SECAUCUS, N.J. -- The lottery has become a party for the damned. It is usually held in a fancy hotel, with pre-show mingling over cocktails and appetizers for VIPs. Once a team contingent showed up, let's say, a little rowdier than usual after a private flight to New York. Representatives from each lottery team sit at tables adorned with team logos in the secret drawing room where the actual lottery happens about an hour before the TV show. A dozen media "observers" watch. It is a production.
The drawing room of the pandemic lottery was a curtained-off rectangle in the atrium of the NBA's nondescript office building -- it could pass as Initech's headquarters -- in Secaucus, New Jersey.