While this is unfortunate for the team that finishes for the worst record, they are not actually the team in the bottom 5 of the standings that ends up the worst off. To determine the relative strength of a team’s position in the standings, it is important to analyze the difference between the percent chance of winning the lottery and the change in wins across the 82 game season between teams in the standings. Below is a chart that details this below:
The National Basketball Association is different from other professional sports leagues in the way in the way that it treats, or more specifically punishes, the team that finishes with the worst record in the regular season. Both Major League Baseball and the National Football League automatically give the team with the worst regular season record the first overall pick in the following year’s draft. However, in the NBA, all 14 non-playoff teams are inserted into a ping pong lottery with the team with the worst record having the highest (a 25% chance) of winning the lottery. While this is unfortunate for the team that finishes for the worst record, they are not actually the team in the bottom 5 of the standings that ends up the worst off. To determine the relative strength of a team’s position in the standings, it is important to analyze the difference between the percent chance of winning the lottery and the change in wins across the 82 game season between teams in the standings. Below is a chart that details this below: An analysis of the change in average wins compared to the change in percentage change in winning the lottery over the past 15 seasons shows that the team that finishes in the NBA season with the 5th worst record in the NBA is actually the worst off by a substantial amount. As you can see from the data table above, the difference between the Change in wins over the 82 game season/Change in % Chance of getting the 1st overall pick shows how inconsistent this drop off is from 4th worst to the 5th worst is with the rest of the top 5. This demonstrates a major problem in the NBA draft lottery that the NBA should seriously consider changing. The 5th worst team, on average, is one win better over an 82 game season than the 4th worst team, yet this one extra win corresponds to a roughly 3% decease in the chance they win the 1st overall pick. The easiest way to fix this system and make it more equitable for all is to make the % chance of getting the 1st overall pick correspond to the number of wins a team has over the course of the season, not the team’s place in the standings.
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