You don’t always have to actually win the NBA lottery to look back at past lotteries and realize it could have been worse. The poor Nets toppling to the No. 6 pick after tanking two years is a reminder of how inexact a strategy that was even before the league has begun to try to make the lottery a squarer deal.
The Knicks, after all, spent a lot of the past quarter century hoping to hit jackpots — and they busted out every single time. The Knicks quite famously won the 1985 lottery that gifted them Patrick Ewing, after a season in which they lost 58 games but were only the fourth-worst of the seven teams who didn’t make the playoffs. In an equal-weighted draft in which every team had a 14.3 percent chance to win, they moved up from No. 4 to No. 1.
Since then, they’ve been in the lottery 20 times.
They’ve moved up as a result of the lottery exactly zero times. Most recently, the 2019 lottery only let them go to No. 3 (where they dropped from No. 1). That meant that instead of Zion Williamson or Ja Morant, they wound up with RJ Barrett. Now, if you held a redraft based on what they’ve all done as pros, Barrett might well go first (especially if you’re allowed to sub OG Anunoby, for whom Barrett was later traded). So that’s one way a lottery loss can retroactively feel like a lottery win.
