Huge Night For Franchise
While it may be a blip on the radar screen to some fans, tonight is a mammoth night for the Pistons as an organization. For the first time since 2001, Joe Dumars will make his way to beautiful Secaucus, New Jersey for the NBA Draft Lottery. We will broadcast the results and take your phone calls tonight starting at 8 on 97.1 The Ticket. The Pistons need a break. They need some luck and they need to get in to the top 3 of the draft! It is a basketball team in need of a shot in the arm and in need of some good young and cheap talent. This is where the draft comes in. Detroit's likely slot will be picking either 7th or 8th, based on percentages and record and how the ping-pong balls bounce, but, stranger things have happened. Our buddy Keith Langlois with the Pistons did an excellent FAQ about tonight's lottery and I have enclosed that below. Bottom line tonight is important for the Pistons for a lot of reasons, including for the marketability and value of this franchise. Imagine if somehow, Detroit was able to land the #1 overall pick and bring in a top-flight talent like John Wall? It sure needs it.
Here's a look at how the lottery works:
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Does any team have a chance to get the No. 1 pick?
All 14 teams that miss the playoffs have a shot at the top three picks. The NBA has held a lottery for 25 years and a weighted lottery that gives teams with the worst records better odds of pulling a top-three pick for the last 20 years, yet only four times in 25 years and three times in the 20 weighted years has the team with the worst record landed the No. 1 pick.
It happened only in 1988 with the Clippers, who chose Danny Manning, among the five years when all non-playoff teams had an equal shot at No. 1. Since, it's happened in 1990 when New Jersey won and took Derrick Coleman, in 2003 when Cleveland won the right to take LeBron James and 2004 when Orlando won and claimed Dwight Howard.
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What are each team's chances to get the No. 1 pick?
New Jersey, by virtue of its 12-win season, has a 25 percent shot. Minnesota is next with a 19.9 percent chance and Sacramento third with a 15.6 percent shot at the No. 1 pick. The Nets get 250 out of 1,000 possible four-digit lottery combinations, Minnesota 199 and Sacramento 156. From there, in descending order from 4 to 14, teams will have 119 of 1,000 combinations, 88, 63, 43, 28, 17, 11, 8, 7, 6 and 5. More on this in a minute.
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What about teams that finish with the same record?
For purposes of the lottery, the NBA takes the total of lottery combinations involving the tied teams and divides by the number of teams. This year, for instance, Washington and Golden State tied for fourth and the Pistons and Philadelphia tied for sixth. So Washington and Golden State split 207 lottery combinations – and 207 isn't divisible by two, so keep reading – and the Pistons and Philly split 106 combinations, or 53 each.
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What if those tied teams don't get a top-three pick? Then how is order determined?
The NBA held separate drawings involving all tied teams to determine draft order for teams picking outside the top three. That drawing also determined who got the extra lottery combination when the total isn't divisible by the number of tied teams. Philadelphia won the tiebreaker over the Pistons.
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Besides a chance at getting the first, second or third picks, what are the other possibilities for the Pistons?
Any team can move into the top three – which means the Pistons could be jumped over by three teams below them. Because the Pistons finished tied for the sixth-worst record and lost the tiebreaker, their possibilities are to pick 1-2-3 or 7-8-9-10. The Pistons cannot possibly pick 4-5-6 or below 10th.
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What do you mean by 1,000 possible four-digit lottery combinations?
There are actually 1,001 possible combinations if you take the numbers 1 through 14 and sort them by four-digit combinations without regard to order – for example, 1-2-3-4 is the same as 4-3-2-1 or any combination involving those numbers. All possible combinations of 11-12-13-14 are discounted, yielding 1,000 combinations.
A computer then randomly assigns each team its allotment of combinations from the 1,000 possibilities.
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But all we see on TV is David Stern removing envelopes from a drum. Where are the 1,000 combinations?
The process of picking the top three teams is conducted before the TV event, in a separate room, in a meeting attended by NBA officials, one representative of each lottery team, and accountants who guarantee the lottery's integrity.
Four numbered Ping-Pong balls are pulled to determine the No. 1 pick. Whichever team has the corresponding four-digit combination gets the No. 1 pick. The four balls are returned and the process repeated to determine the No. 2 pick, then repeated again to determine No. 3. Picks 4-14 are determined by order of record with worse records picking higher. If a combination assigned to the team that wins the No. 1 pick is subsequently drawn to determine who picks 2 or 3, the process is simply repeated until a different outcome is achieved.
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So why do the team representatives on TV seem surprised, happy or disappointed when David Stern announces the top picks?
Because those people - and Joe Dumars will be the Pistons' representative on the set to look surprised or disappointed - do not know the results of the separate process that takes place elsewhere. The representatives that go into the room where the lottery combinations are first determined stay in that room – and they must be without any communications device – while the televised lottery plays out.
