Zach Lowe

And just like, what have we done?

It was so dumb and it was so reactive because what happened was, A, exactly the system that you had legislated in working as expected.

And B, this lottery last night was a reminder that if you were just a little bit less reactive –

and let this system play out for 20, 30, 40 years, like an actual sample size, more often than not, we would get results like last night where the worst teams would do best in the lottery, like Washington and Utah with some random movement here and there.

It was like last night was a representative kind of lottery of this system that everybody wanted because of the process and the egregious tanking, right?

And they vote for it.

And then some wild stuff happens and everyone's like, oh my God, what have we done?

And now all these years later,

we're getting a system that's probably going to even be more random than this with, like, wildly flatter odds, 3-2-1, a relegation zone and all that.

So I just find it ironic that in the last year of this system, it works to reward the worst teams.

Just to...

Just it's just crazy how reactive everybody is.

And by the way, if the NBA passes this new system, this three to one system and wild outcomes happen in the first year, there's going to be the same like, oh, my God, what have we done?

You did exactly this.

This is what you did.

But who was your biggest winner of the night other than twenty nine teams?

Because Oklahoma City did not move up.

top so you just nailed why it's my favorite thing the absurdist nature of it watching these genius highly accomplished people top of their fields just sit there and sweat and fret over a literally like an 80s newscast like here let's bring on the meteorologist to pull out the tonight's lottery balls um

Uh, so, and next year, by the way, we don't exactly know how it's going to be, but the proposal is this three, two, one system where instead of these, like, you know, now you get these four ping pong, there's 14 ping pong balls numbered one to 14 and teams are assigned four number combinations of those ping pong balls.

There's a thousand combinations.