Another NBA draft lottery is in the books, and this year greeted us with an incredibly shocking outcome that has led many fans to question the integrity of this complex draft process. When the Dallas Mavericks won the #1 pick in the 2025 Draft (just one year after winning their conference and playing in the NBA Championship game), fans were quick to decry the entire draft lottery as a “rigged” system – claiming that the NBA forced the number one pick to Dallas to mitigate the franchise’s widely ridiculed trade of Luka Doncic.
Considering the fact that the NBA lottery gave the Mavericks a 1.8% chance of landing the top spot (and how much media coverage was given over to lambasting the franchise for losing their star player), it’s understandable that some fans would question the authenticity of this outcome.
Some fans have even started to claim that the NBA’s draft lottery has repeatedly done this over multiple seasons, skewing the alleged fairness of their unique draft system to support certain profitable franchises. To fully understand these allegations and whether they hold water, it’s important to dive into exactly how the draft lottery works – as well as the historical examples of “rigged” drafts that caused an uproar among fans.
Where leagues like the NFL simply use the reverse order of their previous season standings for draft order, the NBA’s lottery system is a unique attempt to be fair without overcompensating — giving struggling teams a better chance at top picks, while attempting to prevent guaranteed outcomes.
The NBA Draft Lottery determines the top four picks among 14 teams that missed the playoffs, and what’s unique is that a team does not need a specific record to place in the top 4. Any non-playoff team has a chance, but teams with worse records are given higher odds.
Each team is assigned a number of combinations out of 1,000 based on their record: the worst three teams get 140 combinations (14.0% chance at the No.1 pick), while better teams get fewer. Four numbered ping-pong balls (1-14) are drawn in a lottery machine to form a combination that determines the winner of each top pick. This system aims to balance competitiveness by giving poor-performing teams a chance to improve through the draft without encouraging them to lose games intentionally (tanking).
To put that into perspective, that means the Mavericks had just 18 combinations out of a possible 1,000, somehow overcoming the Spurs, 76ers, and Hornets to land the top pick and draft the college superstar Cooper Flagg.
In a vacuum, one could see this improbable outcome as a stroke of good fortune for a franchise facing backlash for one of the most controversial trades in league history – though some fans say it is just one of many examples of the league itself bending the rules to fuel a specific narrative.
As many longtime NBA fans know, the draft lottery has come under scrutiny multiple times for the alleged influence that major teams and players have on draft night. There have been multiple instances where a departing player makes headlines throughout the regular season and offseason, only for their team to miraculously end up with the #1 pick and stabilize their future prospects.
Some of the best examples of this include the Cavaliers getting the #1 pick in 2011, the year after they lost Lebron James. The Cavaliers actually failed to secure the #1 spot with their own pick at 15.6% odds, and earned it in spectacular fashion with a traded LA Clippers pick that held just a 2.8% probability of winning.
Another apparent miracle occurred in 2012, when the Pelicans earned the #1 pick with 13.7% odds (the fifth best in the draft) and immediately replaced their departing superstar Chris Paul with Anthony Davis. Other examples include the Chicago Bulls jumping up to the first pick in 2008 to bring hometown hero Derrick Rose to their team, a move that fans said was a bit too perfect for this massive market team.
And yet, despite the numerous occasions where the stars have seemingly aligned to the most exciting (and marketable) outcome for these profitable franchises, the chances that the draft lottery is rigged are still incredibly low.
One of the main reasons why it’s almost impossible to “rig” the NBA draft is because the league itself has made the process incredibly transparent – putting together a vast network of safeguards to ensure fairness, including more than a dozen select media members who are present within the actual lottery room during the drawing. The league also publicizes exactly which reporters will witness the draft, revealing it via their official X (formerly Twitter) account.
The 14 media members present during the 2025 draft included Zach Love from The Ringer and Gina Mizell from the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others, and together they serve as invaluable watchdogs to ensure the entire process goes off without any funny business.
In addition to the multiple journalists maintaining the integrity of the draft process, the lottery itself is also conducted with a witness from Ernst and Young (EY). The EY witness acts as a direct auditor for the entire process to ensure it occurs within league regulations. By doing this, EY also puts themselves under an incredible level of legal and financial liability, which ought to be proof enough that “rigging” the draft is a losing game for everybody involved.
Ultimately, it’s almost impossible to bypass the NBA’s draft watchdog and safeguards, and the alleged examples of “rigging” in the NBA draft are more accurately a statistical anomaly — an extremely lucky jump made just by the virtue of having a fair and random system. The fact that the outcomes themselves paint a narrative (the Mavericks getting bailed out of the worst trade in history, the Cavs maintaining relevance despite their star leaving) are just circumstantial.
Fun as it might be to claim that the draft was rigged, the truth is that it was just an incredible stroke of luck – one that provided fans the world over with one of the most stunning draft nights in recent memory.
