The NBA draft lottery has just been decided and the Dallas Mavericks have, against all odds (literally; they had a 1.8% chance), earned the first overall pick in the 2025 NBA draft.
This means that the Mavericks will have the option to pick up Duke freshman and college basketball superstar, Cooper Flagg in the draft. It’s very likely that they do, considering Flagg is one of the most attention-grabbing basketball players in the past few years.
Still, this isn’t the most surprising thing the Mavericks have gone through this year. Earlier, Nico Harrison, the general manager of the Mavericks, orchestrated a trade between the Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, and the Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis, which shocked the basketball world. A top player in the league was inexplicably traded for a washed-up star, at best. That trade went very poorly for the Mavericks. Davis almost immediately got injured while Doncic continued to perform excellently in Los Angeles.
The saga between Doncic and Harrison has continued to intensify, though it has been very painful for Doncic.
On their own, both of these events are extremely surprising, but together?
Basketball fans are starting to believe that there’s more to the situation than the NBA was letting on. There are several different theories with different implications, but the core theory is that the NBA wanted Luka Doncic off of the relatively less popular Mavericks from Dallas, and instead in LA, where the Lakers are extremely popular. This would give Doncic, one of the top players in the league, more room to shine and have potential to draw more fans in LA than he could in Dallas. However, since trading Doncic would be costly for the Mavericks, the NBA compensated for this by giving them the top pick in a rigged lottery.
On the face of it, the theory makes a decent amount of sense. And it was espoused, or at least publicized, by several sports personalities on X (formerly known as Twitter), including Joe Pompliano and Robert Griffin III.
There are a few inconsistencies, however, the most obvious being that the Dallas media market is relatively large. Dallas is ranked fourth in media market size according to Nielsen, a TV and media analysis company, whereas Los Angeles is only two spots ahead. Why would the NBA risk illegal dealings just to move a player, who isn’t even the best in the league, to a slightly larger market?
Additionally, the concept of compensating with the draft lottery is somewhat flawed, as giving Cooper Flagg to a supposedly inferior media market would be bad for the league as well. In fact, Flagg coming to LA would likely make a bigger difference than Doncic playing in LA, so why wouldn’t the NBA make sure Flagg ended up there instead?
The process of the lottery is quite transparent as well. The winners are chosen by a ping-pong ball lottery machine, and the machine was created by Smart Play, the same company that manufactures machines for state lotteries as well. So, it would be difficult for the NBA to rig it without Smart Play working with them, which could open them up to lawsuits and destroy their business in the long term.
These rebuttals weaken the argument that this situation was orchestrated by the NBA, but the thought stays present in many fans’ minds regardless. While it’s unlikely that the draft lottery is rigged in reality, it’s hard to deny that the circumstances of the lottery were extremely surprising and an incredible coincidence for the Mavericks.
