The Knicks enter tonight’s lottery (8:30 PM Eastern on ESPN) with a question begging to be answered – “Do the basketball gods love Phil Jackson more than they hate James Dolan?” Phil Jackson has lived a charmed life in the NBA. He won two titles as a player, then won six titles with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and the Bulls and then five titles with Kobe Bryan, Shaquille O’Neal, Pau Gasol and the Lakers. James Dolan, on the other hand, has lived a charmed life in general, but not so much in the NBA, where he does stuff like hire a guy that a jury ruled was a sexual harasser to be the head of his Women’s Basketball team (and then not only not throw in a “He’s changed. He’s sorry for what he did before” but instead go the opposite route and say “We think the jury was wrong”).
The Knicks also annoyingly won a couple of otherwise meaningless games at the end of the season, which reduced their odds from having the best odds at getting the top pick in the lottery to the second best odds (and made their worst case scenario change from #4 to #5). Tonight we will learn if the basketball gods have decided to reward the Knicks with a top pick due to the fact that the Knicks didn’t actively try to lose games once they gutted their roster (they were just terrible, so they normally had good odds for losing) instead of the Minnesota Timberwolves, who also gutted their roster but then actively tried (and succeeded) to lose games late in the year.
Here are the Knicks’ odds tonight:
1st overall: 19.9%
2nd overall: 18.8%
3rd overall: 17.1%
4th overall: 31.9%
5th overall: 12.3%
Breaking it down further..
Top Two pick: 38.7%
Top Three pick: 55.8%
Top Four pick: 87.7%
Top Five pick: 100%
The important thing to remember if the Knicks don’t do well in tonight’s lottery is that it will all be Chris Paul’s fault. He cannot be considered a star player if I cannot blame him for the Knicks not doing well in the lottery.
So, one last time for the 2014-15 season, let’s go Knicks(‘ ping pong balls)!