On Tuesday, the NBA Draft Lottery will be held in front of an audience of reporters who nervously fidget as they are trapped in a room and shut off from the world until the results have been revealed to the public. After a couple years of bad luck and even worse basketball, the Los Angeles Lakers will be chattering at their fingertips hoping to finally get a lucky bounce.
In the 2014/15 NBA season, the Los Angeles Lakers finished with the worst record in franchise history. Sixty-one painful losses promised the Lakers the fourth best odds of winning the lottery, 11.9 percent. Twenty-one victories sprinkled over six months of the NBA season gave the Lakers an 82.8 percent chance of finishing in the top five, and finishing in the top five is critical for a franchise attempting to rebound from two historically bad seasons.
As part of the trade for Steve Nash, the Lakers sent the rights to their first round 2015 draft pick to the Phoenix Suns with the stipulation that LA keeps the pick if it falls in the top five. Phoenix has since traded away the rights to that pick to the Philadelphia 76ers, but the Lakers would prefer not to even entertain those thoughts. If the Nash trade has already been declared a disaster, falling out of the top five would officially label it a nuclear bomb.
Winning the lottery would be welcome, but not losing the lottery is imperative.
In order for the Lakers to drop out of the top five, two of the three winning combinations of ping pong balls would need to belong to teams below the Lakers in the lottery order. For those wondering, there is a 17.2 percent chance that the Lakers will fall out of the top five. If this scenario plays out, a collective groan may well be audible in Los Angeles when NBA commissioner Adam Silver reads out the results of the lottery.
Of course, Monday's news that Jordan Clarkson, who was drafted with the no 46 overall pick, had become the first Laker to earn NBA All-Rookie First Team honors in 20 years served as a reminder that draft position does not always beat out good scouting. However, Clarkson's award also provided a reminder that the Lakers could just as easily have lost a couple extra games-- two games against the Philadelphia 76ers, in particular--and snatched the third worst record in the NBA. Actively tanking with that slight bit of extra emphasis would have provided the Lakers far better odds of holding onto their pick, 96 percent.
However, the reality is that the Lakers will be nervously staring at the television screen rubbing their sweaty palms. The no. 1 pick would be celebrated with screams of jubilation, but more than anything, the team could just use any positive outcome that results in a relieved sigh. It would take a powerful stroke of bad luck to lose this draft pick, and the Lakers are hoping they are finally all out of bad luck.
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One good bounce of a ping pong ball would go a long way to forgiving the last two years of unwatchable basketball. Perhaps, the Clippers crashing out of the playoffs in fall-on-your-face fashion serves a good omen that order is restored in Los Angeles. Before going too far down that rabbit hole, we should probably keep in mind that the NBA is just pulling ping pong balls out of a lottery machine.
The 2015 NBA Draft Lottery is scheduled to take place prior to Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, which means results should be revealed between 5:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time.
