The NBA Draft Lottery Exists Because One Team Got Caught Losing on Purpose

Before 1985, if an NBA team wanted the best young talent entering the league, there was a simple, terrible incentive: lose as many games as possible. The worst team got the best pick, guaranteed. No luck involved, just pure incentive to be as bad as you could manage.

Teams noticed. In 1984, ahead of a draft featuring superstar big man Hakeem Olajuwon, the Houston Rockets appeared to intentionally bench their best players late in the season to secure a worse record and a better shot at the top pick. It worked. They got Olajuwon. The league had a real problem on its hands.

A raffle to fix a broken system

In June 1984, the NBA’s Board of Governors voted to create something brand new: a lottery. Every team that missed the playoffs would get one envelope, placed in a drum, with an equal chance of being drawn for the top overall pick, regardless of how bad their record actually was.

The first lottery, held in 1985, became instantly famous, and instantly controversial. Commissioner David Stern reached into the drum and pulled out an envelope. It was the New York Knicks, a team many assumed the league secretly wanted to win, since landing a superstar in the country’s biggest media market seemed to benefit everyone.

Conspiracy theories about a “frozen envelope” being secretly identifiable by touch have followed that draft for 40 years, even though nothing was ever proven.

The system kept changing

The original lottery gave every non-playoff team an equal chance at every single pick, which created a strange side effect: bad teams could actually fall further down the draft order than better non-playoff teams, purely by chance. The league fixed that by 1987, guaranteeing the very worst team could fall no lower than the fourth pick.

In 1990, the NBA introduced a weighted system, giving the worst teams better odds without guaranteeing anything outright. That system, tweaked repeatedly over the decades, is still the basic structure today, most recently updated again for 2027 to further reduce the incentive for teams to lose on purpose.

A fix that still hasn’t fully worked

Despite four decades of adjustments, teams still sometimes intentionally build weaker rosters late in a season specifically to improve their lottery odds, a strategy fans and media call “tanking.”

The lottery was designed specifically to remove the incentive to lose. It’s never fully succeeded.

From envelopes to ping pong balls

The switch to a weighted system in 1990 also changed the actual mechanics of the drawing itself. Instead of pulling a team’s envelope from a drum, the league began drawing numbered ping pong balls from a machine, with each team assigned a specific combination of numbers based on their odds.

That format, still used today, was designed partly to look more transparent on live television than the earlier envelope system that had fueled so much lingering conspiracy talk.

Given that the NBA has spent 40 years adjusting the draft lottery and tanking still happens anyway, is there any version of the system that could actually solve the problem completely?