Ping-pong balls and conspiracy theories: Can Charlotte Hornets win NBA draft lottery?

It’s almost NBA draft lottery time, and that means it’s time for ping-pong balls and for conspiracy theorists to join the party en masse.

Let’s start with the facts, though: The NBA draft lottery is at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday in Chicago (ESPN).

The Charlotte Hornets, owing to having the fourth-worst record in the league in 2022-23, are guaranteed to pick no worse than No. 8 no matter how it works out.

And the No. 1 pick, no matter who wins it among the 14 lottery teams, is all but guaranteed to be 7-foot-3 French teenager Victor Wembanyama, considered to be a generational talent and labeled an “alien” by no less than LeBron James.

The Hornets’ have a 12.5% chance of obtaining the No. 1 pick in the Wemby Sweepstakes. That works out to one chance in eight. The three teams with worse records last season — Detroit, Houston and San Antonio — have only slightly better odds, at 14% apiece.

The Hornets plan to send Mark Williams, their first-round draft choice in 2022, as their on-stage representative to the draft lottery.

Now let’s ponder just two of the competing conspiracy theories you will find online if you burrow far enough down the rabbit hole.

Pro-Hornets conspiracy theory: Basketball legend Michael Jordan is seriously considering a sale of his majority stake in the team.

The NBA wants badly to keep its most famous player in the league. Thus, Jordan and the Hornets will beat their 12.5% odds to earn the first pick and will win both the lottery and Wembanyama, in return for Jordan sticking around.

Anti-Hornets conspiracy theory: Are you kidding?

The NBA doesn’t want Wembanyama in one of its smaller markets with a team that hasn’t made the playoffs for seven straight seasons (a dubious streak that is now the NBA’s longest). There’s no way the league will “allow” Charlotte to win the lottery. He will end up in a bigger market, or at least one with more of a championship tradition.

When I asked Hornets fans via social media about lucky charms or what other thoughts they might have for the upcoming lottery, most of what I got back wasn’t about horseshoes or psychics. It was mostly some variation of: “It doesn’t matter, because the lottery is rigged anyway.”

This sort of pessimism is what happens when you haven’t made the playoffs since 2016. The Hornets’ glory days of “winning” the lottery or at least improving their position to get Larry Johnson (No. 1 pick in 1991), Alonzo Mourning (No. 2 in 1992) and Baron Davis (No. 3 in 1999) do seem very long ago.

I should note there was a bit of optimism among Charlotte fans, too, and some of it stemmed from the fact the Carolina Panthers already picked No. 1 in the NFL Draft (albeit after a trade up that cost them a bundle) only last month.

There were several suggestions that the Hornets could enhance their luck by sending Bryce Young, the former Alabama quarterback who was Carolina’s No. 1 pick, to the NBA Draft as the Hornets’ representative in a bit of citywide cooperation.

Note: The Hornets won’t have a draft lottery party Tuesday, but they will hold some public events around the June 22 NBA Draft.

Hornets’ bad lottery luck

A bit of history: Beginning in the 2000s, the Hornets have been in the lottery 16 times.

On 15 occasions, their pre-draft position has either stayed the same or gotten worse post-lottery. It most notably got worse in 2012, when the Hornets had a horrid 7-59 season that was so bad somebody made a movie about it. That gave the Hornets the best chance at the No. 1 slot (it was a more robust 25% chance that year). But Charlotte still lost out, instead dropping to No. 2.

The Hornets then picked Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, a nice guy who couldn’t shoot straight in a league where shooting was soon to become everything. MKG is long out of the league.

New Orleans picked Anthony Davis, who is still a star, now for the Los Angeles Lakers. That lottery loss left a huge scar, one that Hornets fans still absentmindedly pick at during random timeouts. (It wasn’t all bad lottery luck, though, that made the Hornets keep stumbling — Damian Lillard was available at No. 2 and lasted until the No. 6 pick that year).

The Ewing ‘conspiracy’

Conspiracy theories for the NBA lottery date back most famously to 1985, when supposedly the NBA “gave” the New York Knicks the No. 1 pick and Patrick Ewing in the lottery’s infant days.

At that time, instead of ping-pong balls, the league simply used giant envelopes inside what looked like a transparent beach ball. Supposedly the Knicks’ card was either creased or refrigerated or something, which allowed NBA commissioner David Stern to select it without seeming to do anything wrong. The NBA, of course, has always categorically denied this or any allegation of tampering with any lottery.

The lottery’s technology has since improved. It’s now 14 ping-pong balls — weighed and measured before the event begins — that make or break the lottery, and there are 1,001 possible combinations. The actual drawing of the ping-pong balls will take place in a separate room shortly before the results are announced on ESPN. The lottery results announcement will be made by Mark Tatum, the NBA’s deputy commissioner. He won’t know the results until he reads them, the NBA says, nor will the team’s on-stage representatives.

According to the NBA, Charlotte has a 48.08% chance of obtaining a top-4 pick. If the Hornets end up second or third, they likely will get either G League Ignite guard Scoot Henderson or Alabama forward Brandon Miller. The most likely scenario has the Hornets ending up picking sixth (25.74%), which would be a true bummer.

But who knows? Maybe Williams will bring the Hornets some luck and find himself a teammate even taller than he is. Until the ping-pong balls stop popping, no one knows.

Or do they?