The Detroit Pistons were not in the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery and it’s probably for the best.
The team with the worst record once again failed to walk away with the top pick, as has happened every year since the NBA flattened the odds for the bottom three teams.
In fact, none of Les Misérables at the bottom were rewarded, as Utah and Washington dropped four spots and New Orleans dropped three, giving them the 5th, 6th and 7th picks, respectively.
The Pistons know this pain well, as they dropped to the 5th pick three years in a row after having one of the worst records in the league.
In the year the Pistons did win big, they had the second-worst record, so actually moved up one spot in the lottery that landed Cade Cunningham.
Meanwhile, play-in team Dallas, who had just a 1.8 percent chance, were gifted the number one pick, which certainly softens the blow of their disastrous trade of Luka Doncic.
And to absolutely no one's surprise, the San Antonio Spurs moved up six spots to land the #2 pick, the fourth straight year they have bucked the odds to move into the top four.
The Spurs are undoubtedly the luckiest team in the Lottery, but really only tanked once, which should be a lesson to the rest of the league.
Tanking doesn’t work but what is the solution?
I genuinely feel sorry for fans of the Hornets, Wizards, Pelicans and Jazz, as they just suffered through awful seasons only to end up with mediocre picks in the draft.
It’s hard to know the answer to this problem, as the only real way to rebuild a roster is to gut it and hope to luck out in the draft. It’s hard to win without a superstar and the draft is the only way a team like the Wizards is going to get one, a task that gets a lot harder when you drop to the 6th pick after winning just 18 games.
The flattened lottery odds haven’t discouraged tanking but certainly haven’t rewarded it, as the worst teams have repeatedly fallen while non-tanking teams move up, as happened just last season when the Hawks got the top pick after making the play-in game.
There hasn’t been an advantage to being one of the worst, and you can argue the meager statistical advantage of landing the number one pick is not worth the tradeoff of putting your young players in losing situations where development is more difficult.
14 percent odds are still low and there is a big developmental benefit to actually trying to build a team and win games, ask the Pistons, who watched all of their young guys improve with better veterans around them, the benefit of which was far greater than another long shot in the draft.
And when you look at the parity around the league coupled with the difficulties of keeping a great team together under the new CBA (ask the Celtics) and teams may feel they could be the next Pistons, even the next Pacers, the team that comes out of nowhere with the right additions and team building.
Until the league finds a better way for small-market teams to get stars, they are going to tank and you can’t blame them, but Indiana is solid proof that if you draft well and make the right trades, you can build a team without a number one pick.
I hope this leads to fewer teams tanking outright and more competitive basketball from the top of the league to the bottom, as right now, the worst teams are getting no love from the Lottery Gods.