The future of the NBA is in the balance and the Detroit Pistons are center stage.
At 8 p.m. Tuesday, the world will find out which city 7-foot-5 French phenom Victor Wembanyama will call home.
Basketball fans have been seeing and hearing about “Wemby” for years now, as clips, rumors and legends have built up around his ridiculous size and skills.
For the last year or more, teams across the league have prepared for this moment, trying to gather every last ping pong ball available by losing early and often, or as soon it was clear they couldn’t compete.
HOW DOES THE LOTTERY WORK: NBA draft lottery odds 2023: This is Detroit Pistons’ most important lotto since Darko
Now, the day is here. The 14 teams who did not qualify for the NBA playoffs have been slotted into different percentages based on where they finished in the regular season standings.
It’s a little complicated, but the teams in the lottery are given a number of combinations that could be drawn from the Smart Play lottery machine. The worse you were in the 2022-23 season, the better the chance you have of getting the No. 1 pick, or in this case, getting Wembanyama.
At the top are the Pistons, the Houston Rockets and the San Antonio Spurs, each with a 14% chance of winning the top pick. The NBA flattened the odds a few years ago in an effort to temper the race to the bottom. It hasn’t stopped tanking, but it has made losing slightly less of a guarantee to acquire elite talent. In flattening the odds, they also made it so the bottom three teams also have a strong chance of dropping to pick No. 5.
The highly-anticipated night is filled with drama and definitely made for TV.
2023 NBA draft lottery
When: 8 p.m., before Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals
Where: McCormick Place Convention Center, Chicago
TV: ESPN
Pistons’ full odds:
- Pick 1: 14%
- Pick 2: 13.4%
- Pick 3: 12.7%
- Pick 4: 12%
- Pick 5: 47.9%
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