The results of the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery are in, and Los Angeles Lakers fans are just as surprised as anyone else. After coming in with just 1.8% chance of winning the lottery, the Dallas Mavericks are walking away with the top pick and the right to draft Cooper Flagg next month. The results of this lottery were certainly suspicious to many, and it leads us to wonder: Were the Mavs given the top pick as a result of giving up Luka Doncic back in February?
It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, sure. But let's consider the big picture here. Only three teams in the lottery's history have won the lottery while having as low a percentage chance to do so as Dallas just did. That alone is pretty suspicious. But it wouldn't even be that suspect if it weren't for the events that transpired in the last few months leading up to this moment.
As we all know, it made little to zero sense for the Mavericks to trade away Doncic in February ahead of the trade deadline. Sure, Luka may have been a little out of shape, coming off an injury, and/or not moving as well as he typically does. But that's the player that just took you to the NBA Finals. Dumping him less than a year after coming three wins shy of a championship was truly hard to fathom.
But for the last three months, what we all chalked this up to was, "Well, I guess Nico Harrison just didn't know what he was doing." It seemed to be a somewhat viable explanation at the time, and everyone piled on Harrison as he became a league-wide punching bag. Meanwhile, the Lakers reaped the benefits.
However, now that Dallas is coming away from the lottery with the top pick and what looks to be a loaded roster once they add Cooper Flagg, it seems like what's actually been happening here likely goes far deeper than the Mavericks' General Manager making an incompetent decision.
The Luka Doncic trade may make more sense now
Am I saying this was all a big conspiracy to get Doncic to Los Angeles and then to replace him with Flagg in Dallas? Well, let's look at the evidence and then you can make your own determination. Don't take it from me.
There's a very long and well-documented history of the Lakers just happening to wind up with star players over and over, often for pennies on the dollar. See: Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O'Neal, Pau Gasol, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, the list goes on and on.
You can say that the league favors the Lakers or not, but it's undeniable that they've improbably had a number of stars simply fall into their lap over the years. No matter how many failed moves they have made, they always seem to land on their feet.
Perhaps this serves to shed some light on what just happened with Dallas. Maybe one of the only ways Nico Harrison would have willingly dealt away Luka Doncic earlier this year would have been if he was instructed to do so with the assurance that his team would be getting the number one pick in return.
It absolutely makes sense that the NBA would want their premiere franchise to have another star player as the LeBron James era slowly comes to an end. So why not put together a scenario in which the Lakers end up with number 77 while the Mavericks get his replacement and their new franchise player? Everyone wins, in theory at least.
The NBA is a business, and it's good for the league if the Lakers do well. Three months after one of the most unthinkable trades of all-time, the franchise that traded Luka Doncic and had never previously won the lottery in their history gets the top pick with just 1.8% odds. I'm not necessarily saying it was all rigged, but you can connect the dots and see that it's all very convenient at the least.