Conspiracy: The 1985 NBA Draft Lottery Was Rigged

While fans of struggling teams often have little to cheer for during the end of the season, the NBA Draft is something they have to look forward to. A plethora of young prospects are made available for selection, allowing teams to bolster their rosters in hopes of competing next season. In the past, the worst teams in each conference got to face off in a coin flip for the 1st overall draft pick. The loser of this coin toss ended with the 2nd overall selection. This may appear to be a good idea, but this created a lot of “tanking”, especially in the seasons that had better draft classes. It even had Clippers owner Donald Sterling proudly admitting, “We’ve got to bite the bullet. We can win by losing.” The Sterling strategy was to lose games on purpose and hope to win the coin toss and get the best prospect possible, and this put fear into the — at the time — young commissioner, David Stern. He devised a solution that is still in use today: the Draft Lottery.

The Draft Lottery was created at the perfect time. The team that got to first was going to be rewarded with the consensually best prospect in a long time: Georgetown center Patrick Ewing. He was the dream big man for any team, as he could score, defend, rebound, and shoot mid-range jumpers. The brand-new lottery now gave all seven non-playoff teams an equal 14.3% chance at this generational opportunity. The team with the seventh-worst record, or the best team in the lottery, was the New York Knicks. Commissioner David Stern grew up a fan of the Knicks, but that does not compare at all to the evidence that you are about to learn about.

There were seven envelopes placed into a plastic ball, each envelope displaying a logo of one of the seven teams in the lottery. As Jack Wagner tosses each envelope into the ball, he throws them into the middle, and they fall straight to the bottom. When he gets to the fourth one, he throws it back toward him and it hits the wall of the ball, creating a crease in the envelope. He then reverts to throwing the envelopes into the middle of the ball. When Stern goes to pick the winner of the lottery, he strangely flips over three cards and then pulls out the — you guessed it — New York Knicks!

A year ago, the Knicks would not have even had a shot at Ewing, which also creates an interesting theory that Stern wanted a bigger market to get Ewing in order to bolster viewership and revenue, and he created the lottery for a “chance” to get Ewing to a bigger market team. The lottery unfolded in front of national TV, and many people were suspicious of the whole process. The next day, the theory gained even more traction whenever it was leaked that the accounting firm Ernst & Whinney, the company that Jack Wagner (the man who creased the envelope) worked for, was the auditing firm for Gulf & Western, who owned the New York Knicks. When the Madison Square Garden president Jack Krumpe was asked about the whole lottery conspiracy, he said, “Hey, I told them how to fix it 60 days ago. You call up Ernst & Whinney and you say, ‘If we don’t get Ewing, you’re fired.” It seems to be a joke, but it does stir the pot for conspiracy theorists and NBA fans worldwide. While there were plenty of things to help fuel this controversy, it feels as if we will never truly know if the 1985 Draft Lottery was rigged.