The NBA Draft Lottery: The Sixers Best Friend or Worst Nightmare?

It's been well documented by now just how poor a season the Philadelphia 76ers have had in the 2025/26 NBA season. A season which started with many predicting a deep play off push, resulted in the Sixers confirmed as a lottery team by late March after a blowout loss to the middling Miami Heat. So as we watch the NBA's finest battle it out in the post-season Sixer fans and indeed those employed in the front office, must now look to the NBA Draft as our first opportunity to rectify the wrongs of last season.

To those more familiar with the NFL, MLB, or NHL, the draft is a relatively easy to understand concept as illustrated by the NFL draft that took place just over a week ago. The Tennessee Titans had the worst record in the league, therefore they had the first pick in the draft. Likewise, after dominating the Chiefs in the Superbowl to become champions, the Philadelphia Eagles naturally pick last at pick number 32 with all remaining teams ordering themselves from worst to best in-between these picks. Allowing for the worst teams to hopefully get to a position where they can compete and creating a league with a lot more balance in terms of talent.

The NBA however has taken a slightly different mode of operation. Since 1985 the Draft Lottery has been used to determine who gets the top picks in the NBA. Amendments to the process since 1985 have made it so now the first 4 picks will be allocated to any of the 14 non-playoff teams regardless of record. Whilst if you sit at the bottom of the NBA standings you do have a higher chance of obtaining that number 1 pick, there is no guarantee, and theoretically a team who may have just missed the play-offs after a tight play-in game can swoop in and steal it from the more lowly teams.

The lottery odds of all non-play off teams

The lottery was designed to prevent teams 'tanking', essentially to stop teams losing on purpose to get those all important top draft picks. And whilst another debate can be had as to whether this problem has been solved (The Process era Sixers under Hinkie an obvious counter to this debate) this is the situation we find ourselves in. With the 5th worst record in the league we have a strong 42.1% chance of a top 4 pick, and a 10.5% chance of having the number 1 pick.

And there have been plenty of success stories coming out of the draft lottery. One can only look to 1997 to illustrate this. In the season prior the San Antonio Spurs had been flying. Led by former league MVP David Robinson, the Spurs won 59 games finishing 2nd in the west before losing in the second round to a Karl Malone and Jon Stockton led Utah Jazz. Clearly this was a team with championship potential. Come next season, Robinson and his all-star teammate Sean Elliott were both felled by injuries early into the season that would rule them out indefinitely resulting in the Spurs having the third worst record in the league. Although there were teams with higher odds, and with objectively worse squads, it was the Spurs who had the ping pong balls fall their way obtaining the first pick and eventually selecting unanimous number 1 pick Tim Duncan. With Robinson and Elliott returning the next season the Spurs would propel themselves back up the standings but yet again falling to the Jazz in the second round. The season after however, they won their first ever title as a franchise with Duncan as finals MVP forming a formidable partnership with David Robinson, a duo dubbed as 'The Twin Towers.' Duncan went on to lead the Spurs to 4 more championships, the most recent of which coming in 2014. Safe to say, the status of the Spurs as a franchise, the players they attracted, all the success that followed, all started with a few balls landing in the right spot. Since then even, they've been the beneficiaries of the draft lottery, after securing the number one pick to draft Victor Wembanyama in 2023 despite Detroit having a worse record.

Tim Duncan (Left) and David Robinson (Right) celebrate their NBA title victory in 1999.

The San Antonio Spurs have unmistakably been the success story of the Draft Lottery since its inception. They've shown that with a little bit of luck, the future of your franchise can positively change for well over a decade, and no sooner has Duncan retired that the same process has seemingly happened to them again with Wemby going from strength to strength in the league. But whilst the lottery can be the best way to turn your teams fortune around, it can also be the worst, just ask the Washington Wizards who despite routinely sitting at the bottom of the NBA standings, cannot seem to be lucky enough to garner a top 3 draft pick let alone a number 1 pick. Likewise, the Sixers have to be concerned that they may not even get their pick at all after sending their 2025 pick to OKC for Danny Green and to get off a horrendous Al Horford contract (Another example of Front Office failures and short-sightedness jeopardising our future). The pick traded however is top-6 protected, so if the pick is between numbers 1-6 its still Philly's, but anywhere beneath that, it goes to OKC. Meaning the Sixers have a 64% chance of having a first round pick. It is because of this I have been hesitant to make sweeping predictions about who I'd like us to draft as simply put, we do not know if we'll be able to draft anyone in the first round. Of course we all dream of unanimous number one pick and Duke forward Cooper Flagg but as Sixer fans we've been conditioned to expect the worst and have our hope regularly crushed.

The draft lottery starts at 12am GMT on Monday 12th May, its a damning indictment that there are people in the front office paid 6-figure salaries who've put us in a position where now our future rests solely on what is essentially a gamble, a game of chance. We desperately of course want to envisage ourselves as a San Antonio Spurs, a team that with just a bit of luck can establish themselves as one of the leagues finest. But it would be remiss of me to not look at all the evidence and probably lean a bit more towards the idea that we could very likely end up like a Washington Wizards, who after years of ineptitude and being ran into the ground by sub-par GM's are paying the price for all the bad decisions they've made.

To try to give myself some hope, I've ran the lottery simulator 10 times, here's what I got:

Sim 1: Pick #2

Sim 2: Pick #9 (PICK GOES TO OKC)

Sim 3: Pick #2

Sim 4: Pick #2

Sim 5: Pick #6

Sim 6: Pick #7 (PICK GOES TO OKC)

Sim 7: Pick #6

Sim 8: Pick #1

Sim 9: Pick #6

Sim 10: Pick #4

What pick will the Sixers end up with?

• 1-2
• 3-4
• 5-6
• It's going to OKC