u/capn_trips

Had a lot of fun analyzing historical draft luck today. You can see a bunch of other cuts of who teams have fared in the NBA draft over time here and see the methodology for how I'm quantifying pick value here.

The other charts all showed luck based on how the ping pong balls fell, not based on the team that actually selected from that spot. I think this chart might be the truest measure of who has benefitted the most from the NBA draft lottery over it's history, inclusive of trades.

A couple of notes:

• I generated a model that predicts where a team should pick based on their pre-lottery position, their odds of winning, and which era's lottery rules were in effect (fully explained in the previous post here). "Luck" is the difference between that prediction and where they actually landed, translated into draft-slot value.
• ARC value is about the draft position, not the player. LeBron is worth the same number of points as Kwame Brown as Anthony Edwards as Zaccharie Risacher.
• Rankings changed drastically when accounting for who made the pick on draft night vs. who originally owned the pick. Example: In 2011, LAC held the the #8 pre-lottery position. The ping pong balls jumped it to #1 overall — a +7 leap. But Cleveland owned the pick via trade. So ~74 ARC points of lottery luck (the difference between #1 and what the model predicted for an 8th-position team) went to Cleveland, not the Clippers.

Anything else stick out to you guys? Is this the best way to calculate luck?

Had some extra free time, so adding on to my first post ...

Previously we looked at the raw net values for where a team ended up picking vs. where they'd finished record-wise. That doesn't account for teams in the lottery, odds of that era, etc.

Going back to the drawing board, I wanted to think a bit more about how we could really quantify "luck". I ended up with this model for predicting a team's pick on a given year:

predicted_pick = 0.30 + 0.88*position + 1.65*odds + era-format adjustment

Using this equation, we can predict what a team's pick might be. For instance, in 2025, the Jazz had the worst record. Their pick could then be predicted like so:

predicted_pick = 0.30 + 0.88×1 + 1.65×0.14 + 0.51
               ≈ 1.92

We'd expect the Jazz to pick around pick 1.92. They got the 5th pick, -3.08 lower than what we'd predict. This is unlucky.

Using where the team picked vs. should be picking instead of just record vs. pick position, we can make some new conclusions:

• Philly, San Antonio, and LAL are still the luckiest. Detroit, NYK, and Golden State are the unluckiest. Philly is in the lotto a lot and lucky. SAS is luckiest on a per appearance basis.
• Sacramento is sneaky unlucky. Their raw net pick value is +1 (neutral luck), but their position-adjusted luck is -7.4. They are regularly picking lower than other teams that have picked in their slot.
• Memphis, on the other hand, is sneaky lucky relative to their expectations.

And lots of other things to look at there. Main takeaways for me: Philly is historically the luckiest, Spurs are the luckiest by far when they're in the lotto, and yeah ... Detroit really is that unlucky.

As the fan of a bottom feeder, the draft and draft lottery are the only real times I get to feel excitement and (usually) crushing defeat when the balls don't bounce my way.

I've seen a couple posts like this in the past, but I figured I'd re-run the numbers because I feel like there have been some anomalies in the past couple drafts. Used this data set to run the numbers and cross checked against RealGM.com for accuracy.

Here you have, statistically, the "luckiest" and "unluckiest" NBA teams over the history of the draft lottery. The computed number is the net pick change between a team's pre-lottery position and their actual draft pick. For example, Utah's 2025 pre-lottery position was #1, but they received the #5 draft pick. For 2025, they get a net pick change of -4.

Couple of interesting things I didn't annotate in the chart:

The single largest gains in the history of the draft are:

1. 1993 Orlando: +10 (drafted Chris Webber)
2. 1999 Charlotte: +10 (Baron Davis)
3. 2025 Dallas: +10 (Cooper Flagg)
4. 2024 Atlanta +9 (Zaccharie Risacher)
5. 1990 Seattle +8 (Gary Payton)

Three teams have never moved up, one has never moved down

The Nuggets (14 picks), Heat (11), and Jazz (11) have never advanced their position in the lottery. The Spurs (10) have never done worse than their pre-lottery position.