I just read an article on the lottery, and it said that 4 balls are chosen per pick, giving a 4-digit number, I guess. The worst team gets 250 of the 1000 chances (given 4-digit numbers), and others get fewer chances.
So why use 14 balls? That weights it toward certain combinations.
Using this article for reference: Explaining how the NBA Draft lottery works - SBNation.com
Where you’re going wrong is that they’re not generating a 4-digit number - that is, the balls are (effectively) numbered not 0-9, but rather 1-14. They draw a sequence; thus the sequence might be 1-5-8-14 or 3-6-1-11 or whatever. Order doesn’t count, so 1-5-8-14 would be considered the same result as 8-5-14-1.
This produces 1001 possible combinations. The combination of 11-12-13-14 is thrown out (and I think they re-draw if that combination happens to come up). That leaves 1000 possible combinations, which are divvied up among the teams.
Why they do it in this complicated way, instead of just drawing three numbers 0-9, repeats allowed, from three separate hoppers - which would also result in 1000 possible combinations and have the advantage of being much simpler - is beyond me.
Sorry, I don’t get it.
The first ball has 14 possibilities, then 13, then 12, then 11. Multiply these, and you get over 24K combinations. How do we arrive at 1001?
Once you have the particular balls, there’s 24 ways you could have got each combination, each are treated the same so there’s only 1000 unique combinations
The 1001st combination should be “Comissioner’s Choice” if it comes up. That’d be fun.
Symbolic purposes, to represent the 14 lottery teams?
That could be. In the old days each lottery team had an equal chance, so there would have been 14 balls, each with one team’s logo. Maybe they just got too sentimentally attached to that number of ping-pong balls to bear the thought of change? Seems odd.
My guess is that they use 1 hopper and 14 balls instead of 3 hoppers and 3x10 balls because it’s cheaper and/or easier to audit.
I don’t think they switched to ping-pong balls until the weighted lottery began. Originally, it was envelopes with the team logos in them, which is what they still use to show the selected order.
When they started the weighted lottery, the team with the best record got 1 ball, the second-best got 2, and so on. I think there were 11 teams not in the playoffs at one point, so the team with the best record had a 1/66 chance of getting the first pick…and when it happened, they switched to the current method to make it much harder for that to happen again.
I am assuming they do it with the 14-ball method so they only need one blower instead of three. What I don’t understand is, why don’t they assign the 1001st combination?
I stand corrected. interesting that this is the only NBA related thread on the front page of the Game Room right now.
I’m clearly the least perceptive on this, but why would they need 3 blowers? I put balls 1-9 in a hopper, pick one, note the number, put it back, and 3 balls later I have a 4-digit number. Maybe they want to keep the balls out to prove the digit, but why 3 hoppers then, and not 4?
They would only need to generate a three-digit number, not four. If you have three hoppers, each with balls 0 through 9, then you generate a number in the range 000 - 999, which is 1,000 total.
The current system also generates 1,000 possible results (1,001 really), but it requires 4 choices because they’re throwing away the information about the order in which the balls were chosen. If they used the order, then 3 choices from 14 balls would be enough to generate more than 1,000 results.
For all of the forward thinking that the NBA has done in the last 20 years to establish itself, the fact that they can’t seem to make the lottery exciting and transparent is baffling to me.
It might have been on this board or some article, but I saw a video somewhere of the actual lottery. It was just as mind-numbingly boring as they say it is and I can totally understand why that’s not on TV despite the claims of full transparency. Its just stupid to do it that way. The ping pong balls come up with numbers and each team has a big board behind them to check if the order in which they came up matches one of the combinations they get. Sooooo stupid.
I’m with others when they say they should just do 0-9 and pick the first 4 digits that pop up. Have flashing lights for the winners or something, just make it more interesting
I think the main reason they don’t show it live is the possibility of the same team being drawn multiple times. (For example, if the Clippers get the first pick and one of the Clippers’ combinations is drawn for the second pick, they have to draw the second pick again.)
They could have a 6-digit draw, with each of the 1 million numbers determining the three teams, but that would be just as confusing in terms of how well it would come across on TV.
Is that really why they changed it? Why allow for slim-chance randomness when you’re going to toss out the whole system when that slim chance occurs? I remember when the Magic managed to get two high picks in a row despite being one of the low probability teams and they drafted Shaq and Penny Hardaway. The Bulls got one of the top picks one year too despite being one of the best teams in the draft and they drafted… well I’d rather not talk about that. (Curry and Chandler ugh)
Not just high picks, but back-to-back #1 picks. In 1992, they drafted Shaq with the #1 overall pick; in 1993, they were the best non-playoff team, so had only one of the 66 ping-pong balls (there were 11 lottery teams; each one had a number of balls from 1 to 11), but that’s the one that came out first, so they drafted Chris Webber, but after the Warriors drafted Penny, Orlando traded Webber for Penny and something like the Warriors’ first-round picks in the next three years. 1994 was the first year of the current “balls numbered 1-to-14” system.