Morant's Masterpiece a Painful Reminder of 2019 Draft Lottery
New York won just 17 games in 2018-19 and finished with the league's worst record. It was the first and only time during the lottery era that New York tanked correctly and accomplished this feat...
Stop me if you've heard this one before: The team with a superstar won the basketball game last night…
Ja Morant scored 27 points, grabbed ten rebounds and dished out a career-high 14 assists in a mesmerizing performance to push the Grizzlies past the Knicks Sunday night. Jalen Brunson was awesome, especially in the fourth quarter, but New York fell just short.
Morant did it all for Memphis in the 127-123 victory and acknowledged that it was special to do it inside MSG. "The bright lights, man," said Morant afterward. "Having a triple-double in the Garden is crazy. Growing up watching teams come here and play, watching the Knicks play, everybody loves the Garden. We really called it 'the bright lights'; everybody is watching." Morant added that for the first time in his career, his father, Tee, asked for his jersey after the game.
Yes, we've often talked about how crucially important it is to have a superstar on your roster in the NBA. Watching Morant put on a show Sunday was but the most recent reminder. Yet, zooming out a bit, it's excruciating for Knicks fans because of how Morant ended up in Memphis.
In October of 1993, the NBA implemented a change in the lottery system that gave the team that finished the prior season with the worst record a 25% chance of winning the draft lottery, with the odds tumbling for teams slotted two through 14. For the next 26 years, the league would use that same format.
Then, in 2019, the NBA Board of Governors passed a lottery reform that evened out the odds at the top. Instead of the worst team having a 25% chance of winning, each of the bottom three teams would have the same odds of 14%.
Although the Knicks have been perennial losers this century, they were often stuck in limbo: Not good enough to advance to the playoffs but not bad enough to ensure a top pick. However, that wasn't the case in 2019.
At the midpoint of the 2018-19 campaign, New York traded away Kristaps Porzingis, Tim Hardaway Jr. (NY's leading scorer that season), and veterans Courtney Lee and Trey Burke. No half measures this time around; the Knicks were committed to careening toward the bottom of the standings. (Just how awful was that Knicks squad? The four leading scorers in terms of total points that season were Kevin Knox, Damyean Dotson, Noah Vonleh and Emmanuel Mudiay.)
Unsurprisingly, New York won just 17 games and finished with the league's worst record. It was the first and only time during the lottery era that New York tanked correctly and accomplished this feat. In each of the previous 25 years, that would have meant New York would enter the lottery drawing with a 25% chance at the No. 1 overall pick and a 21.5% chance at the second selection.
Instead, for the first time ever under this new, revised format, New York had just a 14% chance of winning the lottery and a 13.4% chance of landing in the second slot.
As fate would have it, the Pelicans, who won nearly twice as many games as the Knicks in 2018-19, would jump all the way up from seventh to first. The Grizzlies, who, like the Pels, won 33 games the prior season, parachuted past the Knicks to snag the second pick. New York fell to third.
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