Inside Job: Adam Silver Rigs the NBA Draft Lottery to Save the Dallas Mavericks with Cooper Flagg after trading Luka Doncic

You couldn’t script it better. Actually — maybe you could, because that’s exactly what Adam Silver and the NBA just did.

After the Dallas Mavericks handed away Luka Doncic — one of the greatest offensive talents we’ve ever seen — in a trade that made absolutely zero basketball sense, everyone thought they were cooked. Buried. A laughingstock. So naturally, what does the league do? They giftwrap Cooper Flagg, the biggest prospect since Victor Wembanyama, and hand him right over.

You can’t make this stuff up. The NBA Draft lottery was rigged

The final results from the 2025 #NBADraftLottery presented by State Farm:

1. Mavericks
2. Spurs
3. 76ers
4. Hornets
5. Jazz
6. Wizards
7. Pelicans
8. Nets
9. Raptors
10. Rockets
11. Trail Blazers
12. Bulls
13. Hawks
14. Spurs

— NBA (@NBA) May 12, 2025

Let’s talk odds. The Mavs had a 1.8% chance to win the lottery. They’ve NEVER moved up in the history of their franchise. But on the same year they go into full-on disaster mode and trade their superstar? They magically jump to the top and walk away with the most hyped white American prospect since Larry Bird?

Yeah, okay.

Look — we all joke about the NBA lottery being rigged. But this? This was so obvious it might as well have come with a “Sponsored by Adam Silver” graphic on the bottom of the screen.

A Trade So Bad, It Had to Be Reversed by the Commissioner Himself

Let’s not forget — Dallas just pulled off one of the worst trades in modern sports history. The Luka deal will go down in the books as franchise malpractice. Their fans were done. Their team had no direction. So here comes the league with the rescue mission. “Oh, you gave the Lakers Luka? No problem, here’s Cooper Flagg. We cool now?”

Seriously, you couldn’t ask for a cleaner cover-up if it were scripted by WWE. Maybe Vince McMahon should be running the draft lottery next year, just to make it official.

What About the Rest of Us?

Imagine being the Wizards or the Jazz. Tanked all year for nothing. Not even a top-4 pick. Philly fans like myself thought this was the draft that was going to turn things around — get us Cooper Flagg and pair him with Embiid and Maxey. Nope. Thanks for playing.

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And don’t even get me started on how close we were to watching Wemby and Flagg terrorize the league for the next 10 years in San Antonio. But nah, Silver had to bail out his boys in Big D.

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