There’s a pretty large group of basketball fans who believe the NBA is rigged. And after the Dallas Mavericks won the Cooper Flagg sweepstakes last night, their voices are only getting louder.
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The Mavs had only a 1.8% chance of having the lottery ping pong balls bounce in their favor. But this isn’t the first time a team has overcome long odds to get the chance to draft a potential generational player.
Conspiracy theorists have been on the case for years, dating all the way back to Patrick Ewing and the ‘frozen envelope’ theory in 1985. Other pieces of “evidence” include the Cleveland Cavaliers being given the chance to draft Akron native LeBron James in 2003, and then winning the Kyrie Irving lottery the year after LBJ took his talents to South Beach.
Additionally, there’s also the Chicago Bulls being given the opportunity to draft hometown kid, Derrick Rose, in 2008, and the New Orleans Hornets winning the Anthony Davis lottery as a reward to their new ownership in 2012.
While there’s never been any hard evidence proving any chicanery with the lottery, the results have been suspicious, at the very least. Even some NBA players have added fuel to the fire, such as LeBron James suggesting the process was rigged to get him to Cleveland when he appeared on The Pat McAfee Show in March.
Shaquille O’Neal also has his doubts about the integrity of the league, which he shared on The Big Podcast with Shaq last year.
“True story, I never told this story. In the first championship, the first round, I forget who we were playing, I hear Phil Jackson tell [Lakers trainer] Gary Vitti, ‘Hey, get us some hotels in Indiana, ’cause that’s who we’re gonna play in the Finals,'” Shaq recalled. “We hadn’t even played one game yet.”
Shaq’s Lakers went on to win their first of three consecutive championships that year over, you guessed it, the Indiana Pacers.
Conspiracy theories set the NBA apart from other leagues
There’s always been the belief that the NBA is lurking in the shadows and pulling strings to get the results it wants, and last night’s lottery results have only furthered that mindset.
NBA 100% rigged this draft lottery to reward Dallas for agreeing to the league-administered Luka trade. You cant make this up
— Mikey (@MMcC_86) May 12, 2025
Whether it be rigging the draft to fit a narrative or assigning certain referees to important playoff games. For instance, longtime ref Scott Foster’s nickname is “The Extender” for the statistically improbable way teams that trail in postseason series seem to win when he’s assigned to their games. Tinfoil hat-wearing fans have always found a reason to believe the conspiracies.
Even coaches believe this to some extent, as they publicly lobby for big-market teams like the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics not to get every important call in critical games.
The big winner from last night’s lottery, other than the conspiracy theorists, of course, is Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison. He has gone from being Public Enemy No. 1 in Dallas to a man who looks like he was playing 5D chess this whole time.
This isn’t the first time people believe a conspiracy has gone down in Dallas, but that’s a topic for another time. The Mavs were a game away from reaching the playoffs before losing to the Kings in the play-in. And now they will almost certainly enter next season with Anthony Davis and Cooper Flagg, and a revived sense of optimism about the future.
