2016 NBA draft lottery primer: 5 big things to know

The 2016 NBA draft lottery takes place in New York City on Tuesday, locking in the order of selections for the first round of the June 23 NBA draft. Let us prepare for television’s most exhilarating spectacle by running through the relevant details, digits and David Stern made sure New Orleans got the No. 1 pick in the Anthony Davis draft in exchange for Tom Benson buying the Hornets diversions related to the NBA’s yearly ping-pong-a-palooza.

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1. When is the lottery?

The 2016 NBA draft lottery will air on ESPN at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday, before Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals matchup between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Toronto Raptors. Again: Before the game, not at halftime.

The actual drawing of the ping-pong balls happens earlier. We’ll explain that in a bit.

2. Which team has the best chance of landing the No. 1 overall pick?

The NBA employs a weighted lottery system, meaning the team with the worst record has the best odds of receiving the top pick. This year, that’s the Philadelphia 76ers, who finished a league-worst 10-72. That was the second-worst record in an 82-game season in NBA history, bettering only … the 1972-73 Sixers, who went 9-73. There have been some lean times in the City of Brotherly Love.

This season represented the low-water mark of Philadelphia’s much-discussed and derided unapologetic teardown. After losing 63 and 64 games over the previous two campaigns, Philly plumbed new depths, opening the season with a record-breaking 18-game losing streak, entering Christmas with a dismal 1-30 mark, turning in four separate 10-plus-game winless stretches, and not cracking double-figures in victories until their 78th game of the season.

The 76ers turned in the league’s worst offense by a considerable margin, finished 25th in points allowed per possession, and again largely looked like a team biding its time until its long-hoped-for reinforcements — injured former No. 3 overall pick Joel Embiid, stashed former 12th overall pick Dario Saric, whichever high-lottery pick (or picks) they receive this year — finally arrive to save the day.

Ultimately, ownership lost its patience, resulting in the departure of general manager and president of basketball operations Sam Hinkie, the architect of “The Process,” an overarching approach to roster-building in which Hinkie prepared the 76ers to lose as many games as possible in an attempt to snag high-upside, cost-controlled young talent at the top of the draft, with hopes of finding the sort of transformational superstar that teams must land to compete for championships.

The 76ers never picked first in Hinkie’s tenure. Now, with Bryan Colangelo taking the reins, Philly faithful — especially those who continue to Trust The Process — will hope the Sixers’ lottery luck finally meets all these years of preparation.

The 76ers have a 25 percent chance of winning the No. 1 pick. Here’s a full breakdown of the odds of picking in the top three for all 14 teams in the lottery:

3. How have past trades and pick swaps affected this year’s lottery?

The biggest storyline of the night will be the fate of the Lakers’ pick, with L.A. fans set for either delight or disaster depending upon the bounce of the ping-pong balls.

The Lakers enter Tuesday’s drawing with the second-most chances of any lottery team. If their pick doesn’t land in the top three, though, it goes to the Sixers, thanks to a pair of past trades — the 2012 deal that sent Steve Nash from Phoenix to Los Angeles, and the 2015 three-way dance that shipped Michael Carter-Williams to the Bucks, Brandon Knight to the Suns, and that protected future selection to Philadelphia.

That means the Lakers have a 55.8 percent chance of keeping their pick and giving incoming coach Luke Walton another top-flight young talent to pair with D’Angelo Russell, Julius Randle and Jordan Clarkson as L.A. sets about rebuilding after the retirement of Kobe Bryant. (Or, perhaps, shop the No. 3 pick “for a young veteran” who could help kickstart that rebuild, according to ESPN.com’s Chad Ford.) It also means they have a 44.2 percent chance of handing the Sixers a top-five pick and coming away from the phenomenally ill-fated Nash deal with nothing.

The Lakers already dodged one protected-pick bullet last year, hanging onto the selection that allowed them to pick Russell. Will the odds favor them yet again?

Other trade-related info to know:

• If the Kings’ pick lands in the top 10 and ahead of the 76ers’ own pick — say, Sacramento wins the lottery and Philly comes in fourth — the Sixers have the right to swap picks and take the higher selection, thanks to last summer’s trade sending Nik Stauskas, Jason Thompson and Carl Landry to Philadelphia to clear up cap space so the Kings could go free-agent shopping.

“All together,” as Cork Gaines writes at Business Insider, “the 76ers have an 11.9 percent chance to land pick No. 1 and the Lakers’ pick (either No. 4 or No. 5) and about a 30 percent chance of landing two of the top-five picks in general.” By the end of Tuesday night, the fruits of Hinkie’s labors might look an awful lot more appetizing to an awful lot of very vocal critics.

• Fresh off 48 wins and a second straight playoff berth, the Celtics take the Nets’ first-round pick as a result of the 2013 draft-night deal that sent Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry to Brooklyn. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it: that deal has not worked out the way Brooklyn had hoped.

• Denver can trade its first-rounder for the Knicks’ spot as the last vestige of the deal that sent Carmelo Anthony to Broadway way back in 2011. Whether they wind up with their own pick or the Nuggets’ selection, the Knicks will then send that off the Toronto Raptors to complete the conditions of the 2013 trade that brought Andrea Bargnani to New York. If you’re keeping score at home: yes, that means Masai Ujiri managed to trade for the Knicks’ 2016 first-round draft pick twice, with two different teams. No wonder Jim Dolan’s a fan.

• Sacramento’s pick could also go to the Bulls, thanks to a multi-year, multi-player, multi-headscratcher sequence of events that SB Nation’s Tom Ziller explained well here. (J.J. Hickson plays a major role.) That would require the Kings falling outside the top 10, which is exceedingly unlikely — the odds of Sacramento falling to No. 11 and conveying the pick the Bulls clock in at one-ten-thousandth of a percent, according to Richard Yannow of A Student of the Game.

“The Kings would lose their pick if three teams behind them in the order jumped over them, but the odds on that are really, really small,” writes Akis Yerocostas of Sactown Royalty. “So of course it’s going to happen.”

• If the Wizards’ pick falls outside the top nine, it goes to the Suns as part of the 2016 trade-deadline deal that sent Markieff Morris to Washington.

4. Who’s in the running for the No. 1 spot?

This has been considered a two-horse race for months, between one-and-done stars Ben Simmons of LSU and Brandon Ingram of Duke.

The hype surrounding Simmons, a 6-foot-10, 240-pound playmaking combo forward from Australia, was all-encompassing well before he arrived in Baton Rouge and began stuffing stat sheets, averaging 19.2 points, 11.8 rebounds, 4.8 assists and two steals per game en route to a consensus First-Team All-America selection.

Back in March, though, Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress noted that some NBA decision-makers had enough questions about Simmons — on topics including drive, defensive commitment and shooting form — that he no longer profiled as the 2016 draft’s no-questions-asked top prospect.

In his most recent mock draft for The Vertical, Givony tabbed Ingram — a 6-foot-9, 200-pound swingman who is 14 months younger and has a significantly longer wingspan than Simmons, who shot 41 percent from the college 3-point line, and whose game has drawn comparisons to former NBA Most Valuable Player Kevin Durant.

While Ingram and Simmons are considered the clear-cut top-tier prospects in this year’s draft class, several other prospects also figure to hear their names called very early on draft night, including:

• Dragan Bender: A 7-foot-1 Croatian power forward who averaged nearly 14 minutes per game this season for Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv, who profiles as a potential difference-maker as a playmaking stretch power forward, and who is widely considered the top European prospect in this year’s draft. For more, check out Givony’s February deep dive into Bender’s strengths and weaknesses.

• Kris Dunn: A two-time Big East Player of the Year and conference Defensive Player of the Year at Providence, the 6-foot-4, 220-pound Dunn is lightning quick off the dribble; a gifted playmaker who excels in the pick-and-roll and assisted on nearly 42 percent of his teammates’ baskets last year for the Friars; a capable shooter who knocked down 37.2 percent of his triple tries as a senior; and a larcenous defender whose sharp instincts and quick hands can create turnovers and transition opportunities. At 22, he might not have as much upside as younger prospects, and he’s had bouts with turnovers and iffy off-ball defense, but overall, Dunn’s the top point guard prospect in this year’s class.

• Jaylen Brown: Standing 6-foot-7 with a wingspan near 7 feet, the 19-year-old Cal product earned First-Team All-Pac-12 honors after averaging 14.6 points, 5.4 rebounds and two assists per game for the Bears, is considered to have NBA-caliber athleticism on the wing and the tools to develop into a quality scorer and defender at the next level.

• Jamal Murray: Questions persist as to whether he’s got the passing chops and floor vision to play the point in the pros, but after averaging 20 points per game and shooting 40.8 percent from deep as a freshman at Kentucky, the 19-year-old Canadian guard looks to have the stroke, scoring instincts and feel for the game to find ways to make a difference on the offensive end.

• Buddy Hield: The sweet-shooting guard won National Player of the Year and First-Team All-America honors after leading the nation in total points and 3-pointers made, and leading Oklahoma to a 29-8 record and a Final Four trip. While he’s a bit undersized at the two, measuring 6-foot-5 in shoes at the recent NBA Draft Combine, he’s one of the most prolific and efficient scorers in recent college hoops memory, and in a league obsessed with shooting, the 22-year-old Hield doesn’t figure to be waiting very long to find an NBA home.

5. So, what does the lottery actually do?

The 14 teams in the running for picks 1 through 14 all get called “lottery teams,” but the lottery only really locks in the top three picks. Picks No. 4 through 14 are determined by inverse order of the teams’ regular-season records; teams with worse records get higher picks. (This also means means that Philly’s own pick can’t drop lower than fourth, the Lakers’ pick can’t get lower than fifth, and the Celtics’ pick can fall no lower than sixth.)

As detailed earlier, all 14 teams have at least some chance of moving up into the top three. If one of the lower-likelihood teams rises up, one of the three-worst-record teams gets bumped out to No. 4. This happens pretty often; in fact, there’s been some type of leap in every lottery since 1996.

The actual lottery drawing to determine those top three spots takes place before the TV broadcast, with select media members, NBA officials and representatives of the participating teams and the accounting firm of Ernst & Young attending the drawing.

Each team in the running for the top pick gets assigned a collection of four-number sequences. Each number in the sequence corresponds to a number on a ping-pong ball, labeled 1 through 14. The ping-pong balls all go into an air-powered machine — think the “Grab That Dough” episode of “The Golden Girls” — that tumbles them around for 20 seconds before spitting out the first ball. Another ball gets taken out every 10 seconds until you’ve got four.

There are 1,001 possible four-ball combinations, assigned to each team in order of their lottery odds. For example, the league-worst 76ers have the best lottery odds at 25 percent, so they get the first 250 combinations.

Whichever team was assigned the four-number combination that pops out first gets the top pick. The order in which the four balls come out doesn’t change the result; 1-2-3-4 is the same as 4-3-2-1. The balls then go back into the machine to repeat the process to determine which team gets the second pick. After the four balls are drawn and No. 2’s figured out, we start over again for the third pick.

I am skeptical that watching a 12-minute video of ping-pong balls being sucked up through a tube will allay the fears and anger of conspiracy theorists convince the NBA rigs the draft every year, but in the event that it might, here’s what the 2015 drawing looked like:

Lots of people have suggested changes or full-fledged overhauls of the draft lottery process over the years. Those calls reached a fever pitch over the past couple of seasons, as folks watched Hinkie’s Sixers push the rules as written to their absolute extreme in pursuit of the best possible odds of landing top picks.

Despite the hue and cry, though, NBA owners in 2014 voted against changing the system. NBA senior vice president of basketball operations Kiki Vandeweghe said this week that he doesn’t “see anything imminent” in terms of lottery reform.

That means that — for now, at least — the ping-pong balls and “Grab That Dough” machine are here to stay. It’s a good thing you know all about it, then.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!

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