An NBA Draft Lottery analysis: Is getting worse than we are really necessary?

[mmmmm]

I think Pho just meant that you need assets to trade for a top 5 talent, but you don't need assets to get a top 5 pick. So in that sense it's easier.

The standard disclaimer of course applies: "unless you're the Lakers."

As always, Boris Badenov wins at reading comprehension / understanding the basic argument.  TP.

I totally comprehended what you wrote.  I challenged you to explain your basis for why acquiring top 5 talent through the draft is 'easier'.

You are now claiming it is 'easier' only because it doesn't require you to give up talent in trade.

That begs the question though:  Is that the only cost?

If you acquire it only via the draft, by definition, you have to have a team that was bad enough to get into the lottery.   To get a high pick, you have to be then either lucky or really, really really bad (to guarantee a top 5 pick).

If you are lucky - that's great.   We all like to be lucky.  However, the odds are not favorable here.  Being on the fringe of the lottery is overwhelmingly going to lead to just a 10-14 pick.  Nice, but not a 'top 5' talent.

Relying on extremes of luck is simply bad management.

So ... you have to be really bad in order to reliably get a 'top 5' pick.  You have to tank.

You can be that bad in two ways:  Accidentally (injuries decimating your current stars) or on purpose (get rid of your talent and maybe even play dumb lineups to void the talent you have).

Praying for injuries just seems really stupid.  If they happen, and you tank, you can be okay ... IF the injuries are not career impeding (See: Spurs, David Robinson) in which case your team is really stronger when you come out of the tank ... err bad season.   If the injuries are career ending (or just impairing), then you end up not much better off.  You gained the star you drafted ... but lost the star who was injured.

If you tank by purposefully unloading talent, then all you've done is create a team that has no talent except the star draft pick you just added.   

If you tank by playing bad on purpose?  Ugh.  I don't even know if that's possible.

I'm going to submit that there are definite _costs_ involved with tanking.   

If you lost talent either through injury or by purposely ridding yourself of it, you now have to make deals to rebuild it around your 'star pick'.     So, instead the the 'cost' that you didn't want to pay of trading a bunch of pieces to get a star, you now have the costs involved with rebuilding a bunch of pieces to complement your drafted star.

The problem is, That has only worked a couple of times  for top 3 picks in the last 30 years:  a) Sampson to whom Olajuwon was added ... and it still took a decade to win a title and b) Robinson, which did not work until a decade later when they added another star pick in Duncan.

It can take a LOONG time to rebuild a team from that bad, especially trying to rely on the draft.

Aside from the fact that you may have lost talent (whether by injury or by trading it away), there are serious financial hits.   

If you are a team like the Bobcats, who have no attendance to lose and no playoffs to miss, that's one thing.  They basically have no expectation of those revenues.

But for a team like the Celtics the costs of losing ticket sales for a season can be harsh.  And in recent years, playoff games have amounted to something like 10% of their total BRI.

To purposely decide to forego a run at the playoffs is giving up millions of dollars in revenue.

So I just do NOT agree that your assertion that the 'easiest' way to get top 5 talent is by directly drafting it.

And, per my earlier post, the fact that the vast majority of title winning teams did it (added their 'top 5' talent) instead by using trades or free agency suggests that they don't think using the draft is the easiest way either.

[Boris Badenov]

This reminds me of this recent article:

"Via Andrew Sullivan, Chris Dillow points us toward a weird experiment in a fourth-year finance class at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. One student flipped a coin five times and a group of 20 students predicted heads or tails for each toss. Then a second group of students was told that there would be another set of five coin tosses. The best and worst guessers from the first group would try their luck again, and everyone in the second group would earn money for each coin flip that the worst guesser got right.

But there's more! If students in the second group were willing to pay for the privilege, they could instead earn money for each coin flip that the best guesser got right. There's no reason to do this, of course, since guessing is just guessing. Nonetheless, 82 percent of the students paid to switch to the better guesser."


Please take a statistics class.


250 combinations, 25.0% chance of receiving the #1 pick
199 combinations, 19.9% chance
156 combinations, 15.6% chance
119 combinations, 11.9% chance
88 combinations, 8.8% chance
63 combinations, 6.3% chance
43 combinations, 4.3% chance
28 combinations, 2.8% chance
17 combinations, 1.7% chance
11 combinations, 1.1% chance
8 combinations, 0.8% chance
7 combinations, 0.7% chance
6 combinations, 0.6% chance
5 combinations, 0.5% chance
Here are the odds for each seed to get specific picks if there were no ties (rounded to 3 decimal places):
Seed   Chances   1st   2nd   3rd   4th   5th   6th   7th   8th   9th   10th   11th   12th   13th   14th
1   250   .250   .215   .178   .357                              
2   199   .199   .188   .171   .319   .123                           
3   156   .156   .157   .156   .226   .265   .040                        
4   119   .119   .126   .133   .099   .351   .160   .012                     
5   88   .088   .097   .107      .261   .360   .084   .004                  
6   63   .063   .071   .081         .439   .305   .040   .001               
7   43   .043   .049   .058            .599   .232   .018   .000            
8   28   .028   .033   .039               .724   .168   .008   .000         
9   17   .017   .020   .024                  .813   .122   .004   .000      
10   11   .011   .013   .016                     .870   .089   .002   .000   
11   8   .008   .009   .012                        .907   .063   .001   .000
12   7   .007   .008   .010                           .935   .039   .000
13   6   .006   .007   .009                              .960   .018
14   5   .005   .006   .007                                 .982

Every ounce of information you need is right here. Combing through the past data is ridiculous. Like breaking down the data in the first 20 coin flips out of a million.

That goes for the conspiracy theories as well. Unless you think Stern really wants great players to end up in Orlando and Cleveland - 2 of the 4 or 5 worst markets in the league.  Don't get fooled by the randomness.

Just so you know I have a BME and am two semesters away from a BA in Mathematics and then plan to get my MA in Applied Mathematics. I've taken a stats class or four in my life.

This was a historical look at expectations and not a future look per se. My guess is the NBA won't be around for a million years for every possible outcome to come to fruition. So why not look back and see what outcomes have occurred and take a look at those results to see what might transpire if recent results are any indication. It gives a great window to look through for expectations.

I actually enjoyed the post for what it is. Sometimes seeing actual data can illustrate a point, in this case the point being that lottery outcomes can be variable. I would guess that there are plenty of people who would find such an exercise as interesting and informative as the matrix of lottery probabilities.

Not to mention that Nick's data illustrate several other things that the lottery matrix cannot address, all related to the bigger question "Is drafting in the top 3-5 an essential element of building a championship team?"

The answer to that question will depend on, among other things:
1. The distribution of talent in the league (i.e. how top-heavy it is);
2. How often top-5 players are drafted in the top 3-5 picks;
3. How often top-5 players leave the teams that drafted them;

Etc.

Nick's data provide a nice summary view of the net effect of many of those things, because the thing you see immediately is how few of those teams won a championship.

But anyway, I also got curious about the actual statistics that would be analogous to the data Nick presented. So, I calculated the "expected draft position" of each lottery slot. This is just the average draft position each slot would end up with, if the lottery were run a large number of times.

Lottery slot   Expected pick
1                2.6
2                3.0
3                3.4
4                4.0
5                4.7
6                5.5
7                6.5
8                7.6
9                8.7
10               9.8
11              10.8
12              11.8
13              12.8
14              13.8

I think this is another nice illustration of the point that getting a better lottery slot may pay off only slightly in many cases.

For example, the worst 3 records are all in fairly similar shape in terms of average draft position. Being 2nd worst is only 0.4 slots worse in expected draft position than being the worst team. And, being 3rd worst is not even a full slot worse than being the absolute worst.

In the first three positions, the expected pick is worse than the team's record would warrant. That reverses for picks 5-14, for whom expected picks are better than what you'd get if draft order were determined completely by team record. This is of course the intention of having the lottery - it mutes the incentive to be bad.

There are some other neat things too - like, going from 1st to 4th is much less costly (-1.4 expected pick slots) than going from 7th to 10th (-3.3 expected slots). These are things you might want to know heading into the stretch run of the season.

[nickagneta]

Awesome work, Boris. Some great stuff right there!! TP.

[hwangjini_1]

great job as usual boris. thanks for the time, stats, and analysis.

so, basically, it seems to say that positions 1-3 are not enormously different in terms of their chances for the first pick.

and it also seems to say that a team that winds up in the top 7 THIS draft will still have a shot at a very good player. this bodes well for our celtics.

tp for the work.

[Boris Badenov]

and it also seems to say that a team that winds up in the top 7 THIS draft will still have a shot at a very good player. this bodes well for our celtics.

The more I look at it, there is actually some nuance to it in those 4-7 lottery slots that makes it very dependent on how many good players are available.

As one example if there are 6 good players and they're all taken 1-6, and then there's a big dropoff, you really care about being in the top 6.

In that event being 4th worst gives you a 99% chance at one of those guys. But being 7th worst gives you only a 15% chance.

This is because of the fact that the 7th lottery slot will never have the 4th, 5th or 6th pick in the draft. You either jump into the top 3 or you pick 7th or worse, from that lottery slot.

Of course, one of those top guys could slip, etc...there is a lot of randomness even after the draft order is set. But it's interesting how the way the lottery is structured creates these weird breaks in the probabilities.

[mmmmm]

and it also seems to say that a team that winds up in the top 7 THIS draft will still have a shot at a very good player. this bodes well for our celtics.

The more I look at it, there is actually some nuance to it in those 4-7 lottery slots that makes it very dependent on how many good players are available.

As one example if there are 6 good players and they're all taken 1-6, and then there's a big dropoff, you really care about being in the top 6.

In that event being 4th worst gives you a 99% chance at one of those guys. But being 7th worst gives you only a 15% chance.

This is because of the fact that the 7th lottery slot will never have the 4th, 5th or 6th pick in the draft. You either jump into the top 3 or you pick 7th or worse, from that lottery slot.

Of course, one of those top guys could slip, etc...there is a lot of randomness even after the draft order is set. But it's interesting how the way the lottery is structured creates these weird breaks in the probabilities.

A lot of that information is visualized in this sort of grid view:


This shows the gaps in possible position you refer to, once you have the 5th or 'better' record.

There are some relevant differences to the top 4 picks as well, for some teams.   For example, the 76ers own the Pelican's 1st round pick, but it is Top-5 Protected for the next two years.   If the Pelicans struggle at all (injury, whatever), and look like they are going to end up in the lottery, they will have a compelling interest to make sure their pick is in the top 5.   But the only way for NO to guarantee a top 5 pick is to finish with the worst or second-worst record.

The 76ers, of course, can help try to prevent that by occupying at least one of those slots.   they need a few other teams to also 'race for Wiggins' to block NO out.

The concept of trading 'protected' picks is probably something the league should not allow.