The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Cavs can use some luck in draft lottery
Not long ago, Cavaliers fans waited patiently for the regular season and conference playoffs to conclude so their favorite basketball team could get down to the business of meeting the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals.
Now, two years after the Cavs and Warriors played for the championship in a fourth consecutive June, the same teams await the 37th annual NBA Draft Lottery
on Aug. 20 having posted the two worst records in the 2019-20 regular season. The draft lottery begins at 8:30 p.m. and will be televised on ESPN.
The Warriors (15-50), Cavaliers (19-46) and Minnesota Timberwolves (19-45) each have a 14 percent chance of getting the first pick in the draft on Oct. 16, according to the math wizards at tankathon.com.
Those are the best odds of getting the first pick among the 14 non-playoff teams in the lottery, but tankathon.com says the Warriors (47.9) or Cavaliers (27.8) are more likely to to end up picking fifth.
The way the draft is set, by virtue of having the second-worst record in the league, the Cavaliers will get no lower than the sixth pick when the draft order is announced on the lottery show. Here are the odds for each pick they might get: First (14 percent); second (13.4), third (12.7), fourth (12.0), fifth (27.8), sixth (20 percent).
Fourteen ping-pong balls with assigned numbers 1 through 14 are placed in a lottery machine. There are 1,001 possible combinations when four balls are drawn individually from the hopper. All but one of the combinations will be assigned to the 14 teams in the lottery.
The first ball is removed after mixing the balls for 20 seconds. The balls are mixed for 10 seconds a second, third and fourth time before the next three balls are drawn. The team with that combination in exact order gets the first pick. The same procedure will be used to determine the second, third and fourth picks.
Team representatives, NBA officials and some media members will witness the drawings, but the results won’t be made public until envelopes stuffed with the team logos of the four lottery winners are opened in a studio separate from where the drawings take place. Each of the 14 lottery eligible teams will have a representative in the studio for the made-for-TV drawing. Those people will not be privy to what happened in the room where the pingpong balls were drawn.
The draft order of the 10 teams not lucky enough to be in the top four will be determined by inverse order of their 2019-20 records, as will the 16 teams currently in the playoffs.
Of course, it is impossible to do a mock draft for any team without knowing precisely which pick it will have, but that hasn’t stopped analysts from projecting what the Cavaliers might do with their only pick in 2020.
Jonathan Givony of ESPN has the Cavaliers selecting 19-year-old center James Wiseman from Memphis with the second pick, despite Cavaliers current center Andre Drummond announcing he will exercise his $28 million option in 2020-21 to stay in Cleveland. Wiseman is 7-foot-1, 240 pounds.
“Wiseman, a physical marvel with both offensive and defensive potential in the middle, makes sense here, even if his sparse résumé has left some questions regarding his feel for the game, efficiency and defensive impact,” Givony wrote.
“The Cavaliers need to keep drafting guards in the top 10 until they find a star. Ball has some flaws and dealing with his father (LaVar Ball) is no piece of cake, but this is a crafty player who might be a game-changer.” — NBCSports.com
CBSSports.com also has the Cavs picking second and selecting Wiseman after the Warriors pick guard LaMelo Ball. ESPN has Golden State taking shooting guard Anthony Edwards from Georgia with the first pick.
NBCSports.com foresees the Cavs getting the fourth pick in the lottery and using it 58 days later on Ball.
“The Cavaliers need to keep drafting guards in the top 10 until they find a star,” the website report says. “Ball has some flaws and dealing with his father (LaVar Ball) is no piece of cake, but this is a crafty player who might be a game-changer.”
Bleacher Report projects the Cavaliers with the second pick and using it on Ball. Ball played his senior year of high school at SPIRE Institute in Geneva after playing professionally in Lithuania in 2018.
The projections might be altered when the results of the NBA Draft Lottery are revealed. Wiseman and Ball will likely be long gone if the Cavaliers end up with the booby prize of picking fifth or sixth.