The Sixers Will Need More Luck Than They Deserve at the Lottery Tonight

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Tonight will be a fateful night for a number of teams at the 2013 Draft Lottery in New York, as David Stern will dramatically unveil a series of envelopes containing logos from crappy teams until just three lucky franchises remain, who will get to pick from the cream of the crop from this year's class at the draft on June 27th--thus setting off a series of crackpot conspiracy theories about how the system is rigged and how Patrick Ewing really should have gone to the Golden State Warriors back in '86.

In all likelihood, the Philadelphia 76ers will not be one of those teams. Their strong (and by strong I mean not always embarrassingly weak) end to the season meant that they climbed out of the league's bottom ten, and actually needed a strong surge from the Toronto Raptors to even finish with the 11th-worst record, meaning that ten teams have better odds of being selected in the lottery than they do. As Enrico recently broke down for you guys, the Sixers have no better than a 1.2% chance of nabbing any of the top 3 picks, and just a 0.8% chance of getting #1.

History is not on their side here--the '99 Hornets were the most recent team to grab a top three pick with odds that bad, grabbing franchise point guard Baron Davis, and you gotta go back to the '93 Magic for a team who got the #1 overall pick with a slot as low as the Sixers, when they landed Chris Webber back in '93. (Longtime Sixers fans will no doubt recall the team earning the #2 pick in that draft, with which they selected the immortal Shawn Bradley.)

And you know what? That's OK. The Sixers already cashed in at the lottery once in recent years, when they landed the #2 pick despite only having the sixth-best odds, drafting Evan Turner with the pick. Not only has Turner not panned out for us as we'd hope a second-overall selection would, but the more spiritual and/or superstitious contingent of the Liberty Ballers fanbase could reasonably argue that the karma we used up getting that pick ended up biting us in the 'fro with the whole Andrew Bynum debacle. Lucking out a second time (with even-worse odds) could result in the Wells Fargo Center being attacked by a rove of ice zombie Hip Hops at the season-opener next year.

Besides, this really isn't the draft for pushing our luck like that anyway. The consensus top guys--Kentucky big Nerlens Noel, Kansas shooting guard Ben McLemore, Georgetown swingman Otto Porter--are all guys with question marks or limited ceilings, lacking the slam-dunk obviousness of a Blake Griffin or an Anthony Davis. Chances are pretty good that at least one of those teams in the top three is going to look back in anger at this lottery night, while at least one team who missed out is gonna be secretly thankful not to have the pressure. Besides, finishing with the #11 pick gives our new guy Sam Hinkie a chance to be a little creative, rather than just taking the guy everyone agrees is best. Don't you want to see what our GM can do?

Don't get me wrong, I'll still be rooting for Stern to skip from the Raptors to the Blazers when drawing teams out of his envelope tonight. But it's almost certainly not gonna happen, and that's cool. I'm weirdly optimistic about our chances at hitting at #11 anyway.

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