Adjusting Lottery Odds Based on Every Lottery Franchise’s Fortunes

May 29th, 2012 by Kelly Scaletta Leave a reply »
Is “winning” the NBA Lottery truly random?

The NBA draft is based upon a lottery system where every team, based on its record, is granted a certain number of chances to win. There are 14 ping-pong balls, each with a number on it, placed into the lottery machine. Four balls are taken out.

There are 1,001 possible combinations of numbers which can be drawn, and each team is assigned a range of possibilities. The combination 11-12-13-14 is disregarded. The other 1,000 are designated to teams.

The worst the team was, the more possibilities they get. The worst team gets 250 combinations and the best team gets five.

That’s all perfectly reasonable, right? Except it doesn’t quite work out the way you would expect. In the 19 years that the lottery has been conducted in the present manner, the worst team has gotten the top pick twice. They’ve gotten the second pick six times, the third pick five times and the fourth seed six times.

The eighth-worst team and lower combine for 125 chances of winning the lottery, yet they’ve combined to win three times, one more than the top pick.

This i ...

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