NBA Lottery process not expected to change

The NBA lottery process is not expected to have changes even after the season has been suspended due to coronavirus pandemic.

Per ESPN, The NBA’s draft lottery won’t take place Tuesday in Chicago as originally planned, but whenever it does happen, it is likely to look the same as it did last year, league sources told ESPN.

Executives brought up several potential reasons that the lottery wouldn’t be tweaked because of the unusual circumstances in which the league finds itself. One is the fact that every team in the league has played somewhere between 63 and 67 games — or more than 75% of its season, a representative sample. Although things likely would have shifted in the final few weeks of the regular season, there isn’t a credible argument to be made that not enough games have been played to fairly set the order.

Under the new system, the top four spots are selected via the lottery, and the odds are drastically flattened. The teams with the worst three records are given 14% odds of winning the top pick, and the teams fourth through 13th in the lottery have their odds of moving up increased.