It's TIME To bring the ping pong balls from behind closed doors!

They just drew numbers and a lady just yelled out Dallas. How do we know Dallas had those numbers before they drew? You would think they would just have a certain number of balls from each team to make up the percentages and just draw 1 ball... so it's obvious who wins

 

Every team is given all the combinations before the drawings, it's on the piece of paper in front of them. So they do all know that it's Dallas beforehand.

 

The possible lottery combinations are divided up among the lottery teams beforehand. They each have a list of those combinations. They all knew who had the combination. They have it on a board in the room, too, possibly (I thought I heard that in the lottery drawing video - not sure).

As a matter of fact, the actual 4-number lottery combinations can be generated by anyone beforehand (dumbasses like us included!). There's no mystery to it since they're sequentially generated with Utah starting at "1-2-3-4" (see the lottery drawing video making the rounds and they make mention of this).

Here's Zach Lowe holding up part of the assigned combinations on his podcast with Bill Simmons. Showing some of the Rockets combinations and Mavs combinations :

 

I could not agree with you more. I can name 5 or 6 #1 picks that are questionable.

The Bulls desperately needed a power forward in 1995-96. Long story short I think the Spurs agreed to trade Rodman for chicken fodder with a wink-wink you'll get the #1 draft pick for your troubles. Wild conspiracy, maybe, but with this trading Luka nonsense...all I'm saying is I have questions.

At the end of the day the NBA is entertainment, and I do understand that, but I still think we should be able to demand transparency.

 

I think we can more than demand transparency, there should be a fan committee within the NBA.....

The fans are a major cornerstone of this all. Who is watching this charade.....paying ridiculous prices.

 

The Spurs traded Rodman to the Bulls because they were completely fed up with him at that point. Nobody in the league was particularly eager to add Rodman in 1995 because he was seen as a malcontent and a distraction.

 

Media, Lawyer's and half the GM's in the league watch it happen. Now, I just posted about EY (the auditing company) being crooked so take that as you may. That said, do you really think competitive billionaires like Ballmer and Lacob are going to let themselves be screwed (or even disadvantaged)? Other billionaires like Saver and Sterling, who were forced to sell their teams against their will, never even alluded to problems. Joe Tsai, one of the richest men in the world just lost out. The money is just a drop in the bucket (a larger societal problem) to these guys. Owning a team is a toy, I doubt they'd let Silver dick them around.

Does every sports league figure out which refs have biases an appoint them to games/series? Almost certainly. Is the lottery actually rigged? I doubt it (caveats: Ewing, because it would have been super easy at the time and the league's TV "sponsors" were still tape-delaying finals, and AD because every owner got a cut of the team b/c the league owned the team).

Also, we love to find patterns in randomness, In fact, humans are pretty much unwilling to accept that random outcomes are actually random:

 

i kinda like it behind closed doors, off to the public. gives it some mystery and intrigue

 

It's telling Adam Sliver hasn't responded to this thread yet.

Why are you hiding Adam?

 

Probability is a strange beast. A roulette wheel could land black 9 times in a row…doesn’t mean the 10th roll will be black again, or red, for that matter. The vetting for the draft lottery seems legit

 

1983 ROCKETS win 'coin flip' and the #1 pick --> Ralph Sampson
1984 ROCKETS win 'coin flip' and the #1 pick --> Hakeem Olajuwon
1985 NBA responds to outcry of rigged coin flip and starts lottery... Knicks win --> Ewing
1986 ROCKETS lose in the finals to the Celtics (refs)
______

How much more proof do you need?