Much to my chagrin, the Cleveland Cavaliers have once again leapfrogged their way to the NBA draft's first pick. For the second time in three years, the ping pong balls bounced in the Cavaliers' direction, overcoming significant odds 2.8 percent in 2011 and 15.6 percent in 2013 to snatch the draft's pole position. How did this happen? Let's start from the beginning.
Since 1966, the year the NBA decided to stop giving teams territorial preference the ability to relinquish a first round pick in exchange for exclusive rights to a local player the league has become steadily more focused on increasing competitive parity without also creating incentives to purposefully lose.
For more than 20 years, the NBA merely flipped a coin to determine the first pick in the draft, with the lowest record in each of the Eastern and Western conferences having a 50-50 shot at the top pick. The loser of the flip received the second pick with the rest of the draft order determined by number of wins.
Then, in the 1983-84 season, the Houston Rockets pulled a shameless tank-job, throwing the entire season for a chance to draft the consensus top pick and local hero, Hakeem Olajuwon. Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Olajuwon attended the University of Houston, leading the school to the Final Four in three of his four years. The morally gray decision paid dividends: Olajuwon led the Rockets to back-to-back NBA Championships in 1994 and 1995.
Nevertheless, a high-draft pick is no replacement for quality scouting and a thorough understanding of a college player's potential. In the 1984 draft, Michael Jordan was selected third by the Chicago Bulls. The Portland Trail Blazers chose Sam Bowie with the second pick, in between the dominating forces of Olajuwon and Jordan: a blemish on a successful decade for Bowie.
In preparation for the 1985 draft, newly minted NBA commissioner David Stern set out to realign the incentive to tank without undercutting the role of the draft as a competitive equalizer. The NBA implemented a simple lottery system where each non-playoff team was assigned a single nondescript envelope. The order in which the envelopes were chosen determined the draft order, meaning a team that barely missed the postseason had an equal chance at the top pick as the league's worst team. While this addressed the attractiveness of tanking, it weakened the draft as a tool for leveling the playing field.
In an attempt to resolve this catch-22, the NBA added a wrinkle to the overly simplified lottery system in 1987. Rather than determining every lottery team's draft position by random draw, only the top-three picks would come from the envelopes. The subsequent picks would be determined by the team's record in the regular season. This means that the team holding the worst record from the previous season could only drop as low as the fourth pick in the draft. The second-worst team could only drop to the fifth spot, and so on.
These fundamental issues generally split the NBA's franchises into two factions: the haves and the have-nots. John Kenneth Galbraith describes politics as "the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." When David Stern spearheaded what would be the final era reform of the NBA draft lottery system, making two adjustments in 1990 and 1993, there's no doubt he was politicking.
The lottery's current incarnation is similar to its predecessor in that only the top three picks are determined randomly, while picks four through fourteen are handed out amongst the remaining teams in order from worst to best record. These top three spots are determined by a random drawing of four ping pong balls, each numbered with a single digit. Each lottery team is allocated a pre-determined number of four digit combinations, with 1,000 combinations assigned in all. The team with the worst record gets 250 combinations, or 25 percent odds of getting the first pick, while the best non-playoff team gets just five combinations, or 0.5 percent chance of landing the top pick.
Good politics requires creativity to keep groups with divergent interests from eating each other. With this weighted lottery system, Stern's been able to keep the peace between the haves and the have-nots, but at the expense of concerns over tanking. With Stern retiring in February and deputy commissioner Adam Silver set to take his place, don't be surprised by a new round of serious discussions for further reforms to the draft.
