By KL Chouinard
Of the 14 NBA teams who will participate in Sunday's NBA Draft Lottery, the Atlanta Hawks have the 10th-best odds of landing the top overall draft pick, as well as the 10th-best odds of nabbing a top-4 overall pick in the NBA Draft that will be held on June 26 and 27.
The lottery process determines which teams will hold the first four spots in the draft; the remaining ten teams are then slotted in order based upon their winning percentage from the 2023-24 regular season. As a result, one thing we already know is that the Hawks won't walk away from Sunday's lottery process with a pick in the 5-9 range. Those outcomes are mathematically impossible. They will either jump into the top 4, or they will end up with a pick that ends up 10th or lower.
The most likely outcome, by a large margin, is that the Hawks end up with the 10th-overall pick. There is a 65.91 percent that the pick stays in the 10th spot. The second-most probable outcome is that they fall to the 11th spot. After those two, the next most likely results involve them leapfrogging into the top-four spots.
Below is the full list of likelihoods, in order from most probable to least:
- 10th pick – 65.91 percent
- 11th pick – 18.98 percent
- 4th pick – 4.01 percent
- 3rd pick – 3.60 percent
- 2nd pick – 3.27 percent
- 1st pick – 3.00 percent
- 12th pick – 1.21 percent
- 13th pick – 0.02 percent
- 14th pick – less than 0.01 percent
With no prior trades involving this pick, there are also no contingencies in play. The Hawks will finish Sunday with a top-14 pick in hand. The actual lottery procedure takes place away from the stage in a separate room prior to the televised broadcast. Fourteen ping-pong balls numbered 1 through 14 are placed in a lottery machine. There are 1,001 possible combinations when four balls are drawn out of 14, without regard to their order of selection. Before the lottery, 1,000 of those 1,001 combinations are assigned to the 14 participating lottery teams. The Hawks will have 30 of the 1000 combinations assigned to them.
The drawing process occurs as follows: All 14 balls are placed in the lottery machine and mixed for 20 seconds, then the first ball is selected. The process is then repeated three more times in 10-second intervals. The team that has been assigned that four-number combination will receive the No. 1 pick.
This process is repeated with the same ping-pong balls and same machine for picks Nos. 2, 3 and 4.
If the same team comes up more than once, the result is discarded, and another four-ball combination is selected. Also, if the one unassigned combination of 11-12-13-14 is drawn, then the result is ignored and the process repeated. Here is what the selection process looked like in 2023.
Sunday will mark the 40th NBA Lottery since its inception in 1985. The Hawks themselves have participated in 14 of those 40 drawings, landing top-4 picks in 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2018, but never going home with the top overall pick.
One might say that the Hawks are due for a bit of good fortune, and with any luck, they will get it this weekend.