Sometime around 6 p.m. EDT Monday, locked inside a secure room with no way of communicating with the outside world, team executives and others will watch 14 ping-pong balls start to bounce inside
Sometime around 6 p.m. EDT Monday, locked inside a secure room with no way of communicating with the outside world, team executives and others will watch 14 ping-pong balls start to bounce inside a machine.
The balls will be numbered, 1 through 14. One will be drawn, then a second, then a third, then a fourth. And with that, the people inside that room will find out, an hour or so before the rest of the world, which team won the No. 1 pick next month in the NBA draft.
The NBA draft lottery is Monday night in Chicago, with the winner getting the chance to pick No. 1 overall. And that means Duke’s Cooper Flagg — the likely No. 1 pick — will have a good chance of knowing which city he’ll be calling home next season as soon as the lottery results are announced.
Nobody inside the room where the results are revealed on a televised broadcast will know who won the lottery until deputy commissioner Mark Tatum makes the actual announcement. Those inside the room remain there, without their phones, until that time.
