May 12, 2024; Chicago, IL, USA; Representatives of the 14 NBA teams wait to go on stage during the 2024 NBA Draft Lottery at McCormick Place West. Mandatory Credit: David Banks-Imagn Images David Banks-Imagn Images

The NBA draft lottery is bad no matter what pick the Hornets get

Originally posted on Charlotte Hornets on SI
By Zach Roberts | Last updated May 12, 2025 8:34 AM ET

The NBA draft lottery determines which of the non-playoff teams gets the first overall pick.

In this year's draft, that means someone is getting a generational prospect in Cooper Flagg. The Charlotte Hornets have, on paper, the best chance to get him, along with the Washington Wizards and Utah Jazz (14%).

But before that happens this evening, it's time to say that the lottery is bad. The Hornets could win the lottery, but it's still bad and has been bad for the NBA. It's not a fair system whatsoever, and it often punishes teams that are bad and keeps them bad.

A great example would be the 2023-24 Detroit Pistons. You may recall that some of their losses last year were historic, and yet they fell to fifth overall with the worst record in basketball. The 2012 Charlotte Hornets, who won seven games, didn't win the lottery, either.

This is designed to prevent tanking, but it doesn't do that. Teams this year were undoubtedly tanking for Flagg. Will it work? For all but one, no. That didn't stop them, though. The lottery didn't stop Utah and Washington from arguably tanking and losing a ton of games. It didn't stop the Hornets from clearly throwing out bad lineups at the very end of the season.

The 2024-25 Hornets, however, are a good example of why the lottery is bad. They weren't tanking, they were just extremely injured and bad. They lost Brandon Miller for the season, and Mark Williams and LaMelo Ball failed to hit 50 games. They lost an immense amount of talent, and they lost games because of it.

They weren't tanking at first, and now they could end up with pick seven despite just genuinely being bad? It isn't easy to build a winner in the NBA without lottery luck, and that's not exactly a fair system. This keeps the bad teams bad and forces them to have to do better than other teams in the draft, which is pretty much hit or miss, in order to catch up.

If the NBA wants to keep a lottery under the guise of preventing tanking, which doesn't even work, then so be it. But this current system is faulty. There's just no way it's fair that teams like the Chicago Bulls, Atlanta Hawks, Sacramento Kings, and Dallas Mavericks should be at all in the running. They were in the play-in tournament on the cusp of the playoffs, and they might pick first?

Without being an expert on the lottery, I can't provide a system that would work perfectly, but there should be a limit on how high teams can rise in that situation. Maybe the NBA needs to section off the lottery into two or three sectors and have those teams able to move up to the top of their sector, but no further.

For example, the top five worst teams should all have staggered chances of winning the lottery, and they'll all pick one through five. That would prevent a team from just outright tanking for the top pick like in other sports, but it would keep the outcome a lot fairer. Either way, the current lottery system is bad, and that will still be the case even if Charlotte somehow wins it.