May 12, 2025 • 13 mins
Step into the drama and intrigue of the very first NBA Draft Lottery in 1985-a game-changing moment that reshaped basketball forever. Discover why the lottery was created, relive the suspenseful envelope draw, and explore the legacy of Patrick Ewing’s selection by the New York Knicks. We’ll break down the controversies, conspiracy theories, and how the lottery system has evolved to shape the NBA’s competitive landscape. Perfect for sports history enthusiasts and anyone fascinated by the intersection of chance, strategy, and spectacle in professional basketball.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do you remember on May when one envelope changed the
NBA forever, sending shock waves around the world as multiple
teams were hoping for that one chance where their lottery
ticket got them the jackpot. A new idea was sweeping
across the NBA for a draft lottery to avoid taking
(00:21):
going on in the NBA for teams to get the
number one overall pick, and the league decided to institute
a lottery, giving every team that did not make the
playoffs a chance at the number one overall pick, and
it provided teams with hope. It provided a conspiracy that
all collided on one basketball stage. Join us today as
(00:44):
we dive into the nineteen eighty five NBA lottery, the
first of its kind that went on to change the
league forever today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily
Sports History. I'm Ethan Rees, your guide as you daily
(01:07):
learn more about sports history, increasing your sports knowledge. Now
to learn about the NBA lotter, we first have to
go back to what it was like before the NBA
had what we largely use for most drafts ever since
they started to be held. The worst team gets the
first pick, and then the second worst team gets next pick,
(01:30):
and so on. And so on and so on. Now
this is a great strategy. It allows the team that
had arguably the worst hunt, they got the worst record,
and that's how they started from nineteen forty seven to
nineteen sixty five traditional win loss record with a special
toorial pick, which was a draft choice where a team
could forfeit their first round pick and pick a player
(01:53):
that played within fifty miles of their home arena, giving
them a boost in fanfare. And there were twenty three
territorial picks in the first iteration of the draft, and
twelve of these players ended up being in the Hall
of Fame, including players like Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Jerry Lucas.
And it was a big moment, except it made it
(02:14):
very hard. Depending on your location, you could have better
players around you than other teams. So it made it
very difficult and teams were starting to lose. It made
it harder and teams wanted to lose were starting to lose,
and so they introduced in nineteen sixty six a coin
flip system where the worst team in each conference would
determine who would have the first overall pick. The team
(02:37):
who lost the coin flip would get the second one,
and the rest of the first round would be determined
in reverse when lost order. So it's essentially the same,
except you separated the two conferences east and West, and
you had a chance with whichever side you were on
to win that first round pick. But that didn't mean
you wouldn't stop taking, and you'd have a fifty to
(02:57):
fifty chance number one pick and you have a good
chance to get whatever player. And they did away with
the territorial pick, allowing teams from all over the country
to pick whoever they wanted and not miss out on
great players. But teams were starting to do some things
that were a little fishy. They started this new thing
called tanking. Now we know taking as teams do it
(03:19):
in all types of sports. They still do it today
in the NBA despite this lottery. But the most notorious
example was in nineteen eighty four with the Houston Rockets
deliberately were trying to lose game to improve their odds
of landing Hakeem Elijah On, who was thought to be
a once in a generalation type of player and went
on to be a Hall of Fame player that led
(03:41):
the Rockets to championships. But is this what we needed.
This is something that was starting to happen more and
more as teams were seeing how good players were coming
out of college and knowing if you got the number
one pick, you got a chance to have a player
that could change your trajectory forever. So after seeing these
teams seemed like they were deliberately not playing players, not
(04:03):
playing competitive towards the end of the season, trying to
lose games, they wanted to change that because at this
time TV was starting to get involved, but still it
was largely based on ticket sales, and if you have
teams that are not trying to win, you are not
going to sell tickets. So the NBA Board of Governors
got together and adapted a new lottery system for the
(04:25):
nineteen eighty five draft. This would eliminate tanking, basically taking
away the incentive to try to lose, meaning if you
were the worst team with the worst record, it would
not guarantee you the first pick, and they planned to
make it a live televised moment where sealed envelopes would
be placed into a container so you could see the
(04:45):
randomness of what was going on. And then May twelfth,
nineteen eighty five, the NBA held its very first lottery
on television. They had seven picks among the non playoff teams,
and each team with an equal chance at the number
one pick, which was a fourteen point two nine percent chance,
So it didn't matter if you missed the playoffs, you
(05:05):
had a chance the number one pick. It didn't matter
at the end of the season if you were going
to make the playoffs or not. You could still play
for something, and players would play for contracts, and the
event was broadcast live on National TV, adding suspense and
transparency to the process. They didn't want it to be
behind closed doors and teams thinking, oh, you picked them
because you're trying to collude and have conspiracies, which we'll
(05:27):
get into that later. Seven envelopes, each containing a non
playoff team's logo, were placed inside a transparent drum, and
Commissioner David Stern personally drew out the envelopes one by one,
establishing the draft order, and the first envelope drawn would
get the first pick, followed by the rest of the order,
and that revealed that the New York Knicks, coming off
(05:51):
at a twenty four and fifty eight season, had won
the very first pick, sparking joy throughout the New York
fan base, as that meant they had the chance to
select presume number one overall pick Patrick Ewing a consistens
everyone knew he was going to go number one and
he was a future Hall of Famer, changing the NIXT
(06:12):
trajectory to being a dominant powerhouse throughout the late eighties
and into the nineties. The Indian Pacers got number two,
and they went Waynsman Tisdale out of Oklahoma who never
made an All Star Game. Number three was the Los
Angeles Clippers who selected Bint Beignette Benjamin, a Sinner from
Creighton who also never made an All Star game. Number
(06:34):
four was the Seattle SuperSonics who selected Xavier McDaniel, who
did go on to be an All Star out of
Wichita State. Number five went to the Atlanta Hawks, who
selected John connect out of SMU who never made an
All Star. And then number six was the Sacramento Kings
who selected Joe Klein out of Arkansas who never made
(06:55):
an NBA All Star. In the last team to select
in the lottery, who essentially lost the lottery, meaning they
got the last pick, was a Golden State Warrior who
may have won out as they picked Chris Mullins, who
went on to become a Hall of Famer. The first
seven picks wasn't all this draft. In fact, this draft
(07:15):
actually went into seven rounds, which is crazy to think
as today we only have two Many of these players
wouldn't go on to play in the NBA, but there
were a few more Hall of famers. At pick number thirteen,
the Utah Jazz selected Karl Malone, and at pick number eighteen,
the Detroit Pistons selected Joe Dumar and in round number four,
(07:36):
the Atlanta Hawks selected r Vetus Sibonis, who has a
crazy story about how he made it to the NBA.
But what this goes to show you is that the
lottery isn't everything, but it's important as there were three
other Hall of Famers picked outside of the lottery that year.
But in the first seven picks there were two Hall
(07:57):
of Famers. But the big prize, the one that ever
everyone wanted, everyone thought would change the outcome of their team,
was Patrick Ewing. Now there was controversy in this that
has come out more recently as people can analyze videos
a little bit more, and the thought is the New
York Knicks is the biggest market in America. There are
(08:19):
more people in New York to root for the team,
to cheer for the team, so you have more eyeballs,
you can get more butts in the seats. It's what
was thought. So by the New York Knicks winning the
first pick, they thought something had to be a miss. Now,
if you watch the clips of what actually happened, it's
on YouTube, you can watch it. There is one thing
(08:40):
that's a little different. But if this was what happened,
it was one well rehearsed and two just kind of
crazy that that's how it worked out. So they had
seven envelopes and they placed them all in a clear
cylinder to be rotated around and mixed up before they
picked out the lottery. But when they put in the
Knicks envelope, it got kind of bent on the side
(09:03):
just a little bit. And the thought was they did
that so they could know which one was the Knicks,
so they could pick that one last. And they also
speculated that maybe they actually froze the envelope so that
when Commissioner Stern picked out the envelopes he could tell
which one was cold to be the Knicks. Now, this
is all speculations. There's no nothing to confirm these claims.
(09:24):
The bent corner probably just happened. The frozen envelope, it
is just something that people will say. There's no confirmation
of this. But you know, conspiracies, how they loved to
rear their head into our every day live and there
have been some other type of conspiracies because of the lottery.
Sometimes luck looks a little odd because the NBA would
(09:46):
have wanted that to happen. We had it with the
Knicks getting Patrick Ewing, and then we had it with
the Orlando Magic being a new expansion franchise, getting Sequille O'Neill.
And then again we had it with Lebron James when
he he entered the draft getting picked by his home team,
the Cleveland Cavaliers. But luck happens too. It's not all conspiracies.
(10:08):
Conspiracies always come up, and conspiracies aren't always about aliens
in the government. They're also about our sports teams and
we love. But Patrick Ewing was a great prize. He
was an NCAA champion, the Player of the Year, three
time All American. He was a clear number one pick,
so clear that at the lottery they actually had a
(10:28):
Patrick Ewing jersey already made. It's like it was a
hands down, drop down. This is gonna be the number
one pick. And Ewing went on to sign a ten year,
thirty two million dollar contract with the Knicks, and despite
battling injuries, his rookie year would average twenty points in
nine rebounds a game, earning Rookie of the Year honors, showing
(10:49):
immediately that the Knicks had won the lottery by getting
a great player. Ewing went on to play fifteen seasons
for the Knicks, making the playoffs fourteen times, becoming the
Knicks all time leader and points, rebounds, blocks, studios, field
goals made, and played over one thousand games for the team,
(11:10):
averaging twenty one points and almost ten rebounds a game
throughout his career, becoming an eleven time All Star and
seven time All NBA selection, and be inducted into the
Basketball Hall of Fame in two thousand and eight and
be named to the NBA's seventy fifth anniversary team. But
the NBA lottery was not done. See the problem was
(11:33):
that it was the lottery system did help the tanking
narrative that there was no reason to tank, but it
also created so much unpredictability and if you were just
unlucky in the worst team in the league, you probably
stayed the worst team in the league because you couldn't
get that number one pick or you didn't have the
best odds to get that number one pick. So in
(11:55):
nineteen ninety they introduced a weighted lottery system, teams with
the worst records better odds to pick the top pick,
discouraging tanking while maintaining the element of chance. Now, this
system has continued to evolve over the years, and the
reason being that even having the biggest chance of the
number one pick, people still tank for and tanking is
(12:17):
something that still happens to this day. So they have
justed the percentages now the top three losing teams, so
the three teams with the worst record in the NBA
get the same odds of winning the number one pick,
so you have no reason to really bottom out. I
want to thank you for listening to today's daily Sports History,
(12:39):
and if you want more NBA Draft content, check out
the Upswings NBA Draft podcasts, where your hosts, Bryce Cooper
and Stone focus on everything center around the NBA Draft.
They aim to bring you top notche analysis of prospects
and every possible angle and discuss how they may impact
(13:00):
a team's fit at the next level. We'll put a
link in the description below for you to check them out.
And if you enjoy today's Daily sports History, please follow
us on our socials. We're Daily Sports History on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,
blue Sky, Threads, Massive LinkedIn, wherever you like to socialize.
You can check out our post on there and come
(13:21):
back tomorrow for more Daily Sports History.
Do you remember on May when one envelope changed the
NBA forever, sending shock waves around the world as multiple
teams were hoping for that one chance where their lottery
ticket got them the jackpot. A new idea was sweeping
across the NBA for a draft lottery to avoid taking
(00:21):
going on in the NBA for teams to get the
number one overall pick, and the league decided to institute
a lottery, giving every team that did not make the
playoffs a chance at the number one overall pick, and
it provided teams with hope. It provided a conspiracy that
all collided on one basketball stage. Join us today as
(00:44):
we dive into the nineteen eighty five NBA lottery, the
first of its kind that went on to change the
league forever today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily
Sports History. I'm Ethan Rees, your guide as you daily
(01:07):
learn more about sports history, increasing your sports knowledge. Now
to learn about the NBA lotter, we first have to
go back to what it was like before the NBA
had what we largely use for most drafts ever since
they started to be held. The worst team gets the
first pick, and then the second worst team gets next pick,
(01:30):
and so on. And so on and so on. Now
this is a great strategy. It allows the team that
had arguably the worst hunt, they got the worst record,
and that's how they started from nineteen forty seven to
nineteen sixty five traditional win loss record with a special
toorial pick, which was a draft choice where a team
could forfeit their first round pick and pick a player
(01:53):
that played within fifty miles of their home arena, giving
them a boost in fanfare. And there were twenty three
territorial picks in the first iteration of the draft, and
twelve of these players ended up being in the Hall
of Fame, including players like Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Jerry Lucas.
And it was a big moment, except it made it
(02:14):
very hard. Depending on your location, you could have better
players around you than other teams. So it made it
very difficult and teams were starting to lose. It made
it harder and teams wanted to lose were starting to lose,
and so they introduced in nineteen sixty six a coin
flip system where the worst team in each conference would
determine who would have the first overall pick. The team
(02:37):
who lost the coin flip would get the second one,
and the rest of the first round would be determined
in reverse when lost order. So it's essentially the same,
except you separated the two conferences east and West, and
you had a chance with whichever side you were on
to win that first round pick. But that didn't mean
you wouldn't stop taking, and you'd have a fifty to
(02:57):
fifty chance number one pick and you have a good
chance to get whatever player. And they did away with
the territorial pick, allowing teams from all over the country
to pick whoever they wanted and not miss out on
great players. But teams were starting to do some things
that were a little fishy. They started this new thing
called tanking. Now we know taking as teams do it
(03:19):
in all types of sports. They still do it today
in the NBA despite this lottery. But the most notorious
example was in nineteen eighty four with the Houston Rockets
deliberately were trying to lose game to improve their odds
of landing Hakeem Elijah On, who was thought to be
a once in a generalation type of player and went
on to be a Hall of Fame player that led
(03:41):
the Rockets to championships. But is this what we needed.
This is something that was starting to happen more and
more as teams were seeing how good players were coming
out of college and knowing if you got the number
one pick, you got a chance to have a player
that could change your trajectory forever. So after seeing these
teams seemed like they were deliberately not playing players, not
(04:03):
playing competitive towards the end of the season, trying to
lose games, they wanted to change that because at this
time TV was starting to get involved, but still it
was largely based on ticket sales, and if you have
teams that are not trying to win, you are not
going to sell tickets. So the NBA Board of Governors
got together and adapted a new lottery system for the
(04:25):
nineteen eighty five draft. This would eliminate tanking, basically taking
away the incentive to try to lose, meaning if you
were the worst team with the worst record, it would
not guarantee you the first pick, and they planned to
make it a live televised moment where sealed envelopes would
be placed into a container so you could see the
(04:45):
randomness of what was going on. And then May twelfth,
nineteen eighty five, the NBA held its very first lottery
on television. They had seven picks among the non playoff teams,
and each team with an equal chance at the number
one pick, which was a fourteen point two nine percent chance,
So it didn't matter if you missed the playoffs, you
(05:05):
had a chance the number one pick. It didn't matter
at the end of the season if you were going
to make the playoffs or not. You could still play
for something, and players would play for contracts, and the
event was broadcast live on National TV, adding suspense and
transparency to the process. They didn't want it to be
behind closed doors and teams thinking, oh, you picked them
because you're trying to collude and have conspiracies, which we'll
(05:27):
get into that later. Seven envelopes, each containing a non
playoff team's logo, were placed inside a transparent drum, and
Commissioner David Stern personally drew out the envelopes one by one,
establishing the draft order, and the first envelope drawn would
get the first pick, followed by the rest of the order,
and that revealed that the New York Knicks, coming off
(05:51):
at a twenty four and fifty eight season, had won
the very first pick, sparking joy throughout the New York
fan base, as that meant they had the chance to
select presume number one overall pick Patrick Ewing a consistens
everyone knew he was going to go number one and
he was a future Hall of Famer, changing the NIXT
(06:12):
trajectory to being a dominant powerhouse throughout the late eighties
and into the nineties. The Indian Pacers got number two,
and they went Waynsman Tisdale out of Oklahoma who never
made an All Star Game. Number three was the Los
Angeles Clippers who selected Bint Beignette Benjamin, a Sinner from
Creighton who also never made an All Star game. Number
(06:34):
four was the Seattle SuperSonics who selected Xavier McDaniel, who
did go on to be an All Star out of
Wichita State. Number five went to the Atlanta Hawks, who
selected John connect out of SMU who never made an
All Star. And then number six was the Sacramento Kings
who selected Joe Klein out of Arkansas who never made
(06:55):
an NBA All Star. In the last team to select
in the lottery, who essentially lost the lottery, meaning they
got the last pick, was a Golden State Warrior who
may have won out as they picked Chris Mullins, who
went on to become a Hall of Famer. The first
seven picks wasn't all this draft. In fact, this draft
(07:15):
actually went into seven rounds, which is crazy to think
as today we only have two Many of these players
wouldn't go on to play in the NBA, but there
were a few more Hall of famers. At pick number thirteen,
the Utah Jazz selected Karl Malone, and at pick number eighteen,
the Detroit Pistons selected Joe Dumar and in round number four,
(07:36):
the Atlanta Hawks selected r Vetus Sibonis, who has a
crazy story about how he made it to the NBA.
But what this goes to show you is that the
lottery isn't everything, but it's important as there were three
other Hall of Famers picked outside of the lottery that year.
But in the first seven picks there were two Hall
(07:57):
of Famers. But the big prize, the one that ever
everyone wanted, everyone thought would change the outcome of their team,
was Patrick Ewing. Now there was controversy in this that
has come out more recently as people can analyze videos
a little bit more, and the thought is the New
York Knicks is the biggest market in America. There are
(08:19):
more people in New York to root for the team,
to cheer for the team, so you have more eyeballs,
you can get more butts in the seats. It's what
was thought. So by the New York Knicks winning the
first pick, they thought something had to be a miss. Now,
if you watch the clips of what actually happened, it's
on YouTube, you can watch it. There is one thing
(08:40):
that's a little different. But if this was what happened,
it was one well rehearsed and two just kind of
crazy that that's how it worked out. So they had
seven envelopes and they placed them all in a clear
cylinder to be rotated around and mixed up before they
picked out the lottery. But when they put in the
Knicks envelope, it got kind of bent on the side
(09:03):
just a little bit. And the thought was they did
that so they could know which one was the Knicks,
so they could pick that one last. And they also
speculated that maybe they actually froze the envelope so that
when Commissioner Stern picked out the envelopes he could tell
which one was cold to be the Knicks. Now, this
is all speculations. There's no nothing to confirm these claims.
(09:24):
The bent corner probably just happened. The frozen envelope, it
is just something that people will say. There's no confirmation
of this. But you know, conspiracies, how they loved to
rear their head into our every day live and there
have been some other type of conspiracies because of the lottery.
Sometimes luck looks a little odd because the NBA would
(09:46):
have wanted that to happen. We had it with the
Knicks getting Patrick Ewing, and then we had it with
the Orlando Magic being a new expansion franchise, getting Sequille O'Neill.
And then again we had it with Lebron James when
he he entered the draft getting picked by his home team,
the Cleveland Cavaliers. But luck happens too. It's not all conspiracies.
(10:08):
Conspiracies always come up, and conspiracies aren't always about aliens
in the government. They're also about our sports teams and
we love. But Patrick Ewing was a great prize. He
was an NCAA champion, the Player of the Year, three
time All American. He was a clear number one pick,
so clear that at the lottery they actually had a
(10:28):
Patrick Ewing jersey already made. It's like it was a
hands down, drop down. This is gonna be the number
one pick. And Ewing went on to sign a ten year,
thirty two million dollar contract with the Knicks, and despite
battling injuries, his rookie year would average twenty points in
nine rebounds a game, earning Rookie of the Year honors, showing
(10:49):
immediately that the Knicks had won the lottery by getting
a great player. Ewing went on to play fifteen seasons
for the Knicks, making the playoffs fourteen times, becoming the
Knicks all time leader and points, rebounds, blocks, studios, field
goals made, and played over one thousand games for the team,
(11:10):
averaging twenty one points and almost ten rebounds a game
throughout his career, becoming an eleven time All Star and
seven time All NBA selection, and be inducted into the
Basketball Hall of Fame in two thousand and eight and
be named to the NBA's seventy fifth anniversary team. But
the NBA lottery was not done. See the problem was
(11:33):
that it was the lottery system did help the tanking
narrative that there was no reason to tank, but it
also created so much unpredictability and if you were just
unlucky in the worst team in the league, you probably
stayed the worst team in the league because you couldn't
get that number one pick or you didn't have the
best odds to get that number one pick. So in
(11:55):
nineteen ninety they introduced a weighted lottery system, teams with
the worst records better odds to pick the top pick,
discouraging tanking while maintaining the element of chance. Now, this
system has continued to evolve over the years, and the
reason being that even having the biggest chance of the
number one pick, people still tank for and tanking is
(12:17):
something that still happens to this day. So they have
justed the percentages now the top three losing teams, so
the three teams with the worst record in the NBA
get the same odds of winning the number one pick,
so you have no reason to really bottom out. I
want to thank you for listening to today's daily Sports History,
(12:39):
and if you want more NBA Draft content, check out
the Upswings NBA Draft podcasts, where your hosts, Bryce Cooper
and Stone focus on everything center around the NBA Draft.
They aim to bring you top notche analysis of prospects
and every possible angle and discuss how they may impact
(13:00):
a team's fit at the next level. We'll put a
link in the description below for you to check them out.
And if you enjoy today's Daily sports History, please follow
us on our socials. We're Daily Sports History on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,
blue Sky, Threads, Massive LinkedIn, wherever you like to socialize.
You can check out our post on there and come
(13:21):
back tomorrow for more Daily Sports History.
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