Is the NBA Draft Rigged?

Tonight is a big night for basketball. It’s the NBA draft: the moment the world’s top 30 basketball teams line up to select the next generation of prodigies. And the worst performing of those 30 get first dibs. This should, theoretically, mean they have better odds at landing top talent. In practice, though, the selection order is determined by a draft lottery — a system that combines the reverse-order rankings with an increasingly heavy element of weighted randomness.