Be honest: a small part of you thinks the NBA Draft lottery might be rigged, right? Don’t be embarrassed. A lot of people, on some level, believe that to be the case. One of them happens to be at the center of one such conspiracy: the No. 1 pick in the 2003 NBA Draft, LeBron James.
“During the ball drop, the lottery drop, Cleveland got the No. 1 pick?” James said in a recent interview with Pat McAfee, admittedly while laughing. “I just don’t think that — what a coincidence. Let’s keep LeBron home. Patrick Ewing to the Knicks, Derrick Rose to the Bulls, I understand the assignment.” Now, James himself may have been joking, but given how many people buy into these theories, it’s worth exploring them with at least a somewhat critical eye.
Pick any lottery of note and you’ll hear conspiracies like these. Victor Wembanyama went to the Spurs because the greatest French player in NBA history, Tony Parker, was a Spur. Anthony Davis went to the Pelicans because the league itself had recently owned the team and included the top pick as a condition of the sale in order to drive up the price. The Cavaliers won three No. 1 picks in four years out of pity when James left as a free agent in 2010. The list goes on and on and on. It is possibly the single most enduring conspiracy in professional sports.
It is also perhaps the most easily disputable through a very simple exercise. We’ll use James’ 2003 NBA Draft as an example here. If you go through all of the top picks, you can justify the presence of a conspiracy for almost all of them.
- The No. 1 pick was won by Cleveland, James’ hometown team. Simple enough. James himself believes it.
- The No. 2 pick was held by Detroit, but it originally belonged to Memphis with a top-1 protection. Had the Grizzlies won that lottery, it would have been very easy to suggest that the league badly needed Memphis to work as a market after relocating the Grizzlies there from Vancouver only two years earlier. That the Grizzlies were run at the time by Jerry West, the greatest general manager in NBA history, also gave the league some assurance that James’ career would be in good hands.
- The No. 3 pick was held by Denver. There are no obvious conspiracies there.
- The No. 4 pick was held by Toronto. At this point, the Grizzlies had just moved and the Vince Carter era in Toronto was coming to an ignominious end. Had the Raptors won the lottery, it would have been a very straightforward conspiracy: the NBA wanted to save basketball in Canada.
- The No. 5 pick was held by Miami. Easy conspiracy: James would have been going to a glamour market run by Pat Riley, who, like West, would have been trusted to guide the early portion of LeBron’s career effectively by the league office.
- The No. 6 pick was held by the Clippers. Another easy conspiracy, as it would have sent James to the NBA’s second-biggest market. Meanwhile, look at who played for the other Los Angeles team at that point. The Lakers were still in the midst of the Kobe Bryant-Shaquille O’Neal era. Imagine the publicity that would have come out of James and Bryant sharing a city. Think of the “next Michael Jordan” debates that would have been held between them. It would have been a goldmine.
- The No. 7 pick was held by Chicago… Jordan’s actual team. The stories write themselves. Jordan’s heir would wear the same uniform that he did.
- The No. 8 pick was held by Milwaukee. Like Denver, there is not an obvious conspiracy here.
- The No. 9 pick was held by New York. I don’t even need to explain the conspiracy here. James did it for me. If you’re willing to believe the NBA rigged the lottery to get Patrick Ewing to New York, you’re probably willing to believe that it would do so for James as well.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Sure, you could talk yourself into the NBA wanting to keep James at home… but you could talk yourself into half a dozen other possible conspiracy theories depending on the outcome of the 2003 lottery as well. These theories aren’t based on actual evidence. They take an outcome and work backwards, asking you to believe in them merely because a plausible motive for that outcome exists. But when a motive for any outcome exists, a conspiracy for every outcome becomes possible. That makes the concept of a conspiracy pretty easy to dismiss when there isn’t further evidence.
Let’s talk about those motives for a moment. The NBA kept James and Rose at home. Why hasn’t it done so other top prospects? Blake Griffin grew up in Oklahoma City and was drafted in 2009, the first draft in which the Thunder, rather than the Sonics, technically participated. Shouldn’t the NBA have sent him home by this logic?
What about markets? If the NBA wanted Ewing in New York, why was it comfortable sending Tim Duncan to San Antonio or Zion Williamson to New Orleans? If big-market teams are getting bailed out, why did the reeling Celtics fall to No. 5 in 2007, considered at the time to be one of the best drafts in NBA history? Or miss out on Duncan in 1997? Why are the Knicks mathematically one of the unluckiest teams in lottery history? How have the Cavaliers and Magic won four lotteries apiece when the Lakers have never won one?
The entire concept falls apart when prodded even a little bit. The lottery drawing is witnessed by representatives of every participating team as well as the media. Successfully rigging even a single lottery would require the secret to be kept by dozens of people with differing agendas and personal stakes in the results. If this were happening consistently, there would be better evidence for it than a fun story and the skepticism of a player affected by it. The reality is that you could talk yourself into a lottery conspiracy almost every year, and that alone should tell you that the conspiracies are probably bogus. Remember that in six weeks when the chance to draft Cooper Flagg is awarded.
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