I don’t trust The Lottery. Not in the sense that certain envelopes in certain drafts spent a night in David Stern’s freezer; no, my mistrust is much more sinister and ridiculous than a chilled envelope that faintly smells of casserole. The Lottery is that generic salesman wearing an ugly tie with suspiciously nice hair and a permanent pinned-on smile, who breaks off mid-script, saying something like, “…listen, I’m going to level with you…,” before vomiting out some disarming sale-clinching special discount for the 100th time that week.

It’s laughing at us, The Lottery. It stands there once a year and tells us that tonight — for one night only — the fortunes of 14 franchises, all nervously twitching with various levels of powerless desperation, will be governed by chance and chance alone.

The Lottery isn’t lying, necessarily, but it’s telling the truth in a sneakily deceptive way. The smirking implication being that the rest of the NBA season is less random and subject to the whims of chance than that one fateful night in May (or August) when the ping-pong balls of destiny are unleashed. The Lottery isn’t a quirky one-off event in the offseason, it’s an ever-present force of NBA nature, and just like we wildly underestimate the role of chance in life, we struggle with the fundamentally random realities of the NBA.

The ping-pong balls never rest. The ping-pong balls are everywhere. The ping-pong balls are rarely ping-pong balls. 

Sometimes the ping-pong balls are actually injuries, like, say, I don’t know, an Achilles tendon in the NBA Finals, or an ACL tear on a blah February Tuesday, or another ACL tear at the end of a meaningless preseason game. Sometimes they’re casual hand-me-down corporate inheritances. Sometimes they’re just the unlikely existence of an entity as disgustingly beautiful as Michael Jeffrey Jordan.

This underestimation of pick-a-card chance feeds a corresponding overestimation of all those squishy absolutes we, as glorified two-legged certainty junkies, can’t help but crave. Right. Wrong. Success. Failure. The randomness that The Lottery temporarily admits to doesn’t disappear when the ping-pong balls stop pinging and ponging, it just scuttles off to malevolently randomize the next NBA event. 

The Lottery is far less of a lottery than the draft itself. From 2010 to 2015, the draft has produced 26 All-Stars. The average draft slot for these 26 guys is 14.1. Can you hear it? That little decimal is giggling. Fourteen point one. The Lottery is laughing at us.

The laughter is especially sharp this year, in this draft, because this one — as you may have heard — is a “bad” draft. Really, all drafts are bad, and all teams are bad at drafting; some just look like they’re good compared to others who are going through a particularly bad streak of picking the wrong teenage question mark. Often, teams that are crowned “good” at drafting are more likely just good basketball teams, and good basketball teams tend to be be better environments to become good basketball players than bad basketball teams. 

Then we have coaching, where success and failure are very slippery concepts indeed. Confidently assigning either label is like downing a bottle of vodka before clumsily attempting to remove a bar of soap from a sack full of agitated eels. Even after painstakingly separating situation from winning percentage, we’re basically left with a choose-your-own-narrative adventure. 

Gregg Popovich, a consensus sideline GOAT candidate, was one random loss away from being fired in 1999, before Avery Johnson rallied the troops and the Spurs went on a winning streak that paved the way to a title. Does Pop ever become Pop if he’s annexed from Tim Duncan after only one season together? Rick Carlisle (2003), George Karl (2013) and Dwane Casey (2018) were all fired a hot second after winning Coach of the Year, which should give us pause before we happily correlate win percentage with a definitive ability to coach, or its opposite, losses with a definitive inability to coach. They’re very often indicative, but never definitive.

It makes me extremely uncomfortable that David Fizdale was likely one undetonated Achilles away from winning a lot of basketball games as the Knicks’ head coach, because, well, Kevin Durant is alright at the basketball thing (See: 2010 NBA Coach of the Year Scott Brooks). This inevitably would have led to a statue being erected slap bang in the middle of ESPN The Jump’s propaganda studio, which would be dumb, because Fizdale makes me positively pine for the Kurt Rambis glory days.

And then there’s Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks’ newly appointed general. The basketball lifer. The old-school throwback. The frozen water enthusiast. Thibs is one of the winningest coaches of all time — imagine what he’d be if it was LeBron James whose knee exploded in 2012 instead of Derrick Rose’s? There’s a world where Thibs is Pop and Pop is Thibs and Fizdale still has a job. The possibility of that world punches the confident reality of this world square in the nose.

There are, as always, agreed-upon exceptions to this good-coach bad-coach Venn diagram. At the good end of the spectrum, we have Brad Stevens, who transcends the concept of employment and shits perfect little gold-plated X’s and beautifully circular diamond O’s. At the bad end of the spectrum, we have Jim Boylen, who somehow managed to go to sleep as a feared and respected high school gym teacher in 1954 and wake up as an NBA head coach in 2019. 

Even the analytics movement is, at heart, an admission of how much we don’t know about basketball. While this mass of unknown, this statistical NBA dark matter, isn’t exactly random, it may as well be up until the point that we adequately decipher tiny sections of it. Considering some of the league is still wrapping its head around the significance of the difference between two and three, it’s reasonable to assume there will be more eureka moments down the road, as mountains of data are gradually mined for actionable on-court advantages.

Of course, underlying randomness doesn’t diminish the importance of the details, process, and smart people doing smart things; but the competitive advantages these controllable franchise-by-franchise variables result in only increase a team’s ability to push back against the constant barrage of uncertainty. There is still an anarchic maniac driving the NBA fun-bus, it’s just that some teams have seatbelts on, some teams have helmets and seatbelts, and some teams are just short of black-out drunk flailing around in the aisle covered in their own vomit.

What’s the point? I hear you ask. 

Stay woke, my friends. Extra-woke even. Woke to the wild, wild west that is success and failure in the NBA. Woke to the presumed importance of ping-ping balls. Woke to the good-draft, bad-draft pseudo-dichotomy. Woke to the fluffy allure of wingspans and ceilings and upside. We are in the best-guess business, and even the absolute best best-guessers are still just guessing.

What’s that? Did Kyrie Irving just storm into my living room in a tin-foil hazmat suit and commandeer my keyboard? No-one can prove he didn’t. So I guess it probably happened.

In all seriousness though, listen, I will actually level with you: I’m petrified. Optimistic? Yes. But mostly just petrified that the Knicks, for the first time in seven thousand or so days, are picking themselves up off the floor of the bus, and making a wobbly beeline for the nearest available seatbelt. For so long, all Knicks fans have wanted is a plan, far from trusting any process in particular, we’re happy to trust that there is in fact a process.

Now we have a man in Leon Rose who appears to have a plan. Admittedly, Knicks fans have been known to throw the occasional premature party the instant the franchise even glances in the general direction of a plan. But whatever. The alternative is to cry all the liquid out of my skull every time I see anything blue or orange for the rest of time. Or be patient. No, premature optimism is the winner.

So there’s nothing else for it but to cross our collective fingers, close our eyes, and pray for friendly ping-pong balls; because, really, the capital L Lottery is just the beginning. Welp.