NBA admits brutal Mavericks truth that proves they deserved Flagg over tanking teams

Dallas Mavericks fans were on the edge of their seats on May 12 as Mark Tatum revealed the results of the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery, and the one way to partially make up for the Luka Doncic happened. Dallas won the lottery, giving them the first pick in the NBA Draft this summer and the right to select Duke's Cooper Flagg.

Fans from other teams immediately tried to say that the lottery was rigged for the Mavericks, as they believed that Nico Harrison traded Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for the No. 1 pick in the lottery, but that wasn't the case at all. Dallas just got extremely lucky, as their 1.8 percent chance of winning the lottery came to fruition, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver recently talked about this. His comments quietly reflect why the Mavs winning the lottery should be an example to the rest of the NBA.

Silver appeared on Fox Sports' Breakfast Ball on Wednesday, and he dove into Dallas winning the lottery and the lottery system as a whole. He talked about how even the worst team in the league had just a 14 percent chance of winning the lottery (a 86 percent chance not to win it), and one thing that the Mavericks did during the season actually gave them some favor with the basketball gods when it comes to the way the lottery is supposed to work.

Mavs shocked the NBA by winning the Draft Lottery without tanking

They didn't tank.

Even when it would have been easy to.

Silver talked about how two percent is two percent when talking about the Mavs' odds of winning the lottery, and how, on occasion, chance is going to run its course. He also said that the lottery odds were made to "disincentivize teams from tanking," and Dallas won the lottery without tanking a single game.

"They were trying to win," Silver said. "Then Kyrie got injured, and Anthony Davis got injured. So they found themselves in the lottery. Odds are odds and that’s how it turned out."

Even though the Mavericks contemplated tanking by shutting Anthony Davis down and not bringing him back from his adductor injury, they stuck to their guns, made the Play-In Tournament, and still landed the first overall pick. The lottery was redesigned to keep teams from tanking, and now the Mavericks can be used as an example to show that you don't always have to tank to land the first pick.

They played the season out how they were supposed to, and even though tanking would have given them better odds of landing the first pick, they still moved up with just a 1.8 percent chance and shocked the world. Tanking doesn't always work in today's NBA, and the Mavs got the best of both worlds by refusing to tank while also winning the Flagg sweepstakes.

Adding Flagg to a team that already has Kyrie Irving, Davis, Klay Thompson, Dereck Lively II, and P.J. Washington should terrify the rest of the NBA, as they would have undoubtedly been a playoff team if they hadn't dealt with so many injuries. Irving tearing his ACL wrecked the Mavericks' chances of making any noise in the postseason, but they still pressed ahead and tried their hardest to make the playoffs, and won the draft lottery less than a month later.

The Mavs winning the draft lottery after everything that has happened to them over the last four months was the most unbelievable outcome possible, and tanking teams had to have hated seeing Dallas win the chance to draft Flagg after being in the NBA Finals just over a year ago.