7:40 PM ET

Alrighty folks, we are a mere 20 minutes away from the start of ESPN’s 2022 NBA Draft Lottery Coverage! I’m going to kick the night off by running a simulation of 150 trials from the Hyzermetrics NBA Draft Lottery Simulator. For this initial run, I won’t be fixing any draft positions or anything, just going to change the number of repetitions and let it ride. I’ll be back with the results shortly.

7:56 PM ET

Alright, the results of our set of 150 trials are in. As expected, the Rockets, Magic, Pistons, and Thunder finished with the highest average and median draft positions. Nothing too crazy here. What I would like to focus on is our famous p(max)/p(observed) likelihood ratio stat that I’ve talked about at length in past articles. For the series of 150 repetitions that we just ran, the average ratio was 45.8, which seems relatively high, but check out the median… it’s only 5.7. This means that half of the random trial reps we just ran came in with a max:observed likelihood ratio at or under 5.7. As we go through the lottery, this median number is important to note, as we can benchmark the likelihood ratio that we’re about to observe against this unadulterated 5.7 median in our initial set of trials.

8:07 PM ET

Doing a little digging into the numbers from our initial set of trials. There were some really unlikely outcomes that brought the average likelihood ratio way up! In fact 132 of the 150 trials had a max:observed likelihood ratio under the average of 45.8. Based on this, I’d be relatively surprised if the observed result of the NBA Draft Lottery has a ratio greater than the median of 5.7, and I’d be downright shocked if it we see an outcome with a ratio that exceeds 45.8.

8:13 PM ET

Ok, ESPN let’s announce the results already.

8:21 PM ET

Alright, we are pretty much locked to get a very chalk-y result here. We know that the Kings are picking in the top 4… the least likely result remaining is 1) Kings, 2) Thunder, 3) Magic, 4) Rockets. Let’s see what that result would look like from a probability perspective…

8:30 PM ET

The results are in! The first four picks in the 2022 NBA Draft will be:

1. Orlando Magic
2. OKC Thunder
3. Houston Rockets
4. Sacramento Kings

Let’s run another simulation with this result built in as fixed:

With p(max)/p(observed) roughly equal to 2, the actual result of the 2022 NBA Draft Lottery was about half as likely to occur than the most likely outcome. Based on our initial series of trials, this result is rather unremarkable, however there are two important observations we made in the Draft Lottery that were unlikely:

1. The Kings got a top 4 pick
2. The Rockets draft after the OKC Thunder

To conclude the evening, I am already preparing the enhancements for next year’s NBA Draft Lottery, can’t wait to share them with you! Thanks for joining for the first Hyzermetrics Live NBA Draft Lottery Simulation!