Every spring, before a single draft pick is made, fourteen teams gather in a sealed room and watch ping pong balls decide their future. The NBA draft lottery is the closest thing the sport has to a game of pure chance, and the stakes could not be higher: the winner walks away with the number one overall pick and, often, a shot at a franchise-changing superstar.
The lottery exists for a reason. Before 1985, the worst teams simply picked first, which gave struggling clubs an incentive to lose on purpose. The lottery added randomness to discourage that, and the system has been tweaked repeatedly ever since to make tanking less rewarding. It does not always work, but it has produced some of the most dramatic moments in basketball’s offseason.
The chart below lists the lottery winner for every recent year, the odds they overcame, and the player that pick became, along with the records and the history of how the system has changed. Take a look, then we’ll get into the details.
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How the lottery actually works
The mechanics are part game show, part accounting exercise. Each year the 14 teams that miss the playoffs are entered into the lottery, with the worst teams given the best odds. Fourteen ping pong balls numbered 1 through 14 go into a machine, and four are drawn to form a combination. There are 1,001 possible combinations, 1,000 of which are distributed among the teams according to their odds, and the team holding the winning combination gets the first pick. The process repeats to determine the second, third, and fourth selections, after which the rest of the order simply follows reverse record.
One subtlety trips people up: the lottery winner is the team that draws the top pick, which is not always the team with the worst record, and not always the team that ends up making the selection if the pick was traded. Since 2019, only the top four picks are decided by the draw, which means even the worst team in the league can fall no further than fifth. The whole apparatus is overseen by an accounting firm in a sealed room, with team representatives barred from electronic contact until the result is revealed on television.
The long shots that shocked everyone
The drama of the lottery comes from the upsets, the nights a team with almost no chance jumps the entire field. The most recent and most stunning was 2025, when the Dallas Mavericks won the top pick with just a 1.8 percent chance, the fourth-biggest underdog ever to win, and landed Duke phenom Cooper Flagg months after trading away Luka Doncic. It echoed 2014, when the Cleveland Cavaliers won with 1.7 percent odds, the kind of result that fuels every conspiracy theory about the lottery being staged.
Cleveland, in fact, became the poster child for lottery luck in the early 2010s, winning the top pick three times in four years, in 2011, 2013, and 2014, despite rarely holding the best odds. That run let them draft Kyrie Irving and, crucially, gave them the 2014 pick they would use as a trade asset during LeBron James’s return, a windfall of fortune that helped build a championship team almost overnight.
When the favorites deliver
Not every lottery is an upset. Sometimes the team with the best odds simply wins, and the result reshapes the league anyway. In 2023, the San Antonio Spurs won the top pick with the joint-best 14 percent odds and selected Victor Wembanyama, the most hyped prospect since LeBron James, an outcome that felt almost too perfect for a storied franchise. The 2019 New Orleans Pelicans defied slightly longer 6 percent odds to land Zion Williamson, another generational talent.
These moments matter because the number one pick so often becomes a cornerstone. Anthony Davis, Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Edwards, and Cade Cunningham all arrived as lottery-won top picks and became franchise pillars. For the teams involved, one lucky drawing can compress years of rebuilding into a single night, which is exactly why the lottery draws such intense attention every May.
Why the system keeps changing
The lottery has been reformed repeatedly, almost always for the same reason: to discourage tanking. The original 1985 version gave every non-playoff team an equal chance, but the Knicks’ win that first year, landing Patrick Ewing, immediately drew accusations the draw was rigged. The league moved to a weighted system in 1990, then to the ping pong ball format in 1994, which handed the worst team a hefty 25 percent shot at the top pick.
That generous reward for being terrible eventually backfired, most visibly when the Philadelphia 76ers openly embraced “The Process,” losing on purpose for years to stockpile high picks. In response, the NBA flattened the odds beginning in 2019, giving the three worst teams identical 14 percent chances and expanding the lottery to the top four selections. The goal was to make bottoming out less rewarding, and while teams still tank, the math now punishes it more than it used to.
Final Word
The NBA draft lottery is where hope is distributed, sometimes fairly, sometimes cruelly, and always with maximum suspense. The list of winners reads like a map of the league’s shifting fortunes, from the Knicks landing Ewing in the very first lottery to the Wizards claiming the top spot in 2026. Some winners overcame nearly impossible odds, while others simply took the prize their poor season had earned them.
What never changes is the stakes. One winning combination of ping pong balls can deliver a Wembanyama, an Anthony Davis, or a Cooper Flagg, and turn a struggling team into a contender. As each new lottery approaches, fourteen fan bases let themselves dream, knowing that a single lucky bounce could change everything. For more on what happens once those picks are made, see our list of NBA first overall picks by year.