Why a Lottery Decides the Fate of Cooper Flagg and the Mavericks

The Dallas Mavericks won the NBA lottery Monday night by securing the first overall pick in the 2025 NBA draft and the chance to draft Cooper Flagg, the NBA’s most heralded prospect since LeBron James was selected first overall in the 2003 NBA Draft.

Once again, an NBA team’s fortunes for the next decade or so turned on the sequence of ping pong balls generated by a lottery machine. The San Antonio Spurs came close to landing Flagg, securing the second overall pick based on the lottery balls, but will instead have to identify the best of the rest.

It can be rightfully asked why such a franchise-altering event is determined by a lottery. There is no league more fixated on data, analytics and algorithms than the NBA. Teams invest massive resources in hiring talented and data-driven basketball operations staff in hopes of outsmarting each other. Yet the player thought to be “the next great one” is going to a team because it won a lottery, by definition a random process.

There are other ways Flagg could enter the NBA. 

Like in the NFL, the first pick could be awarded to the team with the worst regular season record (the Utah Jazz). From 1966 to 1984, the NBA used a variant of that approach by having the team with the worst record in each conference flip a coin. The league moved away from the use of records because of concerns it incentivized teams to tank. To that point, in 1982, then-Clippers owner Donald Sterling was recorded as saying, “Maybe I have to lose the battle to win the war, we must end last to draw first to get a franchise-maker.”

Although the current lottery is weighted to favor the team with the worst-record and is limited only to the 14 teams that failed to make the playoffs, the lottery’s outcome remains a mystery until it is revealed. In other words, an NBA team losing this past season didn’t guarantee it the chance to draft Flagg. San Antonio and Philadelphia, meanwhile, now hold the numer two and three picks in the upcoming draft, while teams accused of tanking to lower their position fared far worse in the lottery.

A more radical approach would be to eliminate the draft altogether. Flagg could sign with the team with whom he most wishes to sign. He’s from Maine, so maybe he’d want to sign with the Boston Celtics. Or maybe Flagg wants to team up with James and Luka Dončić in Los Angeles. Or if he’s liked living in North Carolina over the last year, the Charlotte Hornets are right there.

That sounds radical from a sports perspective, yet it captures 99.9% of employment in the United States. Employers in other industries don’t “draft” college students, nor are bad employers rewarded with the best college prospects. The valedictorians of MIT, Princeton, Stanford and similarly prestigious schools–including Duke, where Flagg’s freshman classmates will enter the job market in a few years–aren’t assigned to the worst companies in America. That idea sounds nonsensical because it is. If a company is struggling, it goes out of business. It’s not rewarded.

Yet major sports leagues use drafts because they help to ensure that every team has a legitimate chance to succeed. That, in turn, retains and grows fan bases, boosts TV ratings and ultimately generates more revenue for the league. It might not be “fair” to Flagg that he’s denied the chance to pick his employer, but the logic is that the league is healthier if a weaker team’s fortunes are boosted with Flagg and other top prospects. Even when a fan’s team is bad, there is hope that everything will change with the draft. That hope might keep that person a fan of a team and not turn their attention and dollars to some other form of entertainment.

Drafts in the major pro leagues are also legal, even if they’re unabashedly anti-competitive. A draft overtly restrains the labor market by preventing both a player from signing with a preferred employer and getting multiple employers (teams) to bid for him or her. If subject to antitrust scrutiny, a draft would be deeply problematic because it impedes choice and price fixes.

Except it’s not subject to antitrust scrutiny. A league and a players’ association negotiate the draft as a term of employment in a collective bargaining agreement. A draft is thus insulated by the non-statutory labor exemption, which embodies a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that instruct when management and labor collectively bargain pay, wages and other employment conditions, those conditions are exempt from antitrust scrutiny. Federal courts have blessed drafts as a result.

That is true for the NBA, which saw its draft challenged in the early 1980s. Leon Wood, a Philadelphia 76ers first round pick out of Cal-State Fullerton who later became an NBA referee, made the case against the draft. But Wood lost because the NBA and players’ association had negotiated the draft. The same legal point applies to rookie wage scales. Even though those scales adversely impact new players, new players are still subject to the conditions negotiated by their union with the league.

Even players who, by virtue of an eligibility rule, are barred from being part of the union have been held subject to unions’ negotiations with leagues. I know this personally, having served as an attorney for Ohio State star running back Maurice Clarett in his antitrust challenge against the NFL and its eligibility rule requiring that players be three years out of high school. 

So Flagg doesn’t have a say on where he’s picked, and that is legal. It might not be a great system,  but it’s arguably the best for the league as a whole.