The formula is a bit, um, math-y, but the gist is that it rewards the worst teams with high picks while still encouraging teams to win as many games as possible. It requires no changes to the schedule or to the lottery or really to anything other than how we assign the lottery odds. The genius of this, mathematically, is that it simultaneously rewards wins but also a team’s position in the “negative standings.” The basic equation that determines everything is: P = W − k(R − c)2 That may look like gibberish to you, but it’s the E=mc2 of tanking research. Every team gets lottery points (P) based on how many games it wins (W) minus a quadratic penalty for its ordinal rank among the 30 teams (R). Those lottery points then get summed up across all teams and converted into percentages for the draft lottery. If, say, the Wizards have 30 “lottery points” and the league’s bottom 14 teams as a whole have 300, their odds are 10 percent.
New York Times
This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Every team gets lottery points (P) based on how many …
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