2020 NBA Lottery Primer

The NBA Lottery is finally here! After originally being scheduled for May 19th before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the teams that missed out on the playoffs will now find out where they will be picking in the 1st round. Because it's been 15 months since the last lottery and that one was the first in the new system, here is a quick primer for what to expect tonight. 

More chances to move up

You can see in the graphic above that in addition to having a fourth drawing to move up to a higher pick, the odds of doing so were significantly flattened with the three worst teams now having the exact same number of lottery combinations (It's a little odd to me that they draw for the first four picks now while it's three teams with equal odds, but that's just my opinion). This change to discourage tanking came on the heels of the worst teams getting rewarded with the top pick more than ever. As I wrote when last digging into the system a few years ago, the teams with the #1 odds didn't win the lottery for the first ten years after the change to having 14 teams involved. Then as luck would have it, those teams in that position, which had a 25% chance for the 1st pick, won for four years in a row before last year's changing of the odds. That shift produced immediate results as the Pelicans moved up after tying for just the 7th worst record. They had a 6% chance of doing so instead of only 2.9% from that same position in previous years.

The rich get richer

Even with the new changes, a top-5 pick is still guaranteed to the Warriors after five straight trips to the Finals. The departure of Kevin Durant and getting only five games combined between Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson due to injuries left the team with the league's worst record, so they have a 14% chance at the #1 spot and can only drop four spots from the drawing.  It may not be a guaranteed top-4 pick anymore and only a 40.17% chance at the top-3 compared to 64.3% previously, but reinforcements will be on the way for their core of the Splash Brothers, Draymond Green, and now Andrew Wiggins to potentially give them a jolt right back into title contention. It could be somewhat similar to the Lakers getting James Worthy 1st overall as the reigning champions, the Celtics adding Kevin McHale to an ascending team that just won 61 games and would go on to win the title his rookie year, or the champion Celtics drafting Len Bias 2nd overall before his tragic death. 

Breaking Down the 2020 Champions League Bracket

First off, I want to share my most recent contribution to The Sports Fan Journal, Three Statistical Reasons Why Kawhi Leonard and Paul George Will Rule the Restart. Between sorting through exported box scores and on/off advanced stats, I put a lot of research into how their new partnership has operated going into the bubble, so give that a look.

But that's not the point of this post, the Champions League is. It's back! After sports had to go on hiatus in the middle of the round of 16 due to COVID-19, the second legs concluded over the weekend. Due to the time off, it will now be a single elimination tournament all held in Lisbon, but we now know the last eight teams. Finishing up an exercise I did after the draw was made, here is a visual of how Five Thirty Eight ranks the remaining squads with probabilities of advancing to each stage:

The way the bracket played out means that the three best teams remaining are grouped together, so the odds of winning the Final are pretty wide open. Bayern Munich is actually ranked right behind Manchester City with the two of them in a tier of their own, but having to face the very next best team in Barcelona creates quite a difficult path to glory. City owns a 52% chance of making it to the Final compared to Bayern's 31% as a result, but the difference in the probability of winning it all is just 37% to 21%. That being said, Germany's eight time defending champions are my pick to win it all and complete the treble like in 2012/2013 after winning 30 of 33 matches in all competitions since replacing Niko Kovac with Hansi Flick in November.