An NBA Draft lottery conspiracy? It’s too crazy to believe

It can be jarring at first, realizing they’re everywhere. In the grocery store. At the gym. Living right across the street. Maybe even in your own family.

You want to believe no reasonable person could be that far gone. That nobody’s really deluded enough to buy into such conspiratorial nonsense. That it never could happen to someone you know.

Then one day, one of them will pull you aside. It might be the person you’d least suspect. And you’ll be asked a question that will make you wonder if everyone you’ve ever known has lost their minds.

“Hey,” this educated, seemingly well-adjusted person will say, “the NBA lottery is fixed, right?”

For some reason, people want to believe this. People want to believe it even though it would require a level of secrecy, meticulous planning, and intricate logistical machinations the people in charge of the NBA have given no indication they’re remotely capable of pulling off.

People want to believe it even though every lottery drawing is overseen by an independent accounting firm, with representatives of every team in attendance, along with media observers from around the country. Tom Orsborn of the Express-News has been in the room for each of the last three drawings, which are videotaped and available to be watched in high-definition by anyone with an internet connection within an hour of the announcement.

But as impossible as it looks to manipulate the order in which a series of carefully weighed and measured ping pong balls get sucked into a vacuum tube, people still want to believe the outcome is rigged, even despite the truly overwhelming evidence that we haven’t even mentioned yet:

After all, if the NBA is fixing the draft lottery, it’s doing an absolutely terrible job at it.

Think about this: if the league could have chosen any destination for Tim Duncan, why would it have sent him to San Antonio? How many more millions of TV dollars would the league had collected if all of those historically low-rated Finals featuring one of the league’s smallest markets had been played in Boston instead? The Celtics, you might remember, were the odds-on favorites to win Duncan in 1997.

And then, having made one financial mistake that killed the bottom line for decades, the league decided to do it all over again 26 years later with Victor Wembanyama?

This does not seem like a very lucrative way to run a conspiracy. Nor does much else about the last quarter-century of allegedly orchestrated lottery drawings.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have the Chicago Bulls, one of the most popular brand names in the world by the end of Michael Jordan’s career, keep it going globally by winning the rights to Yao Ming when the Bulls had the best mathematical chance in 2002?

Shouldn’t the Knicks, a long-suffering, long-irrelevant franchise in the league’s largest market, have won at least one of the 18 lotteries they’ve been in since landing Patrick Ewing in 1985? Shouldn’t New York have ended up with ready-made celebrities like LeBron James, or like Kevin Durant, or like Zion Williamson?

Wouldn’t league-wide TV ratings, merchandise sales and sponsorship income have been vastly improved if both Williamson and Anthony Davis hadn’t started in New Orleans?

The conspiracy theorists, of course, want us to believe that organizations like the Pelicans are in on the whole scheme. They point to the fact that New Orleans won the Williamson lottery in 2019 supposedly as a reward for shipping Davis to the Lakers, just like the Mavericks won this month’s Cooper Flagg sweepstakes as an alleged payment for making a terrible deal that sent Luka Doncic to Los Angeles.

But come on, now. If the NBA was willing to jump through that many hoops to protect the Lakers, wouldn’t it have been much more efficient, and much less messy, just to let them win one of the seven lotteries they’ve been in over the past dozen years? Why not let them take Karl-Anthony Towns in 2015? Why not give them a pick high enough to choose either Doncic or Trae Young in 2018?

Why force Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison to look like a giant sucker before revealing him to be some sort of omnipotent genius?

And wouldn’t someone in the league office had given him a more plausible excuse for this ridiculous charade than “defense wins championships?”

It boggles the mind how anybody could buy into the existence of a plot that ludicrous, that poorly conceived and that pointless. 

But they’re out there. And if there’s any solace in that?

I suppose it’s not the craziest thing they could believe in.