NBA Draft Lottery 2015: Explaining Format, Tiebreak Rules, Coin-Flip Scenarios

The end of the 2015 NBA regular season is nigh, and for 16 teams, that's a welcome development. It means playoffs, extra revenue, cross-country exposure and a shot at the Larry O'Brien Trophy.

For the 14 teams unable—or depending on your views on team-building and tanking, unwilling—to make the postseason, the next major milestone on the calendar is the 2015 NBA draft lottery, where the fates of many franchises and potential prospects hang in the balance.

As of Sunday, April 12, three playoff spots have yet to be determined. Boston, Brooklyn, Indiana and Miami are all duking it out for the seventh and eighth seeds in the Eastern Conference, while Oklahoma City and New Orleans are neck-and-neck for the final seed in the West. Half of those teams will enjoy the postseason; the other three will have to contend with missing out and face long odds for a top pick in this year's draft.

The format for the lottery is fairly simple, but worth an explanation. 

Fourteen pingpong balls numbered 1-14 are placed in a container, rattling around like it's a game of high-stakes bingo. The 14 non-playoff teams receive a certain amount of four-ball combinations out of a total of 1,000 combinations in a weighted system designed to boost the chances of the worst teams receiving a top draft pick.

The fewer the wins, the more combinations you receive, and thus a better chance of winning the first-overall draft choice. Here's a breakdown of the current percentages and combinations.

The container rattles the pingpong balls around, and the team that owns the first four-ball combination drawn from the container gets the first pick (the order in which the balls are drawn does not matter, the numbers just need to correspond).

The process is repeated to determine the second and third picks in the draft. After that, the remaining 11 teams are then sorted based on regular-season standings, in an inverse order.

So if the New York Knicks do indeed finish with the league's worst record this year but don't receive a top-three pick in the pingpong lottery, they would then get the fourth pick in the draft. The next-worst team that didn't get a lucky combination would then get the fifth pick, and so on and so forth.

No team can drop more than three spots from their seeding—which means the Los Angeles Lakers and their fans will essentially be a cases study in how nerve-wracking this process can be for a franchise.

The Lakers currently sport a lowly 21-59 record, one that is fourth-worst in the league and will stay that way with just two games remaining in the regular season and no team in range of either tying or slipping above or below them in the standings. Thanks to the disastrous Steve Nash trade and subsequent NBA deals, the Lakers' first-round pick will go the Philadelphia 76ers if it falls out of the top five.

Eric Pincus of the Los Angeles Times provided a roundup of their current odds for various lottery scenarios:

At fourth, the Lakers have 11.9% odds of winning the top overall pick, 12.6% for second, 13.3% for third, 9.9% for fourth and 35.1% for fifth.

If the Lakers drop to sixth (16.0% chance) or seventh (1.2%), their 2015 draft pick will go to the 76ers, as part of the Steve Nash trade with the Phoenix Suns.

Should the Lakers keep their selection in June, they'll owe their 2016 first-rounder to Philadelphia, with top-three protection.

With Kobe Bryant likely finishing out his final season in 2016, Los Angeles will hope to be playoff-bound this time next year.

Losing this year's draft pick to fate would be a huge blow to their chances of a quick turnaround, especially with talents like Karl-Anthony Towns, Willie Cauley-Stein and Jahlil Okafor potentially available to pair with Julius Randle and—hopefully, for the team's sake—some big-name free agents to be named later.

Tiebreak, Coin-Flip Scenarios

But what if two teams finish with the same regular-season record, you ask? Well, in the case of the combinations, the two teams in question would receive the average number of combinations of their corresponding positions in the lottery.

In other words, if two teams tied for the ninth-worst record, they would evenly split the combinations awarded to the ninth- and tenth-lowest positions, which in this case would mean 14 combinations each.

If the average number of combinations doesn't come out to a round number, as it would higher up in the lottery, then a coin flip determines which team gets the extra combination. This same process works if three teams tie for the same record.

A coin flip also determines which of two tied teams would get the better pick if neither received a top-three lottery pick.

The NBA draft lottery system has come under scrutiny in recent years from those who say it encourages tanking and diminishes competition.

Bleacher Report's Kevin Ding gave his take on how the current system might've created a conflict of interest for the 76ers between the short- and long-term goals of actually playing winning, competitive basketball:

You might've noticed the ridiculousness of the Philadelphia 76ers being incentivized to lose two recent games to the Los Angeles Lakers. The Sixers, who've been rightly ridiculed for skewing rebuilding into deliberate losing in an array of other ways, succeeded and lost both games and decreased the Lakers' chances of netting a high pick while increasing their own chances. (The Sixers had just traded for the Lakers' pick, which will be conveyed this season only if it drops out of the top five.)

The NBA had a chance to reform the lottery system in October, but the proposal was unsuccessful at a league board of governors meeting, failing to garner the required number of votes to enact change, per ESPN.com.

This issue will likely come up again for the Association as certain teams, fans and observers clamor for change. A sense of parity and balance between big- and small-market teams can be good for the league—just look at what it's done for the NFL—and the draft is a major component in team-building.

Grantland's Zach Lowe gave his take on what certain teams and executives may have been feeling when faced with the reform back in October:

The lotto anxiety was especially acute among small-market teams. Their thinking is simple: Non-glamour teams are never going to draw superstar free agents, especially if the big boys have cap room every summer and no qualms about overspending. The only way the non-glams can get superstars is to draft them, and the only reliable way to do that is to finish at or near the top of the lottery.

Some fans and teams might be willing to suffer dreadful seasons for the promise of future great ones, especially if they are in a small market and chasing the lottery appears to be the only viable strategy other than getting lucky with mid-tier picks and the occasional free-agent coup.

At the same time, the NBA is selling a product, and two teams playing lame-duck basketball at the tail end of bad seasons isn't usually great for fans. Plus, there is no guarantee tanking works out in the end.

Reform may be in the future, but under the current system there's one thing we do know: Lakers fans are really, really nervous about what may transpire in late May.