The NBA draft lottery was introduced after the 1985 season and was introduced as a concept to discourage teams from “tanking” which is intentionally losing games in order to get a better draft pick.
Instead, the NBA draft lottery features the 14 teams that don’t make it to the playoffs, and have a random drawing to decide the first fourteen picks of the draft.
The teams with the three worst records in the NBA all have the best odds at landing the number 1 overall pick, and the rest of the lottery odds are determined by team records.
However, there have been conspiracy theories over the past 40 years that the NBA draft lottery is “rigged” and that the NBA actually chooses who will land the number 1 overall pick, instead of randomly selecting it like how the lottery is supposed to work.
The first example would be in the first ever draft lottery, where the New York Knicks would land the number 1 overall pick and draft future Hall of Famer Center Patrick Ewing out of Georgetown.
The Knicks are the biggest market team in the NBA, which means that the NBA is much more profitable when they are a good team, and the theory here is that they used a “frozen envelope” where they froze the Knicks envelope before putting it in with the rest that way then NBA commissioner David Stern, could easily identify the envelope due to it’s cold temperature and wait to pull it out until it was time to reveal the first overall pick.
The next example would be the 2003 draft lottery where Cleveland Cavaliers won the 1st pick, landing superstar Lebron James, who grew up in Akron Ohio.
In James’s stint with the team from 2003-2010, he won 2 MVPs with the team and led them to multiple deep playoff runs including an appearance to the NBA finals in 2007, and even led the Cavaliers to a franchise best 66 wins in the 2008-09 season.
Many believe that the league orchestrated this intentionally to send James, a future superstar, to his hometown team to make the league more marketable as James had the potential to bring Cleveland a championship.
Then there’s an arguably even more egregious case of the Chicago Bulls landing the 1st overall pick in the 2008 draft lottery despite only having a 1.7% chance to do so, and beating out the Miami Heat, who had a 25% chance of winning the 1st overall pick.
Who was the prize of the 2008 NBA draft?
That would be Point Guard Derrick Rose out of Memphis and who was born and raised in the city of Chicago.
Rose would go on to become the youngest MVP in league history and lead Chicago to multiple winning seasons. This is yet another example of the NBA possibly orchestrating the top draft prospect to go there hometown team this time to an even more extreme level, as it was highly unlikely that the Bulls would be able to jump up all the way to number 1.
There’s also the cases of the 2011 and 2019 NBA draft lotteries.
In 2011, the Cleveland Cavaliers won the number 1 overall pick the year after losing Lebron James the previous in free agency, then ending up selecting Point Guard Kyrie Irving out of Duke.
And in 2019, the New Orleans Pelicans won the lottery right after all star player Anthony Davis requested a trade from the franchise.
The Pelicans would then end up selecting Power Forward Zion Williamson out of Duke.
Both of these situations were seen by many as intentional moves by the NBA to offset the losses of their superstar players, and to give the franchises something to look forward to for the future.
And then most recently there is the 2025 draft lottery where the Dallas Mavericks were able to “capture the Flagg,” winning the 1st pick despite having 1.8% odds to do so and will likely select Forward Cooper Flagg out of Duke.
This was after in February of 2025, the Mavericks made arguably the worst trade in the history of sport where they traded there franchise superstar Point Guard Luka Doncic, who had made the all NBA first team the previous 5 seasons, and had said multiple times that he didn’t want to leave the franchise, for a return that a lot of people felt was underwhelming.
Mavericks GM Nico Harrison received lots of backlash for making the move and even including “fire Nico” chants in Dallas in a game against the LA Lakers (the team Doncic was traded to) in April.
Many people believe that the NBA wanted to give the 1st pick to the Mavericks in order to keep a superstar player in a big market like Dallas and to compensate the franchise for trading Doncic.
Even Lebron James believes the draft lottery is rigged.
When James was on the Pat McAfee show on March 31st, 2025, he said “during the ball drop, the lottery drop, Cleveand got the No.1 pick? I just don’t think that… what a coincidence!? Let’s keep Lebron home, Patrick Ewing to the [New York] Knicks, Derrick Rose to the [Chicago] Bulls, I understand the assignment.”
Another thing worth noting is that it has been seven years since the team with the worst record in the NBA got the 1st overall pick, that being the Phoenix Suns in 2018.
In fact, for the past 3 years, the team with the worst record in the NBA has fallen from the 1st overall pick to the 5th overall pick.
It doesn’t exactly seem to be a coincidence that those teams were the Utah Jazz in 2025, and the Detroit Pistons in 2024 and 2023.
The NBA doesn’t seem to want the smaller market teams to end up with the top draft pick in the NBA draft.
In conclusion, is the NBA draft lottery rigged?
Is it real?
There’s no way to ever know for sure but the important thing to remember is that the NBA is a business, and at the end of the day every business is going to do whatever they can to make money, which in the NBA would include sending there top draft pick to whatever team will make them the most money.
