NBA Draft Lottery
The NBA Draft Lottery is a weighted drawing that lets the 14 non-playoff teams compete for the first four selections of the league's annual draft order.
The NBA Draft Lottery is the weighted random drawing the National Basketball Association uses to set the top of its annual draft order among the teams that missed the playoffs. Held each May, it awards the first four selections to lottery results and leaves the remaining selections to fall in reverse order of regular-season record. Its purpose is narrow and deliberate: to keep the league’s worst teams from being able to lose their way to a guaranteed No. 1 overall selection.
Per NBA.com and Wikipedia, through Oct. 27, 2026.
How it works
The 14 teams that fail to reach the postseason enter the lottery. The drawing itself uses 14 ping-pong balls numbered 1 through 14. Four balls are drawn at random, which yields 1,001 possible four-number combinations when order is ignored; 1,000 of those are distributed among the 14 teams before the draw, and the single unassigned combination is discarded and redrawn if it ever surfaces. The more combinations a team holds, the better its chance of moving to the top.
Only the first four selections are decided by the lottery. Four separate drawings produce the first through fourth selections; once a team’s combination is pulled, any later draw that matches it is ignored and the balls are drawn again. After those four slots are filled, selections 5 through 14 are ordered in reverse of regular-season record, best lottery chances first. Because only four teams can jump the line, the club with the league’s worst record can finish no lower than the fifth selection. When two or more teams tie in the standings, their combined allocation is split evenly and a coin flip resolves any combination that cannot be divided cleanly.
The flattened chances
Under the system adopted for the 2019 lottery, the three teams with the worst records each receive an identical 14 percent chance at the No. 1 selection. From there the chances decline steadily down the standings:
| Lottery seed (by record) | Chance at No. 1 |
|---|---|
| 1st–3rd (worst three) | 14.0% each |
| 4th | 12.5% |
| 5th | 10.5% |
| 6th | 9.0% |
| 7th | 7.5% |
| 8th | 6.0% |
| 9th | 4.5% |
| 10th | 3.0% |
| 11th | 2.0% |
| 12th | 1.5% |
| 13th | 1.0% |
| 14th | 0.5% |
Actual chances in a given year can differ slightly when teams tie and share allocations, but the structure above is the baseline the league applies whenever records are distinct.
Where it came from
The lottery dates to 1985, when the league replaced a system that had the worst team in each conference flip a coin for the No. 1 selection — an arrangement widely seen as an open invitation to lose on purpose. Early lottery formats gave every non-playoff team an equal chance before the NBA shifted to a weighted model that handed the most combinations to the worst records.
That weighting created its own problem. Before the change, the team with the worst record held a 25 percent chance at No. 1, the second-worst 19.9 percent and the third-worst 15.6 percent — a steep curve that rewarded bottoming out in the standings. The NBA’s Board of Governors approved a reform in 2017 that took effect at the 2019 lottery, leveling the top three chances to 14 percent apiece and expanding the number of lottery-decided selections from three to four. The stated goal was to shrink the reward for finishing dead last and to distribute meaningful chances further up the standings.
Why it matters
The lottery exists because of tanking — the practice of a team deliberately fielding a weaker roster to lose games and improve its draft position. The most-cited case is the Philadelphia 76ers’ multi-year teardown, which produced records of 19-63 in 2013-14, 18-64 in 2014-15 and 10-72 in 2015-16 as the franchise accumulated losses and assets in pursuit of high selections. Flattening the chances was the league’s attempt to make that calculation less attractive by capping the advantage of being the worst team.
Trades complicate the picture through protected selections. A first-round selection dealt between teams is frequently “lottery-protected” or “top-four protected,” meaning the original team keeps it if it lands inside the protected range and only conveys it to the acquiring team if it falls outside. The mechanism means lottery night can determine not just who drafts where but whether a traded selection changes hands at all; in 2026, Indiana’s selection carried a condition that could send it to the LA Clippers depending on where it landed.
The flattened chances have measurably widened who can win. At the 2023 lottery, the San Antonio Spurs (22-60) won the No. 1 selection and the right to select Victor Wembanyama, while the Detroit Pistons — who held the league’s worst record at 17-65 — slid to fifth. Two years later the Dallas Mavericks won the 2025 lottery despite just a 1.8 percent chance and used the selection on Cooper Flagg. Not until the 2026 lottery did a league-worst team finally win under the new chances, when the Washington Wizards (17-65) landed the top selection — the first time since the 2019 change that the holder of the worst record converted its 14 percent into No. 1.
The arguments
Supporters of the flattened format, including the league office that drove it through, argue that equalizing the top chances removes the incentive to be historically bad and protects the regular season from teams openly playing to lose. By drawing four selections instead of three and giving middling lottery teams a realistic chance, the reform is meant to reward competitiveness rather than collapse.
Critics counter that the change has not stopped tanking so much as reshaped it. Analysts at CBS Sports have argued the reforms failed, noting that teams still have every reason to lose for a strong average draft position even if the single-year top result is smaller, and that a 14 percent ceiling does little to deter a franchise committed to a long rebuild. Others contend the flatter curve can punish genuinely bad teams by handing premier prospects to clubs that barely missed the playoffs, as with Dallas in 2025. Defenders respond that randomness is the point — that unpredictability is precisely what discourages a guaranteed race to the bottom.
Per NBA.com, Wikipedia and CBS Sports, through Oct. 27, 2026.
The bottom line
The NBA Draft Lottery is a weighted random drawing dressed up as a ceremony: 14 non-playoff teams, 1,000 ball combinations, four selections decided by chance and the rest by record. The flattened chances introduced in 2019 gave the three worst teams the same 14 percent chance at No. 1, a deliberate brake on the kind of bottoming-out the Process-era 76ers made infamous. Whether it has actually curbed tanking is still contested, but the results since — Wembanyama to San Antonio, Flagg to Dallas, and Washington’s 2026 win as the first league-worst team to convert under the new math — show a system engineered to make losing a matter of chance rather than a guarantee.
