With the NBA Draft upcoming tomorrow, my new buddy over at TrueHoop has linked to a really interesting paper on the math behind the NBA Lottery. The paper’s math is largely over my head, but Henry has broken it down quite nicely…It sucks to be Utah.

With the fourth best lottery spot (by percentage) Utah looks to be in a pretty decent spot. There would seem to be a nice probability that they could move up to one of the first three spots. However, as shown in the paper by Florke and Ecker :

It is more likely that the team with the fourth worst record will drop in the draft lottery… compared to staying in the same position or moving up.

With ten more teams in the lottery behind the Jazz, for every one of them that secures a top-three pick, Utah will move a pick lower (assuming they don’t move up).

The paper is available here (it requires Adobe Acrobat).

There are some really interesting facts and figures available about the NBA Draft here from NBA.com.