The 2025 NBA Draft Lottery Just Broke The NBA…

The 2025 NBA Draft Lottery Just Broke The NBA…

This is what the NBA draft lottery odds were before the lottery. And this is how the actual draft order shook out. The Dallas Mavericks with a 1.8% chance. I say again, 1.8% chance of getting the first overall pick in the draft have ended up with Cooper Flag and the first overall pick. Or at least we assume that Cooper Flag is going to be in a Mavs jersey. That certainly can change. San Antonio ends up at two. They jump up. Philadelphia at three. Charlotte falls to four. As do Utah, Washington, and New Orleans. Those are the top four teams in lottery odds and they end up four, five, six, and seven. An absolutely insane lottery night. There’s a thousand different directions to go in, but I have to begin with the Dallas Mavericks at first overall. First and foremost, there’s a report out there that this was Chicago or Dallas and it came down to a tiebreaker and they did a coin flip and Chicago lost the coin flip. So, they’re at 12 because that’s the nature of the way the lottery works and Dallas goes all the way up to number one. So, they literally lost out on Cooper Flag because of a coin flip which is absolutely brutal. The Dallas Mavericks winning the lottery a few months removed from the worst trade in the history of the league. Trading away 25 26-year-old Luca Donets to the LA Lakers in exchange for 30 something Anthony Davis Max Christie and a first round pick. Having that happened a few months ago, the first actual like riot and mutiny within an NBA fan base that we’ve maybe ever had where Mavs fans are actively chanting to fire the GM at home games and they’re basically giving up on the franchise. A few months ago, if there was a single Mavs fan out there that was like, “You know what? I quit. I don’t want to be a member of this fan base anymore. I want to go find a new team.” For the first time in maybe the history of the league, I would have been like, “Yeah, cool. Go for it. That sounds fine.” That was a few months ago. And now they’re presumably going to have Cooper Flag on the team. And Flag being the number one overall prospect in this scenario for Dallas is unbelievable for them because a big part of the draw for him is that he’s not your typical number one overall guy where he’s going to be your primary score and he’s going to do everything for you. you’re going to give him the ball and have him run 90 pick and rolls a game. That’s not what he does. He’s a really good connecting in between piece that is so young that’s going to continue to grow and improve. And a connecting piece on the weighing at the four is exactly what Dallas needs. They’ve got Kyrie at the point. They’ve got Anthony Davis in the front court. Cooper flag in between. That is an unbelievable stroke of luck after what has been maybe the most disastrous handful of bunts from a front office perspective in the history of the NBA in Dallas. And you can say all you want to about how they don’t deserve it and it’s crazy they ended up there. They won 39 games in the West and they’re picking higher than teams like Utah and Washington and New Orleans that won in the teens in terms of games. But that’s the way that the lottery works and fortunately for Mavs fans, they’re going to be coming back to their team and that’s just how the lottery works for them. But the bigger subplot here for them is is Cooper Flag actually going to be on the team because all day today there’s been conversations around the fact that Jannis Kmpo is going to be meeting with the Milwaukee Bucks to discuss his future and Dallas winning the first overall pick, San Antonio getting the second pick, the Sixers getting the third pick. All of that really matters within the Giannis conversation because if you were the Bucks and you’re trading away Giannis, the best thing you can get is someone like Cooper Flag or someone like Dylan Harper at the top of this draft. And if Dallas shows the same apathy towards the long-term future of their team that they did when they traded away Luca in exchange for Anthony Davis, then that line of thinking leads you to believe that this might be a Kevin Love kind of situation where Cleveland ends up trading for Kevin Love. They trade away Andrew Wiggins and then all of a sudden they’ve created this this star powered contending team in Cleveland. Obviously, I’m not comparing Giannis and Kevin Love and Andrew Wiggins Cooper Flight, but the situation is similar to where you got a team out there that wants to add a star. You’ve got a team that just won the first overall pick in the lottery and each of those two teams can benefit from the other. And if I’m Milwaukee, I’m calling all these teams in the top three and I’m like, “Hey, what can we do to try and make this happen? And let’s make sure it starts with your top three pick. You’re not getting Giannis unless you give us one of those picks.” And obviously, this assumes that Giannis wants to ask out, but that’s an assumption that I’m making right now. And that is a fantastic, fantastic place for Milwaukee to start. In comparison to prior to this draft lottery, they were not going to have that option because presumably it was going to be Charlotte or Utah or Washington or New Orleans that was going to end up with that pick and that just wasn’t as good of an option in terms of a trade destination for Giannis. Now, let’s talk about the second overall pick here because presumably this is going to be Dylan Harper, which is really interesting for San Antonio. I think most people have Cooper Flag in his own tier, then Dylan Harper and maybe his own tier and then some of the other guys, Ace Bailey, VJ Edgecomb, some of these other guys as well towards the kind of third tierish of this of this draft process. And Dylan Harper’s interesting because the Spurs just traded for Dear and Fox. And it’s not that they’re the same kind of player, it’s just that Dylan Harper would have been perfect before they traded for Adir and Fox. And so now finding a way to get those two guys to fit together in the front court is going to be very interesting. I’m presuming that’s who they’re going to pick. Maybe they’ll end up with somebody else. But that group with Fox and Harper and Wemby and whoever else they’re going to add is super super interesting. If again they don’t end up with Giannis trading away the Dylan Harper pick in exchange for Giannis. Philadelphia here at number three. You want to talk about big winners of the night. They very easily could have ended up with no lottery pick. They had a top six protected pick that they owed to Oklahoma City. And so not only do they get to keep the pick, but they jump all the way up to third overall and they’re probably not going to end up with Dylan Harper and they’re certainly not going to end up with Cooper Flag, but they could end up with a really nice connecting piece for a roster that includes Tyrese Maxi, Jared McCain, who was really good before he got hurt. You’ve got Paul George who hopefully will get healthy, Joel Embiid, who hopefully would get healthy. this is a semi-contending roster if it’s healthy that you’re just going to add a top three pick to again assuming they don’t trade that pick away in exchange for Giannis. And I would say this too with specifically Dallas and Philadelphia. We’ve seen teams try to do this before where if you’re saying they should keep Cooper flag in Dallas’s case and the Sixers should just keep the third overall pick in their case. We’ve seen teams in the past try and do that where they’ve got a young guy on the roster, they’re trying to develop him and they’ve got a veteran group around them that they think can tend for a title. I’m thinking about someone like James Weisman. I’m thinking about really just that whole Golden State era in general, the whole two timelines thing where they had a young guy try to develop it, it just didn’t work because there was so much pressure on them to fit into a group rather than growing their own game. That would certainly be a concern. Not as much of a concern for a team like Dallas because I think Cooper Flag is just that good of a prospect and is that versatile of a prospect. But for a team like Philadelphia, I think they would really explore the possibility of trading the third overall pick just because of where their team is at, where their timeline is at with someone like Joel Embiid and how in the past we’ve seen that potentially negatively impact the development of certain prospects. There’s even a possibility here for Philadelphia where you could convince me that they keep the pick and then a year from now, let’s say it doesn’t go well and then you’re trading away Joel Embiid, you’re trading away Paul George and you’re building around whoever they pick third overall plus Jared McCain plus Tyrese Maxi. That’s a pretty decent future for you as well. And for the Sixers to end up with this pick, there’s going to be a lot of conversation about how the Mavs have been saved by the lottery. The Sixers, you could argue might have been saved by the lottery just as much. Outside of the top three, by far the biggest storyline of the night is these other four teams. Charlotte, Utah, Washington, New Orleans. The four best odds at not only the first overall pick, but obviously staying inside of the top four, they all fell down. And they fell down a long ways. Charlotte’s the only team that even got to go to Commercial thinking that they had an outside chance of ending up with Cooper Flag, but they got jumped by three teams. That’s just how the lottery works. You have a outside chance of getting in the top four. If you get that, it moves teams down and it moved a bunch of teams down. And it’s not that tanking necessarily doesn’t work. It’s just, you know, going into it that you are risking a lot. It’s a 14% chance, best case scenario, to end up with the number one overall pick. And of course, you’re assuming you’re not going to get jumped by three teams with odds so low as a team like Dallas. But if you’re one of these other teams, maybe like the Nets or the Raptors are thinking, man, if we had just tanked more, then maybe we could end up with a really high pick. That’s not always how it goes. And frankly, it’s it’s just really disappointing and heartbreaking if you’re a team like Charlotte, Utah, Washington, New Orleans, even the Nets or the Raptors that threw away an entire season. In the case of Charlotte and Utah, and Washington and New Orleans had singledigit wins on the season. You threw away the entire year just to get not necessarily nothing, but certainly not the thing that you were hoping for. Speaking of the Nets, we got to talk about this like Chicago zone. Basically, this bull zone between 8 and 12 where it seems like the Bulls are always picking. Uh again, the Bulls coin flip thing is absolutely brutal. But at 8 is the Brooklyn Nets. I’m a Nets fan. And this is especially brutal for a few reasons. One, this is the first time in a while the Nets had an actual chance at getting the first overall pick. It was exciting. I was really amped up for the draft and or for the lottery and for them to end up at eight when their odds were at six. Really sucks to get jumped by some of these other teams. But also that Rockets pick at 10th. That’s the Phoenix Suns pick. That’s a pick that Brooklyn owned right up until the off seasonason when they traded a lot of those picks to Houston to get their own pick back this year. And the difference between them and Phoenix ends up being just two selections. If you would told the Nets at the beginning of the year that their pick and Phoenix’s pick after the lottery was going to end up just two spots apart, they certainly would not have made the deal that they did. It’s a risk that they took. There was a lot of people saying that they should have been trying to lose more games. Again, that didn’t really help teams like Charlotte, Utah, Washington, or New Orleans. New Orleans, who only ended up one spot off of Brooklyn, but still, it is a brutal outcome for a Nets franchise that is trying to gear up for some really exciting things this offseason and ultimately fell short. Same thing with a team like Toronto that had potentially high hopes for, you know, it’s wasn’t great odds. It was seven something%, but again, you look at Dallas, 1.8% chance to jump up all the way to number one overall. And then in the late lottery, you’ve got some smaller storylines like the fact that the the the Hawks got their pick from Sacramento because some teams jumped up. This was probably the craziest NBA draft lottery night that I can remember. Three teams jumping up like this. One of which with such a low percentage chance to get the first overall pick in the Dallas Mavericks. And the way that it changes everything for Dallas and for Philadelphia to an extent for the Spurs and this looming Giannis situation over the Mavs. If you were to script the NBA, if you were to put something together to create the best content, to create the most conversation, to create an environment where everybody is talking about the NBA for the next like week, this was the exact outcome. The the Mavs being saved by the lottery ping pong balls, the Spurs getting another potentially really good young player and potentially a piece in a Giannis trade. The Sixers getting to add a top three pick to a veteran group that looks to be potentially a contender next season. All of those things shaking out in place of Charlotte or Utah, Washington, New Orleans getting the first pick or those four teams ending up with just the top four picks in the draft. The way that the chalk would have been, the way the odds would have been, just an unbelievable sequence of events. You want to talk about unlikely. You want to talk about the definition of a lottery.

The 2025 NBA Draft Lottery changed everything for the NBA – Cooper Flagg to the Dallas Mavericks, Dylan Harper to the San Antonio Spurs, and Ace Bailey to the Philadelphia 76ers… unless any of those teams trade with the Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo. The 2025 NBA Draft just got much more interesting.

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