When the Mavericks participate in the lottery for the 16th time in franchise history tonight, the hopelessness they feel will be understood by the masses.
Like the Mavericks, most of us have never won the lottery.
The NBA lottery is some of the worst TV you’ll ever see – an eerily quiet room with one man opening large envelopes to reveal the draft order. The only thing worse than the show has been the Mavericks’ luck.
In their 15 lottery appearances since 1986, the Mavericks have never moved to a better position. Six times, they have moved back to a worse pick in the draft. The other nine times, there was no movement.
If the NBA incorporated music into the lottery show, a perfect theme song for the Mavericks would be Albert King’s 1967 classic “Born Under a Bad Sign.”
“If it wasn’t for bad luck,” King sang, “I’d have no luck at all.”
That bad luck is why no one around here is the least bit excited about the Mavericks winning the right to draft Zion Williamson. And that is understandable.
The Mavericks tied with New Orleans and Memphis for seventh-worst record in the NBA, thus they are tied with the same two for the seventh-best chance to win the lottery. The three teams, however, have only a six percent chance each of winning the No. 1 pick.
That means they have a 94 percent chance of not winning.
But longshots have won before. Consider Cleveland. Since 2003, the Cavs have won the lottery four times and only once (2003) did they have the best odds. In 2014 and 2011, they had only the ninth- and eighth-best odds, respectively, but they won both.
The most outrageous lottery occurred in 1993 and it’s a special memory for me. At the time, I was working the NBA beat for Newsday in New York and as the draft lottery approached, I decided to do something that I was pretty sure had never been done –predict the lottery winner.
Predictions are a huge part in the profession of writing sports. Pre-season predictions, in-season predictions, playoff predictions, draft predictions, free agent predictions, off-season predictions such as which coaches will be fired, etc. – we’re always predicting something.
But no one, at least as far as I knew, had ever predicted the lottery. It was obviously not serious but rather was an amusing way, I thought, to poke fun at our tendency to predict everything. So I figured why not? At the time, the lottery had 11 teams and there were 66 ping pong balls with 11 going to the team with the worst record in the league. The team with the second-worst record had 10 balls, third-worst had nine, etc.
The Orlando Magic had won the lottery in 1992, which was a good one to win because the No. 1 pick was Shaquille O’Neal. They had won 21 games during the 1991-92 season but with Shaq, they improved to 41 wins and narrowly missed the playoffs.
Their success meant they would get only one ping pong ball. That gave them a miniscule 1.5 percent chance of winning the lottery, which made them the perfect team to pick in the first lottery prediction.
As I came closer to sending the article to the office, however, I decided it was too unlikely that Orlando would win, so I changed my prediction to Washington.
Amazingly, the Magic won and created an uproar. No one – including Orlando executives – could believe they won the lottery with one ball. Not only were the other lottery teams incensed, but the rest of the league was also upset. A system that gave a team the first pick in the draft with one ball was not a good system.
As for my Orlando prediction, it never saw the light of day. It would have been fun to be right, but I blew it.
Significant changes were made with the lottery weighted more heavily to help the worst teams in the league, but as Mavericks fans know, nothing helped Dallas.
Even before the lottery system was implemented by the league, the Mavericks had bad luck. In the 1980-81 expansion season, Dallas won 15 games and got the No. 1 pick. That year, however, there was no dominant center in the draft, so the Mavericks settled for Mark Aguirre, who was a great talent but was only 6-5.
In their second season, they improved to 28 wins and drafted No. 4, but it was not a good year and the Mavericks wasted their pick on Wyoming forward Bill Garnett who played only two years in Dallas and averaged fewer than six points a game.
Compare the Mavericks’ luck to Houston’s. In a two-year period, Dallas won 15 and 28 games and got Aguirre and Garnett in the draft. In a two-year period (1982-83 and 1983-84), the Rockets won 14 and 29 games, respectively, and drafted 7-4 Ralph Sampson and 7-0 Hakeem Olajuwon and eventually won two titles.
Bad luck, along with a significant number of bad picks, have plagued the Mavericks in the past, so there is little reason for the team or its fans to be optimistic.
But doesn’t that make it a perfect year for the Mavericks to get lucky? They lost a legend (Dirk Nowitzki) but found a gem (Luka Doncic) and made what could turn out to be the second-best trade in their history (Kristaps Porzingis for Dennis Smith, ranking behind only Dirk/Robert (Tractor) Traylor).
They have a good young nucleus and imagine adding Williamson, who will be 19 when the 2019-20 season begins, to a lineup with Doncic (20) and Porzingis (24). A wild dream for sure, but not something unprecedented.
There is another appealing aspect of the lottery. If the Mavericks do not move into the top five, their pick goes to Atlanta in the Doncic-Trae Young trade. So, winning the lottery, or moving into the top three, delays sending a pick to Atlanta until next year.
Like Orlando in 1993, it would be outrageous to predict the Mavericks will win the lottery, but why not? I believe Zion is coming to Dallas. And I’m not changing my mind.