totaled an embarrassing 10 wins this season. This is the third consecutive season that the 76ers have won fewer than 20 games. As little dignity as there is in being that bad on purpose, it may be the franchise's only hope of netting a superstar without the benefit of lower income tax or year-round warm weather.
The same can be said for any franchise without those benefits, including the Jazz. The NBA needs to create better parity, and the lottery could play a major role.
The first problem I see with the lottery is that the term “lottery team” is too broad. Technically, the Jazz and 76ers are both lottery teams, but the Jazz won four times as many games this year as Philadelphia. The 76ers need more help to be competitive than the Jazz, but at this point, they likely can’t add enough talent through free agency to compete for the playoffs.
The problem for Philly, unless they get a once-in-a-generation player atop the lottery, see LeBron James or Tim Duncan, they likely won’t have the talent to claw their way out of the basement, or be attractive enough to lure quality players to sign with the team in the offseason.
The Jazz problem falls on the opposite side of the same coin. The Jazz are a good basketball team but have won too many games to give themselves a real chance to add top talent in the lottery. Because they can’t add enough talent in the lottery, they likely won’t be able to contend for a top playoff spot, which will prevent the ability to attract free agents.
The lottery has created a quagmire, where being good is punished by a lack of access to young talent, while getting young talent is a result of being incomprehensibly bad.
The teams best positioned in the lottery may be those with the middling lottery picks, not good enough to hurt their chances at getting the top talent in the draft, and not bad enough that the young talent is incapable of fixing the teams' problems.
To eliminate the issue, the NBA can use the value of the mid-lottery to the advantage of all the teams falling short of playoffs, and to increase the competitiveness of the league.
Instead of the current system, where teams outside of the top five picks face extraordinarily slim odds of adding upper-echelon talent, and the teams with those top five picks are so talent-depleted that the players they add will do little to solve the problem, the league should split the lottery into a tiered system.
If the teams that benefit most from the current system are those with say the sixth through ninth best odds of winning the lottery, capable of winning enough games to be semi-competitive in the regular season but needing an extra boost of young talent, the league should incentivize that caliber of team.
If the league were to split the lottery into tiers, with the seven worst teams sharing equal odds of landing picks one through seven, and into a second tier, with teams eight through 14 sharing equal odds of landing those picks, the NBA could eliminate embarrassing 10-win seasons that don’t serve the players, coaches or most importantly the fans buying the tickets.
The New York Knicks had the seventh worst record in the NBA this year, and won 32 games. If the tiered lottery system existed this season, the the 76ers could have built a team capable of winning 32 games or fewer, made for a better product, and still been in the running for a top overall pick.
On the flip side, the Jazz, who missed the playoffs by one game, wouldn’t have to look back at a competitive season and wonder if they should have played their best players less to artificially lose games to better their lottery odds. Instead, if they fought for a playoff berth but still fell short, the team could still potentially add a talent with picks eight through 14 that could take them to the next level of growth.
The NBA lottery was created in 1985 after the Houston Rockets were accused of purposely losing games to land the talents of Hakeem Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson. The Rockets, along with other teams, wanted to land top talent, and lost games in order to do so. Thirty-one years later, the NBA is encountering the same problem.
While a tiered system would be manipulated by front offices much like the current lottery system has been, it would prevent rewarding incompetence and punishing those teams trying to make the playoffs.
Until then Jazz fans, it may be better to be lucky, or just bad, than good.
