The NBA Draft Lottery concluded on Tuesday night with the Phoenix Suns landing the No. 1 overall pick in this June’s draft. The Suns’ efforts this season to finish with the worst record in the league paid off and they will now have the right to take either Deandre Ayton or Luka Doncic, barring an absolute stunner, when draft night arrives.
Behind them, the four-number combinations spit out by the lottery’s ping-pong ball machine led to the Kings jumping up into the No. 2 spot and the Hawks moved one spot up into the No. 3 position. The lottery as a system has been questioned since its inception, with its critics complaining it may be easily rigged.
The NBA has combated that accusation by allowing a group of writers into the lottery room as well as broadcasting it after the fact on their website. Anyone that’s watched even a bit of the process knows it is tremendously boring, with the machine popping ping-pong ball after ping-pong ball up, the numbers being read until they create a four-number combination that is owned by one of the teams.
That is boring. Effective, but boring. As ESPN’s Zach Lowe notes in his dispatch from the lottery room, the contingency plan in place for the lottery machine breaking is far more interesting and entertaining and is now something I desperately want to see it happen.
If the machine in which the balls bounce breaks down, the NBA has a contingency: dump all 14 balls into a basketball with a hole cut out of the top. A league official closes that hole, shakes the basketball, opens it up, and picks out the balls. The league has not had to use said contingency. If it ever does, and I am there, I might retire on the spot.
At some point, it would get boring too if it were to become normal, but the first time this happens it will be amazing. Some poor guy in a suit cutting open a basketball, filling it with ping-pong balls, and then shaking it up over and over again until they’ve filled all 14 four-number combinations. It’s one of those things where you’d think they’d have a better alternative, but also there isn’t really anything that would function better than ping-pong balls in a basketball.
