May 19, 2015
The day after this year’s eventful trade deadline, Sam Hinkie talked a lot about uncertainty, and specifically how he wasn’t afraid of it. For whatever reason, those comments have stuck with me ever since. Today is finally when most of that uncertainty becomes, well, certain. For the second straight season, the Sixers are in the lottery, and more importantly, they made a conscious decision as an organization to play that lottery hard. If this whole event were a casino, the Sixers aren’t sitting at the penny slots. They’re playing blackjack at the high-roller table.
8:30 p.m. is zero hour. Still in the beginning stages of a rebuilding project grand in scope, the NBA Draft Lottery is the Sixers’ Super Bowl.
The NBA released a thorough guide to the lottery procedure. Here’s the basic gist for the uninitiated: Ping-Pong balls numbered 1-14 are placed into the machine, which spits out four of them (1,001 possible combinations, if you’re not a math whiz like me). If you’re the lucky owner of that combination, congrats, you have the first-overall pick in the draft! Repeat the process as many times as necessary until you get two more teams, who receive the second and third picks, respectively. The rest of the draft order is determined by ascending order of record. That means the Minnesota Timberwolves, who own the league’s worst record, can pick no lower than fourth. The Sixers can select no lower than sixth. Here’s what everything looks like in chart form (sorry it's a little small, here's another link):
Just in case you were confused, all of this good stuff takes place in another room just prior to the national broadcast. Deputy commissioner Mark Tatum, who is NOT Adam Silver, then reads the results to the rest of the world on ESPN.
Nerlens Noel and his flattop will be dressed to the nines, and they’ll be representing the local club when the picks are revealed. Overall, the freewheeling Sixers have three potential selections at stake in tonight’s lottery drawing. Let’s go through all of the scenarios of each pick individually, starting with the one we know they’re going to get.
After the 0-17 start, it looked like a foregone conclusion that the Sixers would have the league’s worst record. When you also remember that they closed the season by losing ten consecutive games, it’s kind of amazing that they only finished with the third-worst record. Nobody was #goink to predict how bad the New York Knicks and Minnesota Timberwolves would end up being.
(By the way, both New York and Minnesota voted for lottery reform before the season. I feel like this should at least be mentioned on the broadcast.)
The rest of it is just numbers, odds, and straightforward stuff. The Sixers possess pretty much a 50-50 shot at a Top-3 pick and only a four percent chance at falling all the way back to the sixth position. The most likely scenario? Fifth, which would happen over a quarter of the time. Needless to say, there’s a pretty dramatic difference from the second-best odds like they had last year to the third-best this year.
At the very least, guess who is going to have an extremely uncomfortable couple of minutes later tonight?
tfw you root for a lakers win but deep down you hate yourself for it pic.twitter.com/gOMt0KFMlY
— Kurt (@Kurt_BSH) March 31, 2015
Despite the potential boom-or-bust nature of lottery night for the Lakers, Mitch Kupchak still has to feel pretty good about his odds: The Lakers keep the pick 82.8 percent of the time. Heck, 12 percent of the time they get the chance to likely select Kentucky’s Karl-Anthony Towns first overall. This could be an awesome night for one of the league’s two most storied franchises. And yet…
Man, oh, man, would coughing up the sixth pick in the draft be a disaster (for them, of course; it would practically be cause for a parade here). The Lakers have the potential to finish the worst season in franchise history with nothing to show for their trouble. There’s no team that potentially has more to lose at the top of the draft. In the Sixers’ worst-case scenario, they pick sixth and probably take whomever is left of Kristaps Porzingis, Justise Winslow, Emmanuel Mudiay, Stanley Johnson, and Mario Hezonja. There are very likely some all-stars in that group. In the Lakers’ doomsday scenario, they don’t get anybody.
Remember, the Sixers acquired this pick from Phoenix in the Michael Carter-Williams trade. The Suns initially received the pick in exchange for Steve Nash (think long and hard about who won that deal). It’s Top-5 protected this year, which means at least two teams would have to jump the Lakers into the Top-3 and push them back to six for the Sixers to get the pick. The odds aren’t great, but 17.2 percent is still 17.2 percent.
I tend to think of this pick as insurance. If the lottery gets wonky and two long shots vault into the Top-3, the Sixers will most likely be pushed back to the fifth slot. If one of those teams isn’t the Lakers, the Sixers will pick sixth as well. It’s not foolproof, but Hinkie at least has some of his bases covered now.
(Sorry if there's any confusion. The rows from left to right would read: 1-3 pick, 10th pick. 11th pick, etc.)
Despite trying to make the playoffs until the bitter end (precisely between Game 81 and Game 82), the Miami Heat simply ran out of gas without Chris Bosh. Luckily for them, they’re probably going to keep their first-rounder for at least another year. There’s only a nine percent chance that Miami’s Top-10 protected pick moves to the Sixers this season.
This is the pick that the Sixers acquired from Minnesota for one year of Thaddeus Young, which is malpractice on Flip Saunders’ part. For it to convey this year, one of Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Utah, or Indiana would have to jump Miami into the Top-3. If that happened, the Sixers would also pick 11th.
There’s a lot of excitement tonight for the possibility of #OneSixEleven (real odds of that happening: .028 percent). As someone who has a lot of brand loyalty to ESPN’s mock lottery machine, I decided to run the simulation one time and see how things shook out in my world. Here’s how it looked:
If the Sixers ended up selecting third (and to steal a term from Hinkie, having the “optionality” that comes along with it) and only seeing Towns and Jahlil Okafor off the board, I think they’d probably be pretty satisfied. The odds are against them landing a second pick, but quite a lot is in play tonight.
The thing about uncertainty is that you never know.
Follow Rich on Twitter: @rich_hofmann
