Welcome to the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery Simulator!

To determine the winner of the NBA Draft Lottery, fourteen ping pong balls numbered 1-14 are placed in a standard lottery machine and four balls are randomly selected from the lot. The order in which the numbers are drawn is not important. In doing this, the permutation of 4 balls from 14 becomes the combination of 4 balls from 14. That is, the total of 24,024 (14! / 10!, or 14x13x12x11) possible permutations is reduced by a factor of 24, to 1,001 combinations. Of these, the combination 11-12-13-14 (in any order that those numbers are drawn) is not assigned and it is ignored if drawn and the other 1,000 outcomes are distributed among the 14 non-playoff NBA teams.

The 14 non-playoff NBA teams are seeded 1-14 with the team with the worst record seeded 1, second worst record is seeded 2, and so on, where the best non-playoff team has seed 14. The seeds are then assigned combinations of numbers as described above so that the seeds have the following probabilities of one of their combinations being drawn.

    Seed 1: 250 combinations, 25% chance of receiving the #1 pick
    Seed 2: 199 combinations, 19.9% chance
    Seed 3: 138 combinations, 13.8% chance
    Seed 4: 137 combinations, 13.7% chance
    Seed 5: 76 combinations, 7.6% chance
    Seed 6: 75 combinations, 7.5% chance
    Seed 7: 43 combinations, 4.3% chance
    Seed 8: 28 combinations, 2.8% chance
    Seed 9: 17 combinations, 1.7% chance
    Seed 10: 11 combinations, 1.1% chance
    Seed 11: 8 combinations, 0.8% chance
    Seed 12: 7 combinations, 0.7% chance
    Seed 13: 6 combinations, 0.6% chance
    Seed 14: 5 combinations, 0.5% chance

The NBA Draft Lottery Simulator uses these probabilities to run a Monte Carlo simulation of the Lottery. The simulator uses the standings for the 2008 NBA season to simulate the 2008 NBA Draft Lottery.

To run the simulator click the start button on the applet below.




References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_Draft_Lottery