Pacers don’t win lottery but still pleased

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CHICAGO — After the first three lottery balls were pulled Tuesday, the Indiana Pacers still had a chance of acquiring a player that Kevin Pritchard believes is so special that he won’t ever play in front of an empty seat.

The NBA Draft Lottery operates sort of like a four-number daily state lottery, but it’s just slightly more random. There are 14 balls placed in a lottery machine and numbered 1-14 and four of them are pulled out to determine each pick. There are 1,001 possible combinations when four balls are drawn out of 14, and 1,000 of those are assigned to the 14 teams in the lottery with each team getting a number of combinations based on the reverse standings.

The Pacers entered Tuesday with just a 6.8% chance of landing the No. 1 pick — and certainly using it on French phenom Victor Wembanyama — but when the first three numbers were spit out, the Pacers had a combination with all three.

“My heart was racing, man,” said Pritchard, the Pacers’ president of basketball operations and the team’s representative in the drawing room. “I was super-excited. Washington was next to us. It was us, Washington and a couple of other teams left. We were close.”

Determining exactly how close would require more information to do the math. It certainly wasn’t a coin flip, but even if it was 1 in 14, that’s a lot better than 1 in 1,000. Still, when the fourth number came out, the Pacers didn’t have it and the San Antonio Spurs did. The Pacers didn’t have the combinations for picks 2, 3 or 4 either as those went to Charlotte, Portland and Houston respectively. Instead, the Pacers will pick seventh, exactly where they would have picked if there was no lottery and they got their selection on the basis of where they finished in the reverse standings. They haven’t picked in the top four since they chose Rik Smits No. 2 overall in the 1988 draft.

But Pritchard still considered holding on to the No. 7 pick to be, on-balance, a win. The Pacers could have moved back if teams behind them in the reverse standings had moved ahead of them to get a pick in the top four. He refused to mention names of players, but said he believes the…

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Author : IndyStar | The Indianapolis Star

Publish date : 2023-05-17 08:50:36

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