Someone Is Going To Get Screwed In Tonight's NBA Lottery And It Could Very Well Jumpstart Another Warriors Dynasty
Jennifer Pottheiser. Getty Images.There are always two sides to the NBA Lottery as a fan. When your favorite team isn't in it or you don't have great lottery odds, it's fairly stress free. I would say even enjoyable to some degree. But if your favorite team spent the entire year tanking in hopes or some Lottery luck, it's one of the most excruciating experiences you can have as an NBA fan. Your hopes and dreams and future of your franchise can be gone in a blink of an eye. We see it almost every year. Someone's going to get boned and all that losing will be for nothing. You'll end up picking like 5th or 6th and then in a few years you'll look back and see all the first four picks were studs.
In a previous era, you could count on David Stern to work his magic and rig this thing. That's a tale as old as time. Pick an era and I'm pretty sure you can find an example of David Stern's Lottery Shenanigans. We saw Adam Silver do that at times with the Pelicans winning the Zion sweepstakes despite only having a 6% chance to land the #1 pick. But they lost AD and the league had to throw them a bone. To put that into perspective for this year, that would be like the Raptors (7.5%) getting the #1 pick this year despite having 5 more wins than the closest tanking team.
So why is this important? Well just ask a Minnesota Timberwolves fan today how they feel. Like a bunch of dummies they decided to actually try at the end of the season and finished 5-5. All that did was lower their top 4 odds to 37.2% and their #1 pick odds to 9.0%. This is a big deal because as you'll recall, if their pick lands outside of the top 3 it heads to a certain team.
Did you enjoy the Warriors down year? If they were to land let's say the 4th pick, that gives them 4 and like 14 barring something crazy. You pair that with a young prospect in James Wiseman and a good sized contract like Andrew Wiggins for salary matching purposes and the Warriors could be back to ruining our basketball lives fairly quickly. That gives them the ammo to trade for a star level player. Not sure who that guy is, but it opens the door. That's terrifying when you remember Klay Thompson is also about to be back.
You're also pretty nervous as a Bulls/Magic fan I would imagine. After making the trade for Nikola Vucevic, the Bulls had to give up a top 4 protected pick to the Magic. There's a scenario where the Magic are walking away tonight with a top 3 pick as well as another top 10. For a team that's entering a rebuild, that's huge. The Bulls have around a 20% chance to end up top 4 where they can keep their pick, but could easily be jumped by either the Kings or Pelicans who also have that same percentage.
What I'm interested in is how much Adam Silver is going to decide to get involved and make sure GS has what they need to get back to being the GS we're used to. They are a major market, have one of the most marketable players and after going through a postseason with no Steph for the second year in a row, the league has probably had enough of that. Deep down I think every Wolves fan is expecting the worst because they're the Timberwolves and only bad things tend to happen to them no matter what. Their lives are already being haunted by Steph and the fact that they took 2 point guards right ahead of Curry in the 2009 Draft, and now here he is again all these years later probably about to steal their top 5 pick only to use it to bring in another star player. That's tough.
