The BlogABull draft lottery post: it's, uh, a lottery

deserve's got nothing to do with it

I am very against tanking, and especially the discourse around it. One silver lining to the Bulls sending out a bunch of first round picks was at least we wouldn’t have to hear about it.

At least that was the hope, whoops.

The Bulls traded away their 2023 first round pick with top-4 protection (master negotiator, that Arturas Karnisovas) at the 2021 trade deadline. Surely by now they’d be a playoff team so the odds in their lottery slot wouldn’t be a concern….

And really, they still shouldn’t have been a concern. But indeed there were people in April saying “well they could’ve improved their chances of keeping the pick from 8% to 13% if they crashed the team plane, and that’s just negligence otherwise!”.

And I understand all too well that what we got instead in the PatBev era was useless, even potentially harmful given AK’s gullibility towards late regular season stats. But that indicates a broader concern that is remediated by the lead executive getting fired, not any small steps they could’ve realistically taken. Like they were never going to tell DeRozan to sit out games. I still hear bellyaching about the year Sean Kilpatrick got the Bulls a win hurting their lottery odds. While it did spawn the fantastic nickname of “Kill-draft-pick”, it never made sense: that fringe dude was the tanking maneuver!

Now, the Bulls did screw up at the end of the regular season after they already wrapped up their play-in seed, but that was extremely minor and like the Kilpatrick signing probably wouldn’t have “worked” anyway. You’re never tanking in a vacuum, there are other teams against and around you.

I guess my point is this nickel and diming around draft position is a lot of wasted thought and energy. If you genuinely believe in tanking as a franchise-building strategy, that has to be done early, and heavy. The Bulls indicated they weren’t going that route when trading future first round picks, there was no ‘soft tank’ to be done this year that’d have garnered anything significant.

So all that dumb talk addressed, I can move on to something even dumber: someone predicting a chance outcome?

can’t embed Tweets anymore. Too bad, it’s such good stuff!

Much less dumb, though only because I believe most are doing it ironically, is the idea of which franchise “deserves” to win: whether that’s due to vibes of the team or prior lottery luck/unluck.

No, this isn’t that complicated or contains any deeper meaning: like their shot profile, the Bulls lottery odds are a math problem: 8.5% chance of it landing in the top-4 (and keeping the selection), and 1.8% chance of landing the number one overall pick and taking Victor Wembanyama.

I mean…we all know that even if the Bulls win the lottery tonight that Wemby will get hurt a lot. But that will be less of a Bulls curse and more because giants struggle to stay on NBA courts. It’d still be an excellent result, obviously.

Landing numbers #2-#4 wouldn’t be quite as seismic, and actually would bring up choices for franchise direction that I don’t trust AK to make (and if you agree, you also think he should be fired now), but undeniably a good thing.

The official BlogABull prediction, with over 77% certainty , is that the Bulls get the #11 selection and send it to the Magic.

One of the worst telecasts in all of entertainment begins at 7pm Central. Luckily we will know very quickly if the Bulls jump into the top-4 and keep their pick. If you don’t see their name (or I guess the Magic would get announced?) after #11, you have to sit through 15 minutes of commercials and bullshit.

But at least talk about it here?