May 03, 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: 5th pick
• Simulation No. 2: 7th pick
• Simulation No. 3: 5th pick
• Simulation No. 4: 7th pick
• Simulation No. 5: 1st pick
• Simulation No. 6: 1st pick
• Simulation No. 7: 7th pick
• Simulation No. 8: 5th pick
• Simulation No. 9: 6th pick
• Simulation No. 10: 7th pick
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Of course, the Sixers' two lottery victories in this batch are the best simulations, but after only sticking at No. 5 overall on five occasions in the first 190 of our simulations, it happened three times today. This is unlikely because it requires no movement from slots No. 5 through No. 14, like this:
The only lottery I can think of which featured no movement at all: 2016, which landed the Sixers the No. 1 overall pick to select Ben Simmons.
One of the four simulations in which the Sixers dropped to No. 7 and lost their pick included two potential Western Conference powerhouses jumping to the top of the draft order:
Cooper Flagg in Houston and Dylan Harper in San Antonio would be tons of fun.
The cumulative results of this exercise so far:
| Draft Pick | Simulation Outcomes | Simulation Outcome Percentage | Actual Percentage Odds |
| 1 | 26 | 13.0% | 10.5% |
| 2 | 22 | 11.0% | 10.5% |
| 3 | 15 | 7.5% | 10.6% |
| 4 | 25 | 12.5% | 10.5% |
| 5 | 8 | 4.0% | 2.2% |
| 6 | 35 | 17.5% | 19.6% |
| 7 | 53 | 26.5% | 26.7% |
| 8 | 15 | 7.5% | 8.7% |
| 9 | 1 | 0.5% | 0.6% |
| Keep or Lose Pick? | Simulation Outcomes | Simulation Outcome Percentage | Actual Percentage Odds |
| Kept Pick | 131 | 65.5% | 64.0% |
| Lost Pick | 69 | 34.5% | 36.0% |
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