For this video, I’m going to link to the youtube version here instead of embedding so you can see the title information.

The video shows the first ever lottery, amongst seven NBA teams, to see the order of their draft picks. The fact that this is the first such lottery is particularly noteworthy.

The conjecture is that the NBA fixed the lottery so that the Knicks could get Patrick Ewing as the first pick. One motivation for doing this is that New York is a huge market, so there is incentive for the league’s best player to go there.

You can clearly see the envelope containing the number 1 pick is bent when it gets pulled out of the canister. And, the comment by the submitter of the video seems to indicate that the envelope is bent when it is put in the spindle, although it is admittedly hard to see.

But why the heck are they using only seven, ridiculously giant envelopes? That alone seems to point to scam. Either a scam, or idiots are running the thing.

In fact, as a wee child, I was a huge fan of the Encyclopedia Brown fictional detective series. Encyclopedia Brown was a kid detective who used his brains to solve crimes, usually by finding inconsistencies in the accounts of his main suspect. For some reason, I remember reading a case about a lottery that Encyclopedia Brown foiled by determining that a single ping pong ball used in a lottery was frozen, thus allowing the picker to feel for the one that was frozen. Although I can’t find this story, this forum comment recalls the same story.

Hence, idiots or scam.