Game Thread NBA Draft Lottery - May 12, 2025

[HermanG]

Last 12 months we had a lot of people suggesting that we sell Lauri and others for cheap to "improve out pick".

The only silver lining I see in this result is that at least we didnt do that.

 

[Tanktastic]

Maybe the flattened odds are angering enough fan bases that there is enough of a voice to ask for change.

This fan base is screaming for more tanking next year. Just fake anger and in October everyone's back being tanking generals and believing "George Keyonte" is a future All-Star.

2, they need to have a third party authority examining all the lottery balls before or after the lottery to make sure they are all the same in terms of weight, size and materials made so they don't have any kind of mechanism in place to rig the result in any way.

They have.

 

[The Midnight]

Wow. Some people are DEEP in their conspiracy theory rabbit holes. Not healthy. Anyway, three things:

1) The draft is not rigged (as if that needed saying).

2) The possibility of VJ Edgecombe, the only player with a legit superstar ceiling, somehow still being there at #5 is very, very unlikely… but even stranger things have happened in this league. GM’s mess up all the time.

3) Overall, this draft class will not live up to the hype. Flagg is a glorified jack-of-all-trades 3rd banana (with a 2nd banana ceiling), Ace and Tre are meh bench players in the league. When all is said and done, Harper and VJ will be the ones head and shoulders above everyone else.

Good post.

I agree re Harper and VJ.

 

[Tanktastic]

Btw, here's the full video of the lottery happening.


View: https://x.com/NBA/status/1922077756268916895

 

[The Midnight]

Btw, here's the full video of the lottery happening.


View: https://x.com/NBA/status/1922077756268916895

Don’t do it.

Don’t torture yourself.

 

[gomretat]

Sure….What I meant to communicate is that that the decision to tank vs half tank isn’t the one which should be reconsidered. Even with this brutal result, I am 100% sure I’m happier now than if we half and half tank (if you don’t consider the fact that dumb luck would have resulted in us getting a top 2 pick). The real decision was made when we dumped Gobert and Mitchell. Once that decision was made, we now exist in a different world where this 14% chance is the best hope we have and this should have been considered when we dumped Mitchell/Gobert.

What I’m saying is that the only thing to be reconsidered is dumping Mitchell/Gobert. The decision to tank after they had already been traded is a no brainer. But we should not have looked at the tanking route as so roses when we had those two and it did not take hindsight to recognize that. All it took was the acknowledgment of simple probability to know that this was the most likely outcome.

I am a broken record on this but there was no reason to trade both of them and that was obvious at the time. It clearly was never going to work with the two of them together but we could have gotten plenty of "assets" from trading one of them and still hung on to a core around them. When your plan is to bank on the draft lottery it is the same as not having a plan.

 

[fishonjazz]

There is no "system". There are actual, physical lottery balls - 14 of them.

Go and ask a physicist if 14 identical balls mixed for 20 seconds can be programmed to come up in a certain order.

14?
I heard that the jazz alone had like 140

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[SoberasHotRod]

14?
I heard that the jazz alone had like 140

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There are 14 balls and they pick 4 of them, lottery ball style, which makes up 1001 possible combinations. The Jazz had 140 of the 1001 possible combinations.

 

[Sardines]

There are 14 balls and they pick 4 of them, lottery ball style, which makes up 1001 possible combinations. The Jazz had 140 of the 1001 possible combinations.

Another way of saying it would be that the jazz had 140 lottery tickets out of 1001 total lottery tickets.

 

[stitches]

We should tank even harder for the next 2 years. Because... screw the NBA and Silver.

 

[SoberasHotRod]

We should tank even harder for the next 2 years. Because... screw the NBA and Silver.

Silver doesn't care if we tank.

 

[The Midnight]

Silver doesn't care if we tank.

True.. he could just keep giving us #5 picks and blame it on the lottery odds.

He could make an example out of us as an anti-tanking policy.

 

[LogGrad98]

If the NBA is rigging the lotto either the Jazz front office is entirely in on it or they're ****ing stupid for not realizing it and putting all their eggs in the lotto basket.

Of course the owners know all this. They get compensated, for sure. Ryan knew what he was getting into, and it is a larger cut of the profit sharing to pad his finances. He is fine with the higher draft picks in exchange for "considerations" of some sort.

 

[infection]

We should tank even harder for the next 2 years. Because... screw the NBA and Silver.

We don’t really have any other options so unfortunately it’s the best way to play our hand. It doesn’t mean it will work, it just means that our options are so limited that it’s the only way forward.

 

[The Midnight]

Of course the owners know all this. They get compensated, for sure. Ryan knew what he was getting into, and it is a larger cut of the profit sharing to pad his finances. He is fine with the higher draft picks in exchange for "considerations" of some sort.

Nah no way he knew.

He wouldn't have sent his wife to be embarrassed by and the scapegoat for the bad luck.

Also from Silver’s point of view the less people know about it the better as to not let the secret out.

 

[Jaymz]

We may trade up

 

[LogGrad98]

Nah no way he knew.

He wouldn't have sent his wife to be embarrassed by and the scapegoat for the bad luck.

Also from Silver’s point of view the less people know about it the better as to not let the secret out.

The owners have a completely different point of view than we do as ordinary fans. For them it is a hobby/business, sometimes business/hobby, so they are concerned about the money and the optics of owning a franchise, and their perspective is on different things. Of course they agree how the ping pong balls fall and play along as required to make sure it is as good a show as it can be. The benefits are obvious, if obscured from the rest of us. The back room shenanigans are real. If you don't think they have discussions that literally no one else is privy to, then you are naive in the extreme. Billionaires are always playing back room games with their businesses. Maybe your 15 year old girlfriend's high school naive optimism is rubbing off on you.

 

[The Midnight]

The owners have a completely different point of view than we do as ordinary fans. For them it is a hobby/business, sometimes business/hobby, so they are concerned about the money and the optics of owning a franchise, and their perspective is on different things. Of course they agree how the ping pong balls fall and play along as required to make sure it is as good a show as it can be. The benefits are obvious, if obscured from the rest of us. The back room shenanigans are real. If you don't think they have discussions that literally no one else is privy to, then you are naive in the extreme. Billionaires are always playing back room games with their businesses. Maybe your 15 year old girlfriend's high school naive optimism is rubbing off on you.

Yeah but if you’re Silver can you trust a secret like the fixed lotto on a guy like Steve Balmer who could at anytime blurt it out to a random reporter?

Not to mention being secretly recorded ala the Donald Sterling incident.

There are many owners who are getting old and aren’t careful.

 

[LogGrad98]

Yeah but if you’re Silver can you trust a secret like the fixed lotto on a guy like Steve Balmer who could at anytime blurt it out to a random reporter?

Not to mention being secretly recorded ala the Donald Sterling incident.

There are many owners who are getting old and aren’t careful.

It is old hat for these guys by now.

 

[jom2003]

They have.

View: https://x.com/VinceGoodwill/status/1922093119463366758?t=mu7ehhOpJP9g4tFxYy3GxA&s=19


If the best piece of defending argument they can make is saying "I saw the whole thing and it's not rigged" or "as a reporter I touched the ping pong balls myyself", it's basically admitting that they don't have an independent governing body to fully examine the lottery balls. Or else they would not have repeated the same talking point over and over without ever mentioning it.