The 2025 NBA Draft Lottery will happen on Monday, May 12, and 14 teams will find out if their future is changed forever. But how exactly does it work? Here’s a quick explanation.
For me, the easiest way to think about it is like raffle tickets at the fair. The NBA has a lottery ball machine, and they put 14 lottery balls into it, numbered 1-14. To select the winner of the lottery, they draw four balls out of the machine and stack them in a row. They then read off that 4-number combination. If you are the team that has that first 4-number combination, you win the #1 pick.