A Brief History of NBA Draft Lottery Conspiracies, Part One
As I’ve written before in Undrafted, I love a good conspiracy theory. It’s not that I always believe them, but conspiracy theories usually serve as interesting windows into how people think about power. They also reflect a general skepticism about the Conventional Wisdom or the Official Narrative, which I think is pretty healthy. Often, the dismissiveness towards things labelled “conspiracy theories” stems from a misplaced faith in the people in power to be upstanding and honest — a faith that deserves to be smashed to smithereens. It’s not an accident that many ideas that were once dismissed as “conspiracy theories,” like the idea that the FBI was sabotaging the Civil Rights Movement or that the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq was fabricated, are now accepted as obviously and empirically true.
So I think it’s worth taking conspiracy theories seriously, and perhaps nothing in the sports world has attracted more conspiracy theories than the NBA Draft Lottery.
When the Dallas Mavericks won the lottery last month, earning the #1 overall pick and the right to draft Cooper Flagg, it set off a lot of conspiracy theory alarm bells. The Mavs have been at the center of a fury of speculation ever since they rocked the NBA world by trading Luka Doncic to LA, and the draft lottery was just the latest twist in that story. After all, if not for that trade, there’s a good chance Dallas would not have even been IN the lottery, and the opportunity to draft Flagg – who most scouts expect to be a superstar — fundamentally changes the calculus around that trade.
So, of course, a lot of fans immediately assumed the lottery had been rigged. Like so many conspiracy theories, the logic governing it was not entirely clear, and changed depending on who you talked to: Was this part of a bribe for sending Luka to the Lakers? Was the NBA trying to bail out Nico Harrison, who Dallas fans have wanted fired since the trade? Or was it part of some plot to save basketball in Dallas on behalf of the Adelson family?
Of course, as always happens when there are conspiracy theories, the smug and smarmy Serious People rushed to insist that nobody could really BELIEVE such theories: The NBA CAN’T rig the lottery! That would be FRAUD! Why would they even want to? You have to be CRAZY to think this would happen…
And, as I hinted at above, I just can’t stand this kind of logic. My instinct is generally to assume that the people in charge are lying to me, and I truly cannot understand the people who rush to defend the powers that be in situations like this. Doesn’t this feel like QUITE the coincidence to you?
But I can feel your skepticism. So in the interest of thoroughness, I decided I’d look through the history of NBA Draft lottery conspiracy theories, and see what I can deduce about the 2025 draft…
1985
Accusations that the draft lottery was rigged began on Mother’s Day 40 years ago, with the very first NBA lottery. It was introduced that year to combat the tanking that had consumed the league the year before, with so many teams, especially the Houston Rockets, seemingly losing games on purpose at the end of the year to ensure the right to draft Hakeem Olajuwon. Now the #1 pick would no longer be awarded to the team with the worst record1; instead, all the teams that missed the playoffs would be tossed in a hopper and have an equal shot at the first pick.
The whole thing actually looked pretty amateurish:
Of course, the pick ended up going to the New York Knicks, fueling theories that the lottery was rigged to favor the franchise in the country’s biggest media market. People have all kinds of theories about frozen envelopes, or crushed corners, and they pore over video of that lottery like the Zapruder film.
But if you actually watch that video, the thing that stands out is the lofty expectations around that year’s #1 pick, Patrick Ewing. When NBC’s Pat O’Brien introduces the lottery, he quotes a league executive saying: “We’ve had the Mikan Era, the Russell Era, the Kareem Era — now we’ll have the Ewing Era.” Patrick Ewing is a Hall of Famer who had a great career, but there’s no way he could live up to that hype. In fact, the player who would define the next era of the NBA had already been drafted: Michael Jordan was selected third overall the year before.
This gets at a problem with a lot of the draft conspiracies. Namely, that it’s incredibly hard to predict the long-term impact of amateur players, even great ones like Ewing, and so any attempt to tilt the scales of the league through the draft lottery is going to be very imprecise. As good as Ewing turned out to be, he never won an MVP or led the Knicks past Jordan’s Bulls, and was not the kind of league-altering star that many anticipated.
This doesn’t mean the lottery wasn’t rigged — some argue that David Stern just didn’t want a future star to end up in some comparatively small market, like Cleveland or Portland. But as we will see, there is actually just as much, if not more, evidence that the NBA uses the lottery to favor small market teams.
1992-93
The next big twist in the lottery drama came in the early 1990s, when the Orlando Magic, just three years into their existence as an NBA franchise, won the lottery in back-to-back seasons. The first one landed them the right to select Shaquille O’Neal, the biggest college star since Ewing (and would go on to a pro career that more closely matched the draft hype). Then the next season, they drafted Chris Webber, who they immediately traded for Penny Hardaway and three future first-round picks.
Pairing Shaq and Penny turned the expansion Magic into a title contender overnight: They made the playoffs in their first year together, and the NBA Finals the next year. They won 60 games in their third season (despite Shaq missing a third of the year with an injury), and only lost one playoff game before running into Jordan’s Bulls, and getting swept by the greatest team ever.
The Magic’s success illustrated how the lottery could immediately turn a team around — as well as the luck inherent in the process. By the early 1990s, the NBA had already changed the lottery, giving teams weighted odds based on the previous season’s standings, but Orlando was still able to win two years in a row, despite having the worst odds going into the 1993 draft (the Magic had improved by 20 wins in Shaquille O’Neal’s first season). This led many to suspect foul play, something that Shaq himself just playfully boosted on a podcast:
Of course, you will likely notice that the logic here is the exact inverse of the logic applied to the ‘85 draft. In that case, the lottery was supposedly manipulated to help a big market team; here, it was supposedly rigged to help a small-market expansion team. It is theoretically possible that the league’s needs changed so much in eight years that the commissioner went from favoring major markets to small markets, but it seems more likely that these outcomes were just quirks of probability2…
The other piece of this is that, after just three seasons together, Shaq famously left Orlando to sign a huge contract with the Lakers, confining the Magic to more than a decade of mediocrity. This cuts both ways for conspiracy theorists. On the one hand, it shows that any attempt to “send” players to one destination or another is limited by the autonomy that inevitably comes with free agency. On the other hand, this example also illustrates that the draft is often the best – and sometimes the ONLY — way for a team like the Magic to get a player like Shaq, and that even if it’s only for a few years, it can make your franchise.
2003
Speaking of stars saving small market franchises: Ten years after the Magic’s second lottery win, the Cleveland Cavaliers won the 2003 lottery — and with it the rights to draft hometown star, LeBron James. James, of course, was an Akron prodigy who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was 16, and had his high school games aired on ESPN. In the first seven years he spent with the Cavs, James took a team to two first-place finishes, five playoff appearances, and an NBA Finals appearance. The team won more playoff series in those seven seasons with LeBron than it had in the previous 33 years of their existence combined.
But while LeBron playing for his hometown team WAS a charming story, the logic about why the 2003 lottery might have been rigged is, again, a little confused: Wouldn’t the league want an emerging superstar like James in a big market like New York or Los Angeles? And if it was trying to prop up a small market franchise, that would end badly, when LeBron infamously left Cleveland for Miami in 2010.
In other words, while all three of these examples WERE strange coincidences, there doesn’t seem to be any throughline to the logic governing these supposed conspiracies. Sometimes the league is helping big market teams; sometimes it’s helping small market teams. Sometimes it’s deferring to the interests of a star who wants to play in warm weather; sometimes it’s ignoring the interests by sending a player who wants to be a global icon to play in Cleveland.
What really seems to be happening in these cases is that fans are taking probability personally. They are looking at three high-profile drafts over 18 years3 and backfilling explanations to fit the outcomes, even when those explanations are at odds with each other. This is what a lot of conspiracy theories boil down to: Noticing something weird, and postulating nefarious schemes to explain that weird thing.
But we shouldn’t then conclude that conspiracies are never real. Indeed, as we’ll see in Part 2, when we jump ahead a few years, there IS a consistent logic that starts to emerge with draft conspiracies in the 2010s…
Actually, prior to 1985, there was a coin flip that decided whether the first pick would go to the worst team in the Eastern Conference or the worst team in the West.
After the 1993 draft, the NBA changed the weighting again to favor the worst teams, reducing even further the odds that a team like the 1992-93 Magic would win it.
There’s only one other pick in this time period that approached the hype surrounding Ewing/Shaq/LeBron: the Tim Duncan draft in 1997, when the lottery was won by the San Antonio Spurs. As far as I know, there are no major conspiracies about why Duncan went to the Spurs, which is consistent both with the lack of excitement around all things related to Tim Duncan, and the amount of cherry-picking needed to make conspiracy theories work.