The draft lottery is the weighted drawing that determines the order of the first picks in the NBA Draft among the teams that missed the playoffs.
The draft lottery decides who picks first, by chance weighted toward failure. The fourteen teams that miss the playoffs enter a drawing for the top selections, with odds tied to their records; under the current format the three worst teams each carry a fourteen percent chance at the first pick, and only the first four picks are drawn before the rest fall into record order.
The league adopted the lottery in 1985, when the first drawing delivered the first pick, used on Patrick Ewing, to New York, and flattened the odds in 2019 after an era of extreme losing made the old weights an incentive problem. The enveloped ceremony, the frozen envelope folklore of 1985, and the televised countdown of team logos give the lottery a game show gravity no other administrative process in sports matches.
The lottery is the hinge between this category's two behaviours: hope and tanking. It exists to help bad teams without guaranteeing that losing pays, and every reform since 1985 has tightened that balance. Draft quizzes treat lottery results as facts of the same weight as the picks themselves, because for the franchises involved, the drawing is the season's most consequential night.
In use"They finished with the worst record and still fell to fifth in the draft lottery."