2023-05-15 17:14:03
Jean-Baptiste Sarrazin, with AFP / Photo credit: FRANCK FIFE / AFP
Who will inherit Victor Wembanyama. 14 American franchises will compete for the prodigy of French basketball during the draft. But how does this lottery work? Draw, order of choice, participating teams: here is everything you need to know about the draft.
Established in 1985 by the NBA, the draft lottery determines the teams, among the 14 worst of the season, which will choose first, second, third and fourth, the player of their choice in the batch of the best “prospects”, including French prodigy Victor Wembanyama. There is a very good chance that the French basketball phenomenon will be selected first, by the lucky franchise that will have won the jackpot in the lottery on Tuesday. Also he will know before the big ceremony of June 22 his very probable future destination.
14 participating teams
It remains to explain how this game of probability and chance works, to which the 14 teams not qualified for the play-offs will lend themselves, having therefore finished the regular season with the worst records. In a machine are placed fourteen ping-pong balls numbered from 1 to 14 and four of them are drawn at random to form a four-digit combination, out of 1,001 possible. Before the lottery, 1,000 of these 1,001 combinations are allocated to the fourteen teams concerned, according to a distribution determined by their balance sheet. The remaining combination is considered invalid and will be ignored if drawn.
Thus, the three franchises with the worst records are assigned 140 combinations each, which gives them a 14% chance of drawing the right one. It then goes down: the fourth worst team has 125 combinations (12.5% chance), the fifth 105 combinations (10.5% chance) and so on until the fourteenth which has only 5 combinations (0.5% chance) and therefore very little hope of winning this lottery.
The previous Magic
This system has been in effect since the 2019 draft. Previously, the odds were different. This year, Detroit, San Antonio and Houston were the teams that completed the exercise with the three worst records. They therefore each have a 14% chance of having the right combination. Charlotte (12.5%), Portland (10.5%), Orlando (9%), Indiana (6.8%), Washington (6.7%), Utah (4.5%), Dallas (3 %), Chicago (1.8%), Oklahoma City (1.7%), Toronto (1%) and New Orleans (0.5%), knowing that Dallas and Chicago could be forced to send, in some configurations, their first-round draft picks in New York and Orlando, under the terms of a past player trade.
The combination draw takes place as follows: the 14 balls are placed in the lottery machine and are shuffled for 20 seconds, then the first ball is removed. The remaining balls are shuffled for another 10 seconds, then the second ball is removed, the process repeating for the third and fourth balls. The team that has the winning combination will have won the right to choose first in the draft and will therefore throw themselves, barring a huge surprise, on Victor Wembanyama.
The same coin toss is made to determine those who will have the second, third and fourth choices. The ten other choices, starting from the fifth, are allocated according to the balance sheet of the remaining teams, from the most to the least bad. Note that in the past, it has happened several times that chance contradicts the probabilities. Thus in 1993, the Orlando Magic had won the jackpot despite a 1.52% chance of being granted.
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