Tonight is a big night for basketball. It’s the NBA draft: the moment the world’s top 30 basketball teams line up to select the next generation of prodigies. And the worst performing of those 30 get first dibs. This should, theoretically, mean they have better odds at landing top talent. In practice, though, the selection order is determined by a draft lottery — a system that combines the reverse-order rankings with an increasingly heavy element of weighted randomness.
That random element inevitably results in controversy. Nearly every year, a large segment of the fan base walks away convinced that the lottery is fixed by the league brass in advance. Like so much in America, the NBA draft and its unique system of talent allocation is on the verge of losing its legitimacy.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Each spring, the NBA holds a lottery to determine the order of the first 14 picks — those are awarded to teams that failed to make the playoffs. The four worst are given the best odds at a top four pick, but it’s not guaranteed. Ping-pong balls, weighted according to regular-season record, are drawn behind closed doors and the results revealed on national television. A month or so afterwards, the actual draft proceeds in order, team by team, each selecting the player they believe can change their fortunes.
This year, though, the results are even more shocking. Despite very long odds, all three top picks in the lottery landed with middling teams which already have All-NBA-calibre players (as well as previous championship banners). Each of the teams rewarded with a coveted top-three pick comes with a host of reasons that make a fix plausible. The most notable — and oft-repeated — being that the Dallas Mavericks were given the top draft spot in return for selling one of their best players, Luka Doncic, back to the Los Angeles Lakers for a dubiously low price.
Former top picks LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal have shared their suspicions (and relevant anecdotes) around the lottery delivering their talents to what seemed, to them, like the league’s preferred destinations. Dwyane Wade, the Hall of Fame guard and now part owner of a small-market team, added further fuel to the fire. In a recent interview, Wade danced very close to admitting the lottery results are in fact predetermined. “When you’re in the NBA, it’s a business,” he said. “Sometimes they have to do what’s best for the business.”
On some level, though, whether the draft is rigged is beside the point. A perception of backroom dealing threatens any sport’s most sacred commodity — the idea of fair play. All the same, there’s something essential that the conspiracy-mongers miss. The draft, and its lottery, has always existed to shield American fans from a reality which, owners believe, American national culture can’t psychologically handle.
Unlike football clubs in Europe — where the richest teams can just buy the best players — American sports owners let their fans cling to an illusion of competitive parity. Drafts are the foundation of that illusion. A performative ritual meant to uphold the fiction that every team has a shot, no matter how small their market or feckless their owner. At its core, a draft, as a system of resource allocation, mirrors a deep contradiction at the heart of American thinking. Like the nation itself, US sport insists on a democratic mythology centred around the country’s unique take on the Protestant work ethic — fairness for all, success through effort, and a staunch belief that underdogs can reach the top of the mountain even when faced with the worst possible odds.
This “overcome — no matter what” mentality permeates all aspects of US decision-making. In the founding era, Americans needed to think this way. The entire nation was barren frontier. Civilisation had to be built from scratch. Immigrant settlers without a belief in their ability to overcome perished or, at minimum, became a burden on communities that had few extra resources to offer. While this overcome-the-odds mentality served the early stages of the country well, in the 21st century, it has ossified into a hyper-individualist “society does not exist” mentality. Something that encourages citizens to avoid acknowledging that equal opportunity is now less a reality and more a manipulative mythos (if not a farce).
“Like the nation itself, US sport insists on a democratic mythology — fairness for all, and success through effort”
For instance, Gen Z faces a less affordable existence — and worse employment prospects — than possibly any generation in US history. However, nearly 70% of college-age Americans still believe that they will someday be rich. Predictably, they attribute that prospect’s likelihood to their personal work ethic and guile. As a national culture, Americans believe — with near religious conviction — that the system will eventually reward them and “everything will even out in the end” if they just “work hard enough”. Sports drafts consciously play into this mentality. However, recent progressive reforms to the NBA’s lottery distort it in destabilising ways.
The NBA is by far the most technocratic — and the most overtly progressive — of America’s Big Four sports leagues. This applies both to the league’s public-facing politics and its constant tinkering with the structure of the game itself. From shortening the time allowed to cross half court, to eliminating defensive hand-checking, to legalising zone defences, nearly every recent rule change has been designed to boost scoring and dampen the sport’s physicality — an aesthetic the league’s front office increasingly finds distasteful, for corporate-related reasons. As a result, the NBA is without a doubt the most manicured of all American sports leagues.
In the summer of 2020, amid the post-George Floyd reckoning, the NBA allowed players to replace the surnames on their jerseys with social justice slogans like “Black Lives Matter”, “I Can’t Breathe” and even “Education Reform”. It has also operated the WNBA at a significant financial loss for nearly three decades — a loss that has actually grown in the wake of Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark’s meteoric rise to stardom and the accompanying spike in attention women’s basketball has received. The NBA’s paternal support of their sister league isn’t driven by profit but by ideological principle: it sees the WNBA as an essential public service campaign. Given the league’s consistent commitment to social engineering, it should come as no surprise that fans increasingly suspect this ethos might bleed into its system of talent distribution — i.e., the draft.
Unlike NFL helmet-ball, which lets the worst team draft first (fittingly brutish and old-fashioned), the NBA’s leadership habitually re-engineers the rules of its draft lottery system in an attempt to discourage what it considers bad behaviour — in this case, “tanking”. In other words, teams intentionally losing to secure better draft picks. The NBA’s current lottery system was specifically designed to discourage this by providing far less favourable odds for the worst teams than before. However, in a manner typical of progressive policy, the recent lottery reforms have in fact produced the opposite result while somehow still hurting those most deserving of assistance. Paired with other changes in team payroll structure, also meant to promote fairness, it’s only made it harder for well-run franchises to sustain their competitiveness long-term. Team salary caps are now also so rigid that clubs can’t retain role players around their stars without sacrificing the depth needed for playoff competition. As a result, teams are now more dependent than ever on the draft and the cheap, young players it provides.
Small-market teams — and league integrity overall — would most probably be better off if the NBA scrapped the draft, and its lottery, altogether. Instead, eligible young talent could enter a structured free-agent pool under union-negotiated salary tiers. Teams would still operate under a strict salary cap, but the power dynamic would shift. Instead of team managers gambling on lottery ping-pong balls, they’d compete to convince young prospects that their system offers the best path to success — as happens throughout European football academies (not to mention National Collegiate Athletic Association recruiting).
Top talent, especially in a small-roster sport such as basketball, always gravitates toward the best opportunity. No high-powered agent would put a potential super-star behind a successful veteran in their prime on a lengthy guaranteed contract. Nor would they send them to a franchise with a reputation for mismanaging top-player development. In the system I propose, small-market success stories — teams like the Indiana Pacers, Utah Jazz, and Oklahoma City Thunder — might actually dominate the world’s top professional basketball league. They’d at least avoid the indignity of having to lose on purpose for years on end simply to improve their meagre odds of securing top players. Under a more European arrangement, they’d win by being competent — not by luck or the privileges of wealth or location.
Ironically, this year’s Finals were the first in the NBA’s modern era to feature two small-market teams. Indiana and Oklahoma City got there the old-fashioned way too — patience, development and savvy financial management. The recent implementation of something akin to a hard salary cap has, in some ways, greatly helped the small-market teams compete, resulting in six different champions in the last six years — a level of parity unheard of in previous eras.
However, despite some of the most hard-fought and exciting Finals play in recent memory, the TV ratings for this year’s Finals (minus game seven) have been some of the worst on record. A major disappointment for the television providers, which almost guarantees the introduction of future structural “reforms” seeking to bring the league back in line with domination of wealthy, large-market teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, who just got one of the league’s best players for practically nothing. Hence the conspiracy theories surrounding how their trading partner, only a few months later, got the number one pick despite — literally — the worst odds possible.
The NBA is nothing if not conscious of its own image, not to mention its massive profit margins, much of which comes from mammoth television and merchandise contracts. Given those priors, fans are hardly paranoid to ask if the league’s constant tinkering carries over into its draft lottery results. And so perceptions of the NBA draft lottery have become a microcosm of American’s declining faith in their institutions. These days, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to broadcast your suspicions of foul play. According to Gallup, public trust in every major American institution has cratered, from Congress (a laughable 7%) to higher ed (just 36%) to the presidency itself (26%). What Gallup does not say is that Americans increasingly believe their institutions are not just broken, but that they’re being run exactly as intended — for insiders only. Fans’ perception of the NBA’s draft lottery slots into this broader national disillusionment: it performs legitimacy while running its most consequential decisions behind velvet ropes.
The NBA’s need to constantly adjust its lottery structure shares ideological DNA with increasingly unpopular DEI favouritism practices — a deliberate show of randomness that conceals centralised control. However, what it really delivers is a platform for institutional preferences cloaked in algorithmic mysticism. And when fairness becomes understood as a social engineering project — unaccountable technocrats construct the illusion of chaos, carefully manage outcomes behind the curtain, and gaslight anyone who implies they’ve put a thumb on the scale.
Naturally, the NBA’s yearly lottery ritual happens in a private room. No personal cameras. No smartphones. Only hand-picked VIPs and pre-approved media are allowed. This isn’t transparency; it’s security theatre — lottery as high-church liturgy. Faith replaces evidence and the congregation is expected to clap politely from the pews.
Of course, the NBA’s draft lottery doesn’t need to be rigged for that perception to become a system-ending problem. What matters is it feels rigged or, at least, unfair and dishonest. That perception, at some point, will become inseparable from fans’ view of the basketball league as a whole. And, in this way, the NBA draft and its lottery has achieved something characteristic of late-stage America. It offers fans a spectacle they can still believe in — if only they ignore their own instincts and trust authorities with the most to gain.
