Tonight in Cleveland, the Toronto Raptors will be looking to walk away from their first ever Eastern Conference Finals game with a win. Nearly 500 miles away, in a mid-town Manhattan hotel, the Raptors will have another chance to wake up Wednesday as big winners.
The NBA’s annual Draft Lottery goes down today, and the Raptors, despite finishing fifth in the league’s regular season standings, are one of the 14 teams vying for a top pick in June’s draft.
Masai Ujiri will be representing the Raps for the televised event, which makes sense given it was the GM’s masterwork that landed the Raptors in the lottery — Toronto owns the the Knicks’ first-round pick this year as part of the trade that sent Andrea Bargnani to New York back in 2013.
It gets a little complicated, but the Knicks pick could belong to the Denver Nuggets (fallout from the Carmelo Anthony trade) as part of a pick swap. Basically what it boils down to is that the Raptors will get the worse pick between the Knicks (4.3 per cent chance to win the lottery) and Nuggets (1.9 per cent) .
So in the extremely unlikely scenario that the Knicks and Nuggets finish first and second tonight, it means the highest possible pick the Raptors can land is second overall.
Earlier today, we took a spin on RealGM’s Draft Lottery Simulator — just one — and here are the results:
The Timberwolves (29-53) have an 8.8% chance at the first pick and the notion of adding one of either Ben Simmons or Brandon Ingram — currently expected to go No. 1 and 2, respectively — to what already might be the most promising roster in the NBA (what with unanimous Rookie of the Year and future Hall of Famer Karl-Anthony Towns, and 2014 top pick Andrew Wiggins) is just scary.
You’ll notice Philadelphia dropped all the way to number four — nearly a worst-case scenario for the Sixers, who have the best odds at no.1 after going a pathetic 10-72 this season. The Lottery Gods do not approve of The Process, it would appear.
One of the biggest things to watch out for will be what happens with the Lakers pick. In this simulation, they’ve done well for themselves, but should Los Angeles drop out of the top three, they have to surrender their pick to the Sixers, who have a realistic shot of having two of the top 5 picks in this year’s draft.
No. 9 is right about where the Raptors are expected to land, and while scouts believe there is a considerable drop-off after Simmons and Ingram in terms of superstar potential, there will still be plenty of promising prospects available to Ujiri and the Raps at that spot. Besides, this is kind of like found money, no?
Check back to Sportsnet.ca after the lottery for the first edition of our Mock Draft.
