How the NBA draft lottery works, and what the odds hide

A reverse-order draft is a bounty on losing. Write the rule out and read it back to yourself: the team that finishes worst chooses first, so the last six weeks of a bad season pay better in defeat than in victory. Every league that distributes young players by standing has to live with that sentence. The NBA is the only one that decided the bounty had grown too large to leave alone, which is why the draft lottery exists at all, and why its odds get argued over more than any other table in American sport.

The reason is basketball itself. Five players on the floor, one of whom can be involved in most possessions at both ends, on a roster small enough that a single arrival changes the arithmetic of every game. In football a great quarterback still needs a line. In baseball the best hitter in the world bats fourth in nine. In basketball one player can be the difference between a team that cannot win and a team that is genuinely dangerous, and everybody in the building knows it by February.

So the incentive to lose is stronger in basketball than in any other team sport, and the league's answer was to break the mechanical link between finishing last and picking first. Not to remove the reward for being bad. To make it probabilistic.

This is the machine underneath that decision: fourteen balls, four drawn at a time, a thousand combinations, four picks settled by drawing and twenty-six settled by the standings, plus a set of rules about traded picks that quietly shapes half the trades in the league.

Why the NFL never needed a lottery and the NBA did

Football runs the pure version. The clubs that miss the playoffs pick in reverse order of record, worst first, with ties broken by strength of schedule, and there is no drawing anywhere in the process. If you want that mechanism in full, the way the NFL builds its draft order is a separate piece of arithmetic, and the contrast with basketball is the whole point of putting them side by side.

The NFL can live with a pure reverse order for reasons that have nothing to do with virtue. A football roster carries dozens of players and fields separate units on offence, defence and special teams, so the marginal value of the single best available player, spread across a whole season, is real but bounded. Tanking a football season is also physically hard. The players do not cooperate, because their contracts and careers depend on the tape they put out, and a coach cannot rest his way to a bad record without the locker room noticing within a fortnight.

Basketball is the opposite on every count. Fifteen roster spots, heavy minutes for the best players, and a very ordinary way to lose games on purpose that requires nobody to play badly: sit your good players. Call it load management, call it a development window for the young guys, call it caution with a sore hamstring. The team loses, everybody involved keeps their reputation, and the record slides in exactly the direction the front office wants.

The lottery is the league's admission that its own draft rule was creating that behaviour. It arrived in the mid-1980s, in a form that now looks almost naive: every team that missed the playoffs had an equal chance at the first pick, drawn from envelopes in a drum. Equal chances killed the incentive to lose outright, and immediately created a different problem, because a team that finished five games out of the playoffs had the same claim on the best young player as a team that had won barely a quarter of its games. That is not a competitive-balance mechanism. That is a raffle.

The system has been rebuilt twice since. First by restricting the drawing to the top few picks and ordering the rest by record, then by weighting the drawing so that worse teams hold more chances than better ones. What survives from all of it is a compromise: a bad record must be worth something, or the draft stops rebalancing the league, and it must not be worth everything, or the last month of the season becomes a race to the bottom conducted in public.

NBA draft lottery odds explained by the balls, not the table

Most explanations of the lottery start with the percentage table. That is the wrong end. The table is an output. The input is fourteen numbered ping-pong balls in a machine, and once you can see how those balls generate the numbers, the table stops needing to be memorised.

Fourteen balls go into the drum, numbered 1 to 14. The drum mixes them, and four balls are drawn out one at a time, each one staying out once it is drawn. Order does not matter. A draw of 3, 7, 12, 1 is the same combination as 1, 3, 7, 12, and the league sorts every combination into ascending order before comparing it to anything.

So how many distinct combinations exist? Count the ordered sequences first. The first ball can be any of 14. The second can be any of the 13 left. Then 12, then 11. That gives 14 x 13 x 12 x 11 = 24,024 ordered ways to pull four balls out of fourteen.

Now strip out the ordering. Any particular set of four balls can come out in 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 different sequences, and all 24 of them count as the same combination. Divide: 24,024 / 24 = 1,001.

One thousand and one distinct combinations, and that awkward extra one is the reason for the last piece of housekeeping. The league sets a single combination aside and assigns it to nobody, which leaves exactly 1,000 in play. Odds can then be stated in clean thousandths, and every published percentage in the lottery table is simply a team's count of combinations divided by a thousand.

• 14Balls in the drum
• 4Balls drawn per combination
• 1001Distinct combinations possible
• 1000Combinations actually assigned

All four are fixed by the drawing procedure rather than set each season. The combination count is derived from the fourteen balls, not chosen.

That is the entire mathematical content of the lottery. Everything else is allocation policy: how those thousand combinations get handed out, and how many times the machine runs.

How combinations are handed out, and what happens on a repeat

The fourteen teams that miss the playoffs are ranked by regular-season record, worst first. That ranking, and nothing else, determines how many of the thousand combinations each team holds. Teams at the bottom hold the largest blocks. The blocks shrink as the records improve, down to a small handful for the team that finished fourteenth in the lottery order and closest to the postseason.

Two details about that ranking are worth pausing on.

The first is that it is built from regular-season record alone. Losing a play-in game does not move a team down the lottery order, and winning one does not move it up. A team eliminated from the postseason in the play-in round takes its place in the lottery at whatever slot its record earned, which is one of the quieter design choices in the tournament that decides the last playoff places: it added games with something at stake without adding a new way to manipulate the lottery.

The second is what happens to teams that finish level. Identical records are not broken by head-to-head results or by conference. The tied teams' combined allocation is divided as evenly as it can be, and a random drawing decides who receives any odd combination left over and who sits higher if the tie still matters later. That drawing is held before the lottery itself, so by the time the balls go in the drum, every one of the thousand combinations belongs to exactly one team.

Then the machine runs. Four balls out, sorted into ascending order, matched against the list. The team holding that combination wins the first pick. All fourteen balls go back into the drum, it is mixed again, and four more come out for the second pick, then the third, then the fourth.

Two outcomes require a redraw, and both are ordinary rather than dramatic. If the combination that comes out is the one the league assigned to nobody, the balls go back and the draw is repeated. If the combination belongs to a team that has already won one of the earlier picks, the same thing happens, because a team cannot hold two of the top four slots. Neither event changes anybody's odds in any meaningful sense. A redraw is simply the process refusing to record an outcome it has no rule for.

The drawing itself happens away from the cameras, in a sequestered room, with representatives of the participating teams present along with league officials and an independent auditor. Phones are surrendered. The results are sealed into envelopes and only revealed later on air, which is why the televised portion is theatre performed after the fact. The people on stage holding team logos usually do not know what is in the envelopes either.

That physical separation is a direct descendant of the first lotteries, which were drawn from envelopes in full view and generated a folklore of conspiracy that the league has never entirely shaken off. Ping-pong balls, a sealed room, an auditor and a published procedure are all answers to the same question: can this be shown to be fair, rather than merely asserted to be.

1. 1Fourteen balls go into the drumNumbered 1 to 14, mixed for a fixed period set out in the league's published procedure before anything is removed.
2. 2Four balls come out, one at a timeThe four numbers are sorted into ascending order, because a combination is a set rather than a sequence.
3. 3The combination is matched to its ownerEach of the thousand assigned combinations belongs to exactly one of the fourteen teams. That team wins the first pick.
4. 4Repeats and the unassigned combination are redrawnIf the combination belongs to nobody, or to a team that has already won a pick, the balls go back and the draw is run again.
5. 5The machine runs three more timesAll fourteen balls are returned each time. The second, third and fourth picks are drawn the same way, with the same redraw rules.
6. 6Picks five to fourteen fall into placeThe ten lottery teams left over are slotted in by reverse order of regular-season record, worst record first, with pre-drawn tiebreakers already settled.
7. 7Picks fifteen to thirty go to the playoff teamsOrdered by reverse regular-season record, not by how far a team advanced in the postseason.
8. 8Traded picks move to their new ownersProtections are resolved against the finished order, which is the moment a conditional pick either conveys or rolls into next year.
9. 9Results are revealed on airThe envelopes were sealed in the drawing room. The broadcast is the announcement, not the lottery.

The drawing decides four picks. Everything after step six is the standings, applied without a machine.

Four picks are drawn. The other twenty-six are the standings

The lottery is smaller than its coverage suggests. Four picks come out of the machine. That is all.

Once those four are settled, the remaining ten lottery teams are placed in reverse order of record, worst first, filling picks five through fourteen. No drawing, no drama, and no way to influence it in May, because the tiebreakers were resolved before the balls went in.

Picks fifteen through thirty go to the sixteen playoff teams in reverse order of regular-season record. This is a genuine difference from football, and it is easy to miss. The NFL sorts its playoff clubs by how far they advanced, so a team that wins two postseason games picks after a team that lost its first. The NBA ignores the postseason entirely for draft purposes. A team that wins the championship and a team swept in the opening round are placed by what they did over the regular season, with the champion's own record deciding where it sits rather than its title.

The second round has no lottery at all. All thirty teams are ordered by reverse regular-season record, top to bottom, and the drawing has no bearing on it. A team that wins the first pick in the lottery does not thereby lose ground in round two.

13%33%53%

• Decided by the ball machine4
• Lottery teams placed by record10
• Playoff teams placed by record16

Structural counts fixed by the format: fourteen lottery teams, sixteen playoff teams, four picks drawn.

Show the numbers

How the thirty first-round slots are actually decided

Item	Value
Decided by the ball machine	4
Lottery teams placed by record	10
Playoff teams placed by record	16

Four out of thirty. Put like that, the lottery looks like a small intervention in a large ordering, and in one sense it is. The reason it dominates the conversation is that those four picks sit at the top of the board, where the difference between the players is at its largest and where a franchise-altering prospect, if the class has one, is going to be taken.

Why the NBA draft lottery odds were flattened at the top

The most consequential change to the lottery in decades was not to the machine. It was to the allocation.

Under the older weighting, the team with the worst record held a clearly larger block of combinations than the second-worst, which held more than the third, and so on down. The bottom slot was the best slot, unambiguously, and the reward for being the very worst team in the league rather than the second worst was worth chasing. Front offices did chase it, and the last month of some seasons became visibly uncompetitive.

The current allocation flattens the top. The three worst records receive identical shares of the thousand combinations. Not similar. Identical.

That single change removes the prize from the bottom of the standings. There is no longer any lottery advantage in finishing worst rather than third worst, so a team that has already established itself among the three worst records has nothing further to gain from losing more games. The race to the very bottom, which was the specific behaviour the league wanted to stop, has no finish line any more.

The second change went alongside it: the drawing was expanded from three picks to four. That sounds technical and is not. Adding a fourth drawn pick pushes every non-winner one slot further down the range of possible outcomes, which deepens the floor for the teams at the bottom and gives the teams further up the lottery order an extra route into the top four.

The exact share of combinations attached to each of the fourteen positions is published by the league with its lottery procedure, and it has been revised before. Take the current numbers from there rather than from anybody's article, this one included. What is stable, and what is worth carrying around in your head, is the shape: identical odds for the three worst records, then a steady decline through the remaining eleven positions, with the fourteenth team holding a share small enough that its appearance in the top four is genuinely a surprise.

A bad team can fall four places and cannot rise at all

Here is the asymmetry that most explanations skip, and it is pure arithmetic rather than policy.

Four picks are drawn. Every one of those four that is won by a team ranked behind you in the standings pushes you down exactly one slot in the final order. There are four such chances, so the maximum you can fall is four places, no matter how the drawing goes.

Your route upwards is different in kind. You rise only if one of your own combinations comes out, and how far you rise is capped by how far you already are from the top. The team with the worst record is already at the top of the pre-lottery order, so it cannot rise a single place. It can only stay or fall, and it can fall four. The second-worst record can rise one and fall four. The third can rise two and fall four.

The crossover sits at the fifth position. A team ranked fifth-worst can rise four places to the first pick and fall four places to the ninth, and it is the only slot where the two are equal. Everything above it can fall further than it can rise. Everything below it can rise further than it can fall.

• Places it can rise
• Places it can fall

Worst record04

2nd worst14

3rd worst24

5th worst44

8th worst74

11th worst103

14th worst130

Rule-derived, not probabilistic. Falling is capped at four because only four picks are drawn; rising is capped by the distance to the top.

Show the numbers

Maximum movement for each position in the lottery order

Item	Places it can rise	Places it can fall
Worst record	0	4
2nd worst	1	4
3rd worst	2	4
5th worst	4	4
8th worst	7	4
11th worst	10	3
14th worst	13	0

The bottom three teams live entirely on the wrong side of that line, which is exactly where the league wanted them. A season spent losing on purpose now buys a guaranteed floor of the fifth pick and a modest chance at the first, and under the flattened odds the single most likely outcome for the worst record in the league is not the first pick at all. It is falling out of the top four altogether.

Read the last rows of that chart the other way and you get the flip side, the thing that keeps mid-table lottery teams interested. A team that finished eleventh or fourteenth in the lottery order has almost nothing to lose and a long way to climb. Its chance is small. Its downside is close to zero.

Tanking did not stop, and the honest reasons why

The lottery reduces the incentive to lose. It does not remove it, and anyone who claims otherwise has stopped reading at the flattened odds.

Three reasons, none of them subtle once stated.

A bad record still buys a better floor. The three worst teams hold identical shares at the top, but the fourth, fifth and eighth worst do not. Every position you drop in the standings buys more combinations and a better guaranteed slot, right up until you reach the flat zone at the bottom. The reward curve has been squashed, not deleted, and a team that is going to be bad anyway has every reason to be thoroughly bad rather than accidentally mediocre.

The middle is the worst place to be. This is the argument that actually drives behaviour, and it has little to do with the lottery. A team that wins about as many games as it loses gets a middling pick, no cap space worth the name because its rotation is full of solid players on real contracts, and no realistic path to a title. Under the accounting rules that govern what a team can spend, being adequate is expensive and buys nothing. The exits from that trap are to add a genuinely great player, which usually means a high pick, or to keep paying for adequacy indefinitely. Losing badly on purpose is not irrational in that position. It is the cheapest available option.

Nobody has to admit to it. Tanking is not a decision that gets minuted. It is a series of individually defensible choices: trading a veteran on an expiring contract for a future second-round pick, resting a player with a sore knee in March, giving a rookie the minutes to develop, declining to sign a free agent who would win six extra games. Each of those is normal roster management. Together they produce a bad record, and no rule can distinguish the collection from its parts.

What the league has tried instead falls into three buckets.

The first is the flattening already described, which removed the prize from the very bottom.

The second is giving more teams something to play for. The play-in tournament pulled the seventh through tenth places in each conference into a bracket, which means the number of teams with nothing left to chase in the final weeks is smaller than it used to be. A team sitting eleventh with two weeks to go is no longer safely eliminated. That does not touch the teams at the bottom of the standings, and it was never going to, though it thins out the zone of indifference in the middle, which is where the merely purposeless losing used to happen.

The third is direct discipline. The league constitution gives the commissioner authority over conduct detrimental to the game, and the sanctions available run to fines and to the loss or transfer of draft picks. Taking away a draft pick is the only penalty that actually bites a tanking team, because fines are cheap relative to a lost season and suspensions punish individuals rather than strategies. Alongside that sits the participation policy governing when healthy star players may sit out, which sets expectations about availability, particularly for nationally televised games, and ties eligibility for individual awards to a minimum number of appearances. That policy was written mostly at the load-management problem rather than at tanking, though the two overlap at the edges, and the current text of it is published by the league.

None of these is a solution, and the league does not pretend otherwise. Tanking is a response to the structure of the sport, where a small roster and a huge gap between the best player and a good one make the top of the draft worth more than the difference between forty and fifty wins. As long as that is true, some teams will decide that this season is not worth winning. The lottery's job is only to make sure the decision is not a guaranteed transaction.

Traded picks, protections, and the rule named after Ted Stepien

Draft picks are the league's second currency, and the rules around trading them shape roster building as much as the salary rules do.

The core restriction is known as the Stepien rule, after an owner whose front office traded first-round picks so freely in the early 1980s that the team was left with nothing to select with for years. The rule that followed prevents a team from being without a first-round pick in consecutive future drafts. Whatever is traded, a team must still have a first-rounder to use, either its own or somebody else's, at least every other year.

The practical effect turns up in the way every large trade is described. Firsts move in alternating years, never back to back, and a front office negotiating a big deal is working inside a constraint that the other side is working inside too. It is the reason so many trades feature a pick two years out and another four years out rather than the two nearest ones.

Two devices exist to work around the constraint without breaching it, and both are everywhere.

Pick swaps. Rather than trading a pick outright, a team can trade the right to exchange picks in a given year. The team receiving the swap right takes the better of the two positions; the team giving it up still makes a selection, just possibly a worse one. Because a swap never leaves a team without a first-round pick to use, it sits differently against the consecutive-year restriction than an outright trade does, which is precisely why swaps proliferate in deals where the outright picks have run out.

Protections. A traded pick can carry conditions. Top-four protected means the pick conveys only if it lands at five or later; if it lands in the top four the original team keeps it and the obligation rolls forward into a future year under whatever terms the trade specified. Lottery-protected works the same way at the boundary of the lottery. Protections usually decay over time, becoming looser each year, and typically end with the obligation converting into one or two second-round picks if it never conveys at all.

The interaction between protections and the consecutive-year rule is where trades get vetoed. A conditional pick has more than one possible future, and the league evaluates a proposed trade against every way the conditions could resolve. If any legal resolution of the conditions would leave a team without a first-round pick in two straight drafts, the trade does not get approved. Front offices therefore negotiate protections partly for value and partly for compliance.

1. 1The trade is agreedTeam A sends its own first-round pick to Team B, protected in the top four for each of the next two drafts, converting to two second-round picks if it never conveys.
2. 2Year one, the lottery is drawnTeam A finishes with the third worst record and one of its combinations comes out for the second pick. The pick lands at two, inside the protection, so Team A keeps it.
3. 3The obligation rolls forwardTeam B receives nothing this year. The same top-four protection now applies to next year's pick instead.
4. 4Year two, the lottery is drawn againTeam A improves, finishes seventh worst, and none of its combinations come out. No team behind it wins a drawn pick either, so it stays at seven.
5. 5The pick conveysSeven sits outside the top four, so the obligation is discharged and Team B makes the selection at pick seven.
6. 6The alternative endingHad the pick landed in the top four a second time, the protection would have expired unfulfilled and Team B would have taken the two second-round picks instead.

Invented example. The teams, years and outcomes are constructed to show the mechanism; no real trade is being described.

That worked example is invented, and it is worth sitting with because it shows how much of a rebuild's timeline is decided by a drawing. The same team, the same trade, and a difference of a few slots in the final order changes whether an asset is delivered this year, next year, or converted into something far smaller.

The other thing traded picks do is carry information. A team accumulating other teams' unprotected future firsts is making a bet that those teams will be bad later. A team that has traded away its own firsts with light protections has effectively bet on itself, and the bet becomes expensive at exactly the moment the team gets worse, since a low pick handed over in a bad year is the most painful version of the same obligation.

What happens after the lottery, and why a top pick is an asset rather than a cost

The lottery settles the order. Everything between that night and the draft is evaluation, and it runs on a compressed calendar.

The combine is the central event. Prospects are measured properly, with heights recorded without shoes and wingspan and standing reach taken alongside them, which matters in basketball in a way it does not in most sports: reach and length are close to permanent, and they change what defensive assignments a player can plausibly take. Medical examinations are conducted under conditions every team can see, and a medical flag can move a player further than any athletic test. There are athletic drills, shooting drills, and, for those who choose to play, five-on-five games in front of every front office at once. There are also interviews, which are scarce and valuable, because the number of hours any team gets with any prospect is small.

Around the combine sits the withdrawal machinery. Players who have declared for the draft while retaining college eligibility have a window in which to pull their names back out, and that decision is usually made on the strength of what teams told them in those interviews. The eligibility rules themselves, including the age minimum and the automatic eligibility of older international players, live in the collective bargaining agreement and have been renegotiated before, so read them there rather than assuming last decade's version still holds.

Then come private workouts. Teams bring small groups of prospects to their own facilities, run them against each other, and get the one thing the combine cannot provide, which is a look at a player in the team's own setting with the team's own coaches asking their own questions. Workouts are where teams confirm what they already believe more often than they are where minds get changed, and a player who declines to work out for a team picking above the one he wants is doing something that has been part of the draft's texture for decades.

What all of that is in service of is a contract, and the contract is why a high pick is worth so much.

First-round picks sign under a rookie salary scale. The amount is fixed by draft slot, teams can pay a defined percentage above or below the scale figure, and effectively everyone signs at the top of that band. The structure is two guaranteed seasons followed by two team option years, so a team controls a first-round pick for four seasons at a price set before anybody knows whether he is any good, then holds restricted rights afterwards. Second-round picks have no scale, and the current agreement added a dedicated exception for signing them, which changed the value of a second-rounder more than most people noticed.

The consequence is the same one that governs every other roster decision, and it belongs with the cap rules and the apron restrictions that sit on top of them rather than being re-explained here. A very good player on a rookie scale contract is the cheapest thing in the sport. Every dollar of the difference between what he is worth and what he is paid is available to spend on somebody else, and the window in which that surplus exists is the window in which a rebuilt team is supposed to become a contender. A pick that misses costs comparatively little. A pick that hits pays for years. That asymmetry, not the drama of lottery night, is why teams are willing to be bad.

How other leagues answer the same question

Every league with a draft faces the same design fault, and the answers vary more than you might expect.

The NFL never blinked. Strict reverse order among the non-playoff clubs, ties broken by strength of schedule, and playoff clubs sorted by how far they advanced. Finish worst, pick first, every year, with no drawing at any stage. Football tolerates that because tanking is genuinely hard to execute there, and because the way a hard cap forces roster turnover already redistributes talent aggressively without any help from the draft order.

Hockey took the middle path. The NHL runs a lottery covering the teams that miss the playoffs, though it draws fewer picks than the NBA does and caps how far a team can climb, so a team can move up only a limited number of places rather than jumping from the back of the queue to the front. That cap is the design difference worth understanding: it protects the worst teams from being leapfrogged by everybody at once while still removing the guarantee, and the way hockey's draft handles teenagers and their development leagues creates a different set of incentives again, since the player picked first often does not arrive for years.

Baseball added a lottery in its most recent agreement, having run a pure reverse order for its entire history before that. Its version carries a feature neither basketball nor hockey has: restrictions on the same clubs picking at the top repeatedly, with limits tied to whether a club receives or pays revenue sharing. That is a direct attack on the specific pathology of the multi-year teardown, and it is the most interesting recent idea in this area precisely because it targets the sequence of bad seasons rather than any single one.

The pattern across all four is that the strength of the answer tracks how easy tanking is in that sport and how much one player is worth. Football, where it is hard and one player matters least, does nothing. Basketball, where it is easy and one player matters most, does the most.

How to tell whether a rebuild is actually working

Lottery night tells you almost nothing about whether a team is on the right path, because a single drawing is one sample from a distribution and the team's plan either survives a bad draw or it was never a plan. Here is what to look at instead, in roughly the order the evidence arrives.

Are the young players' minutes coming in games that matter? A rookie playing thirty minutes in March for a team twenty games out of the playoffs tells you very little, because the alternative was a veteran the team had already decided not to keep. The signal appears when those same players hold their minutes in close games, against good teams, with the coach choosing them over the safe option. That is the first honest evidence that development is happening rather than being announced.

Who owns the future first-round picks, and how heavily are they protected? This is checkable and it is where the real position of a rebuild lives. A team holding its own unprotected firsts plus a couple of other people's has genuine optionality. A team that has traded its own firsts away with thin protections has already spent the years it is asking you to be patient through. Protections are the tell: heavy protection means the front office knows the pick could land high, which means it knows the team could be bad.

Is the cap sheet clear at the moment the young players get expensive? Rookie scale contracts expire. Team options come due. A rebuild works when the surplus from cheap good players is still available at the moment the team is ready to add somebody, and it fails when the space has already been spent on medium-quality veterans signed to make a bad season slightly less embarrassing. Look three years ahead rather than at this summer's room.

Have any of these players been paid again by somebody? Second contracts are the market's verdict, and they beat every counting statistic. A drafted player who earns a serious second deal, from his own team or a rival, was a successful pick. A player who starts for three seasons on his rookie contract and then attracts nothing was not, whatever the box scores said.

Is the team accumulating decisions or avoiding them? The failure mode of a long rebuild is not bad luck in the drawing. It is a front office that keeps buying more time by trading for more future picks, because a future pick never has to be judged. At some point the assets have to be converted into players who are actually good, and the willingness to make that conversion, at the right moment and at a price that hurts, is the hardest thing in the job.

Not one of those depends on where the balls landed. That is the lottery working as intended. It was never designed to reward good management or punish bad management, only to stop the draft order being purchasable with defeats. Whether a team then does anything useful with the pick it receives is a separate question, and the answer turns up four years later, in the second contracts and the cap sheet, long after everybody has forgotten which envelope came out first. If you want the wider mechanics around all of this, the rest of the basketball archive covers the cap, free agency and the tactical arguments that decide what a high pick is actually worth once he arrives.