Celtics win the lottery within 3 years

Celtsfan1980 · Post #1 » by **Celtsfan1980** » Mon May 25, 2015 12:59 pm

The up and coming superstar gets a sidekick in Minnesota, while a big market team with a history of great Centers gets another shot at a great Center. Next season seems too early for the Celtics to be rewarded after the Lakers were rewarded but given the Celtics' history of great small forwards I'm looking at 2017 possibly. If the Celtics win the lottery soon do we finally acknowledge the lottery appears to be rigged?

Green89 · Post #2 » by **Green89** » Mon May 25, 2015 1:04 pm

With the East as weak as it is, and the fact we'll surely be upgrading this offseason and the next, I highly doubt we land a lottery pick any time soon.

CeltsfanSinceBirth · Post #3 » by **CeltsfanSinceBirth** » Mon May 25, 2015 1:57 pm

Green89 wrote:With the East as weak as it is, and the fact we'll surely be upgrading this offseason and the next, I highly doubt we land a lottery pick any time soon.

Don't forget the potentially juicy Brooklyn and Dallas picks.

jfs1000d · Post #4 » by **jfs1000d** » Mon May 25, 2015 2:13 pm

Celtsfan1980 wrote:The up and coming superstar gets a sidekick in Minnesota, while a big market team with a history of great Centers gets another shot at a great Center. Next season seems too early for the Celtics to be rewarded after the Lakers were rewarded but given the Celtics' history of great small forwards I'm looking at 2017 possibly. If the Celtics win the lottery soon do we finally acknowledge the lottery appears to be rigged?

Grrr. This was fun for a couple of years...

The lottery is not rigged. The problem with the lottery is, it's a lottery.

It's called probabilities.

None of what's happened is statistical fishy. We would spot that right away.

All the distributions have been random.

What you call rigged is actually randomness. It's a weighed lottery. If we ran the darn thing a 1000 times, the distribution would look like the probabilities. But a one time lottery? It's going to have a wide range of variance because it is intended to be random.

fallguy · Post #5 » by **fallguy** » Mon May 25, 2015 4:51 pm

I question the critical thinking skills of anyone who thinks the lottery is rigged.

Celtsfan1980 · Post #6 » by **Celtsfan1980** » Mon May 25, 2015 5:11 pm

Spurs have won twice in three years. Cavs have won 5 times. Orlando has won 3 times. The same teams should not be winning it this often.

BRUNiNHO91 · Post #7 » by **BRUNiNHO91** » Mon May 25, 2015 5:30 pm

The only way we get into the lottery is if Brooklyn's picks are there. We won't be lottery bound anymore..we have a decent amount of talent and a lot of room for growth for us to fall back that far.

fallguy · Post #8 » by **fallguy** » Mon May 25, 2015 5:47 pm

Celtsfan1980 wrote:Spurs have won twice in three years. Cavs have won 5 times. Orlando has won 3 times. The same teams should not be winning it this often.

Strong argument.

Green89 · Post #9 » by **Green89** » Mon May 25, 2015 7:29 pm

Celtsfan1980 wrote:Spurs have won twice in three years. Cavs have won 5 times. Orlando has won 3 times. The same teams should not be winning it this often.

But the math shows there are only a small amount of teams that can win it, so the odds of that team winning more than once in a short amount of time is not out of the ordinary. It's not astronomical odds we're talking about here. It can just happen that way.

Avalanche · Post #10 » by **Avalanche** » Mon May 25, 2015 11:09 pm

Brooklyn outside the playoffs next season = we finally get a lottery miracle and land Simmons

one can dream

jfs1000d · Post #11 » by **jfs1000d** » Mon May 25, 2015 11:47 pm

Celtsfan1980 wrote:Spurs have won twice in three years. Cavs have won 5 times. Orlando has won 3 times. The same teams should not be winning it this often.

Why not?

Don't say probabilities. It's probabilities. San Antionio hasn't been in the lottery since Duncan, and won it with Robinson many moons ago. The Cavs? Only last year was semi surprising, but not at all fishy.

Each lottery is separate. What happened the previous year has no effect on the probabilities in the current year.

It's called lucky.

jfs1000d · Post #12 » by **jfs1000d** » Mon May 25, 2015 11:52 pm

Also, they have to start teaching probabilities in high school or something.

The amount of people who can't digest how statistics works is staggering. This isn't to jump on a poster, but there have been about 30 lotteries in NBA history. That's way too small a sample size.

Ed Pinkney · Post #13 » by **Ed Pinkney** » Tue May 26, 2015 12:30 am

What a bizarre thread and proposition. For starters, perhaps the pre-weighted lottery system when there were envelopes instead of ping pong balls there might have been something nefarious occurring, but the premise it is rigged is ridiculous.

On top of that, not sure why you think Celtics are going to be anywhere near the bottom of the lottery in the next few years. Some solid draft picks, a trade or two and a decent free agent signing and they are definitely winning more than 40 games next year and hopefully even more the years after. As Avalanche mentioned, the only way it happens is if Brooklyn drops out of the playoffs and jumps to the top of the lottery.

On a side note, that pick swap in 2017 seems to get forgotten about when looking at the Celtics assets, obviously the extra first rounders in 2016 and 2018 are fantastic but there is some intriguing potential in 2017 as well. Look at the Hawks this year, they should be picking 29th and they are going to pick in the middle of the first round because of the pick swap they had with the Nets.

31to6 · Post #14 » by **31to6** » Tue May 26, 2015 1:35 am

Now, wouldn't it seem more rigged if the Knicks won the lottery? I could see the foil hats coming out then.
But I mean .. Minnesota winning it is now considered a smoking gun? Yeesh.

"So Wiggins has a running mate". You can make up an equally 'compelling' story for any team that has a) ever won the lottery or b) ever *not* won the lottery. Every team has a story and always has. It'd be weird if they didn't.

SMTBSI · Post #15 » by **SMTBSI** » Tue May 26, 2015 1:36 am

jfs1000d wrote:Also, they have to start teaching probabilities in high school or something.

The amount of people who can't digest how statistics works is staggering. This isn't to jump on a poster, but there have been about 30 lotteries in NBA history. That's way too small a sample size.

A.

Men.

I'm no statistician - I only took one stat class - AP stat senior year of high school. But, even just that was enough to prime me for the rest of my life to notice bad statistical analysis/understanding all around me every day...

For those who think that "random" means "should always be evenly distributed", here's a simple experiment for you: go to random.org, and set the roll range to 1-6. Now, start rolling, and don't stop until you've gotten each number - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 - at least once. Count how many rolls it took to get them all to show, and track how many of each number got rolled before you finally "finished".

I just ran through it once. It took me 31 rolls to get all six possibilities to show up, and this was my distribution just prior to that 31st roll:

1 : x7
2 : x8
3 : x6
4 : x3
5: x6
6: x0

"Random" doesn't just mean that there's no prejudice towards a particular outcome. It also means that there's no prejudice towards "fairness" - the dice don't know and don't care that they haven't rolled a 6 yet.

Given enough iterations, the distribution will normalize, but that requires large samples, as jfs1000d mentions.

In small samples, it would actually be very improbable to find that things were distributed perfectly "fairly".

SMTBSI · Post #16 » by **SMTBSI** » Tue May 26, 2015 1:47 am

Furthermore, the accounting firm that oversights the legitimacy of the draft lottery - Ernst and Young - is massive:

Wikipedia wrote:It is one of the "Big Four" audit firms and is the third largest professional services firm in the world by aggregated revenue in 2014.
...
As of 2014, EY was the ninth largest privately owned organization in the United States.

They had $27.4 billion in revenue in 2014 (about 5 times that of the NBA). The NBA is not in any way one of their largest or most important clients. Do you really believe that a company that size, with that much revenue, would risk absolutely destroying their credibility and losing the trust of all of their clients by participlating in rigging the draft?

31to6 · Post #17 » by **31to6** » Tue May 26, 2015 1:50 am

So that Minny can win the lottery? OF COURSE

Celtsfan1980 · Post #18 » by **Celtsfan1980** » Tue May 26, 2015 12:37 pm

I told my brother if there's any year Minnesota would win it, it would be this year. After the Spurs were given Robinson they should have had no business getting Duncan. At the very least they have to place limits on how often teams win it to make the teams more even. Even if it's legitimate there's still major amounts of corruption.

celticsfan34 · Post #19 » by **celticsfan34** » Tue May 26, 2015 1:09 pm

Celtsfan1980 wrote:Spurs have won twice in three years. Cavs have won 5 times. Orlando has won 3 times. The same teams should not be winning it this often.

No they shouldn't. the same teams are in the lottery every year for the exception of a few that are usually in the playoffs or barely miss the postseason. What would be entertaining is a tournament for the No. 1 pick. When was the last time Minnesota or Sacramento wasn't in the lottery. Hell, Minnesota chose three point guards in '09, including Johnny Flynn....over Steph Curry.

Cyclical · Post #20 » by **Cyclical** » Tue May 26, 2015 2:41 pm

SMTBSI wrote:For those who think that "random" means "should always be evenly distributed", here's a simple experiment for you: go to random.org,

Random.com is rigged man, everybody knows that. Their website commissioner should be fired. IP addresses in Cleveland and Los Angeles always get a favorable outcome. People are so gullible.