The NBA draft lottery: 14 ping-pong balls, and the right to pick No. 1 overall on the line

Sometime around 6 p.m. EDT Monday, locked inside a secure room with no way of communicating with the outside world, team executives and others will watch 14 ping-pong balls start to bounce inside a machine.

The balls will be numbered, 1 through 14. One will be drawn, then a second, then a third, then a fourth. And with that, the people inside that room will find out, an hour or so before the rest of the world, which team won the No. 1 pick next month in the NBA draft.

The NBA draft lottery is Monday night in Chicago, with the winner getting the chance to pick No. 1 overall. And that means Duke's Cooper Flagg — the likely No. 1 pick — will have a good chance of knowing which city he'll be calling home next season as soon as the lottery results are announced.

Nobody inside the room where the results are revealed on a televised broadcast will know who won the lottery until deputy commissioner Mark Tatum makes the actual announcement. Those inside the room remain there, without their phones, until that time.

The race for No. 1

There are 13 teams with a chance to win the No. 1 pick. Utah, Washington and Charlotte have the best odds, 14% each.

New Orleans has a 12.5% chance, Philadelphia a 10.5% chance, Brooklyn a 9% chance, Toronto a 7.5% chance and San Antonio a 6.7% chance.

After that, it's Houston (3.8%), Portland (3.7%), Dallas (1.8%), Chicago (1.7%) and Sacramento (0.8%).

The reason there are 14 lottery spots but only 13 teams with a chance to win the No. 1 pick is because Atlanta's odds convey to San Antonio, essentially meaning the Spurs are in the lottery twice — with a 6% chance of winning on their own, and an 0.7% chance to win with the Hawks' combinations of ping-pong balls.

This system has been in place since 2019, the latest effort to discourage tanking — the practice where teams aren't overly interested in winning regular season games with hopes instead of bettering their chances of winning the No. 1 draft pick.

The teams with the three worst records all have the same chance — 14% — of winning the No. 1 pick, and odds for the remaining lottery teams are gradually reduced from there.

Where teams can finish

Utah can't finish below fifth, Washington can't finish below sixth, Charlotte can't finish below seventh and New Orleans can't finish below eighth.

Philadelphia would keep the pick should it land in the top six; any other result — only seventh, eighth or ninth would be possible at that point — would send the pick to Oklahoma City.

Brooklyn, Toronto, San Antonio, Houston, Portland, Dallas, Chicago and Sacramento all could move up into the top four as well. They would all have to buck long odds — and in some cases, really long odds — for that to happen. Brooklyn has a 37% chance of getting there; Sacramento only has about a 4% chance.

The rest of the draft order

The lottery only sets the order for the first 14 picks in the draft. The rest of the first-round — picks 15-30 — were determined by regular-season finish, though some of these picks have been traded many times over the years.

The rest of the first-round order, for now, is: Oklahoma City picks No. 15, Orlando No. 16, Minnesota No. 17, Washington No. 18, Brooklyn No. 19 and Miami No. 20.

From there, the final 10 picks in the first round are owned by Utah (21), Atlanta (22), Indiana (23), Oklahoma City (24), Orlando (25), Brooklyn (26 and 27), Boston (28), Phoenix (29) and the Los Angeles Clippers (30).

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