The NBA Board of Governors, meeting in Salt Lake City in June of 1984, voted to adopt a lottery system among the non-playoff teams to determine their order of selection in the first round of the NBA Draft beginning in 1985.
From 1966 through 1984, the teams that finished with the worst records in each conference participated in a coin flip to determine which team would draft first. The remaining teams picked in inverse order of their won-lost records. Under the system adopted prior to the 1985 NBA Draft, the NBA Lottery determines the order of selection for the non-playoff teams (or the teams holding their picks through trades) for the first round only.