April 22, 2025
Patrick Gorski/Imagn Images
On May 12, the Sixers will either be rewarded with a top-six pick or leave the NBA Draft Lottery empty-handed.
Every day between the end of the Sixers' regular season and the NBA Draft Lottery on May 12, we will use Tankathon.com's famous simulation tool to run through the lottery 10 times. Over a 29-day period, we will collect a significant sample of possible outcomes and track those results as the Sixers wait to learn the fate of their own first-round pick.
The Sixers are entering the lottery with the fifth-best set of odds, but they will only keep their first-rounder if it falls in the top six slots due to an obligation to the Oklahoma City Thunder from a trade made nearly five years ago.
Let's get to today's simulations:
The outcomes of today's batch of 10 simulations:
• Simulation No. 1: 6th pick
• Simulation No. 2: 6th pick
• Simulation No. 3: 8th pick
• Simulation No. 4: 8th pick
• Simulation No. 5: 4th pick
• Simulation No. 6: 7th pick
• Simulation No. 7: 8th pick
• Simulation No. 8: 3rd pick
• Simulation No. 9: 7th pick
• Simulation No. 10: 2nd pick
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What is it about Charlotte winning the lottery time and time again in these simulations? No lottery victories for the Sixers in today's batch, but they did land with the No. 2 overall pick in the final drawing:
If this happens, prepare for weeks of debates about whether or not the Sixers should take Rutgers guard Dylan Harper, the consensus No. 2 prospect in this year's class.
The Sixers only have an 8.7 percent chance of their pick dropping down two spots to No. 8 -- comfortably out of its protected range -- but it happened three times out of 10 today.
Being leapfrogged by Brooklyn and Toronto would be particularly brutal.
The cumulative results of this exercise so far:
| Draft Pick | Simulation Outcomes | Simulation Outcome Percentage | Actual Percentage Odds |
| 1 | 11 | 12.2% | 10.5% |
| 2 | 12 | 12.3% | 10.5% |
| 3 | 6 | 6.6% | 10.6% |
| 4 | 6 | 6.6% | 10.5% |
| 5 | 2 | 2.2% | 2.2% |
| 6 | 20 | 22.2% | 19.6% |
| 7 | 25 | 27.7% | 26.7% |
| 8 | 7 | 7.7% | 8.7% |
| 9 | 1 | 1.1% | 0.6% |
| Keep or Lose Pick? | Simulation Outcomes | Simulation Outcome Percentage | Actual Percentage Odds |
| Kept Pick | 57 | 63.3% | 64.0% |
| Lost Pick | 33 | 36.6% | 36.0% |
MORE: Quentin Grimes year-in-review
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