NBA Draft Lottery winners and losers: Mavericks’ win fuels conspiracy theories, Spurs and 76ers also move up

If you’re a fan of chaos, you surely loved what went down in the NBA Draft Lottery on Monday night. The Dallas Mavericks, on just a 1.8% chance, secured the No. 1 pick. The San Antonio Spurs and the Philadelphia 76ers — who both were longshots to get top-three picks — followed at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively.

Here is the 2025 NBA Draft order for the top-10 picks:

1. Dallas Mavericks
2. San Antonio Spurs
3. Philadelphia 76ers
4. Charlotte Hornets
5. Utah Jazz
6. Washington Wizards
7. New Orleans Pelicans
8. Brooklyn Nets
9. Toronto Raptors
10. Houston Rockets (via Phoenix Suns)

And with that settled, let’s take a look at some of the big winners and losers on lottery night. 

Winner: Dallas Mavericks

The Mavericks have to be thanking their lucky stars that they lost to the Grizzlies in their last Play-In Tournament game. If they win that game, they fall out of the lottery all for the right to get blasted in the first round by top-seeded OKC. 

Instead, they lose that game, and give themselves a 1.8% chance of landing the No. 1 pick. It wasn’t much. About like betting on the longest shot at the Kentucky Derby. But I’ll be damned if that horse didn’t come through, and suddenly a team traded Luka Dončić, then saw Kyrie Irving blow his ACL, and was right about at the edge of needing to blow the whole thing up, finds itself in prime position to build an immediate contender. 

The Mavericks have all kinds of options now. They can just draft Cooper Flagg, a player who’s probably ready to contribute on a contender right away (sort of like a Chet Holmgren) and who also while locks in Dallas’ future as the sort of two-way building block Nico Harrison can’t stop telling the world he covets. If Kyrie Irving can come back around January, which Dallas is optimistic about, an Irving-Flagg-Anthony Davis trio with shooters and a bunch of defenders around them is, dare I say, probably a more complete and capable team that one that was going to be led by Dončić. 

Or, the Mavericks can put the No. 1 pick on the open market and see what comes back. Giannis Antetokounmpo is going to be up for discussion. Everyone knows that by now. Can you imagine a Kyrie-Davis-Giannis trio? This is absolutely crazy how this has flipped, on a 1.8% chance, from a franchise on fire to a top-tier contender who has stumbled onto an almost impossible pathway to both short- and long-term success. 

Winner: Cooper Flagg

The nightmare scenario for Flagg, the almost guaranteed top overall pick, was to end up with the Wizards. Of the three teams with the highest odds to get the No. 1 pick, the Hornets would’ve palatable if only for the chance to team up with LaMelo Ball, and the Jazz are in good hands with Danny Ainge and figure to be capable of building a small-market winner. Going to Washington would’ve been the worst. 

But now Flagg doesn’t have to mess with any of those losing teams. He’s either heading to a good team in the Mavericks with a chance to compete right away or he’s going to be in a trade, perhaps to Milwaukee, which is fading as a desirable destination but, alas, isn’t Washington. Good night for Flagg. 

Winner: Philadelphia 76ers

After signing Paul George with the expectation that it would catapult them into top-tier contention, Philadelphia’s season was an unmitigated disaster. Joel Embiid only played in 19 games. George only played in 41 and wasn’t even close to good enough even in that limited action to justify his four-year, $212M price tag. 

When the Sixers finally gave up on winning and turned their attention to upping their lottery odds as high as possible, the only thing that could salvage their season was landing a top-six pick. If they landed anywhere outside the top six, they would’ve lost the pick to OKC. 

Not only did Philly stay in the top six, it landed the No. 3 overall pick. Once we knew they were in the running for Flagg, sure, it’s a little bit of a disappointment that they didn’t get No. 1. But beggars can’t be choosers. This is a deep draft and Philadelphia can do a lot with the No. 3 pick, either with a quality young player or, perhaps more likely, as a trade asset. Big night for the Sixers. 

Winner: San Antonio Spurs

The Spurs are their way up, up, up baby. Two years ago they drafted Victor Wembanyama, who feels destined to be one of the greatest players ever barring injury. Last year they got Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle. And now they land the No. 2 pick in this summer’s draft despite coming in with just a 6.3% chance of that happening. 

Just like the Mavericks and Sixers above, the Spurs now have the option of using this pick on yet another young prospect as they build toward one of most promising futures in the league, or they can use it as a trade asset to hit the fast-forward button on their contention timeline. 

Giannis Antetokounmpo is in play here. San Antonio has the draft assets, young players and matching money to make something happen. Gregg Popovich, now officially off the sidelines and into the top front-office spot, has a major decision to make with this pick, and all the options sound pretty damn good. 

Losers: Hornets, Jazz, Wizards

There were a few teams who started out the season trying to win and went to the tank late, notably the 76ers, Spurs and Pelicans. But the teams that were on the tank from the start, whose sole mission all season was to lose enough games to win the lottery, came up bust. 

That would be the Charlotte Hornets, Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards, who finished with the three worst records in the league and thus shared the highest odds (14.5% each) of winning the lottery. They fell to No. 4, 5 and 6, respectively. 

If you’re a team without absolutely no chance of competing for a playoff spot, and even more if you’re not what we’ve come to refer to as a destination franchise that can build a winner through free agency, tanking still makes sense. But it has not proven to be a path to the No. 1 pick. 

In fact, since the league smoothed its lottery odds in 2019, the team with the worst overall record has never won the No. 1 pick. This year that team was the Jazz, who fell to No. 5. Unbelievably, this is actually the third straight year that the league’s worst team has landed the No. 5 pick. It happened to the Pistons in both 2023 and 2024. The Wizards, in particular, literally fell to the lowest spot possible, No. 6, for a team with a bottom-three record. 

Finally something didn’t go Oklahoma City’s way in the draft. Nobody’s crying for the Thunder, who still have a treasure trove of assets in addition to one of the most talented and youngest rosters in the league, but had they added another lottery pick here, in this draft, it would’ve been too crazy to deal with. Good on the Thunder, who have made their own luck, but at least a little bit of it ran out on Monday. 

Winner: Nico Harrison

This guy was about to go into witness protection after trading Dončić for, relatively speaking, a pathetic return, only to watch Anthony Davis get immediately injured and Kyrie Irving tear his ACL. This guy was done in Dallas. And the next thing you know he steps in you know what and lands Cooper Freaking Flagg — who, just to repeat everything from above, can either be Dallas’ future franchise player or its ticket to Giannis Antetokounmpo. 

Players like Luka might come around every couple decades. If that. When you just give one away, as Harrison and the Mavericks did, you are signing up for the possibility that a player like that will never wear your uniform again. But Harrison, on a 1.8% prayer, gets gifted a basketball miracle to start the cover-up process for what will always be one of the dumbest trades in sports history. Absolutely unbelievable. 

Winner: Conspiracy theorists

If you like to trumpet NBA conspiracy theories — that the league rigs playoff games, lottery spots, et cetera for business purposes — then Monday night was your time to shine. 

Let’s be honest, the league did not want to see Cooper Flagg dying a slow basketball death in Washington or Charlotte or even Utah. It was also watching the Mavericks, a pretty premier franchise, go up in flames. It also has every incentive to make the Spurs as good as possible, as quickly as possible, to maximize the marketing bonanza that Victor Wembanyama stands to be. And clearly the Sixers, another high-profile team, getting a top pick to put a tourniquet on their bleed out is in the best interest of the league. 

And what do you know, against extraordinary odds… it all happened. Not one of those things. Not two of those things. All of them. The Mavericks, with a 1.8% chance, landed the No. 1 pick. The Spurs, with a 13% chance, landed a top-two pick. The Sixers, with a 31.6% chance, landed a top-three pick.

Put all those outcomes together, and the chances of it happening are miniscule. And it came to fruition. Do with that what you will.