April 14, 2025
Patrick Gorski/Imagn Images
On May 12, the Sixers will either be rewarded with a top-six pick or leave the NBA Draft Lottery empty-handed.
Every day between the end of the Sixers' regular season and the NBA Draft Lottery on May 12, we will use Tankathon.com's famous simulation tool to run through the lottery 10 times. Over a 29-day period, we will collect a significant sample of possible outcomes and track those results as the Sixers wait to learn the fate of their own first-round pick.
The Sixers are entering the lottery with the fifth-best set of odds, but they will only keep their first-rounder if it falls in the top six slots due to an obligation to the Oklahoma City Thunder from a trade made nearly five years ago.
Let's get to today's simulations:
The outcomes of today's batch of 10 simulations:
• Simulation No. 1: 7th pick
• Simulation No. 2: 1st pick
• Simulation No. 3: 1st pick
• Simulation No. 4: 6th pick
• Simulation No. 5: 3rd pick
• Simulation No. 6: 8th pick
• Simulation No. 7: 1st pick
• Simulation No. 8: 4th pick
• Simulation No. 9: 6th pick
• Simulation No. 10: 7th pick
MORE: 5 biggest takeaways from Sixers' exit interviews
Three out of 10 times in which the Sixers land Cooper Flagg? What a way to start. One of the three simulations which netted the Sixers the No. 1 overall pick turned out to be one of the wildest lottery drawings you will ever see, featuring three major jumpers in the top three and devastating falls for the NBA's worst teams:
Would the NBA enjoy an outcome of this sort to be able to flex the anecdotal evidence that teams at the bottom of the standings can still end up not scoring the most valuable draft picks? Maybe.
The Sixers did see their pick drop down to No. 8 once across this batch of simulations, but everyone would agree that the pick landing at No. 7 would be the absolute most painful scenario imaginable. It happened twice today, including in the very first of what will be 290 simulations, and in the final simulation of this grouping:
This would be a particularly brutal result given the lengths the Sixers went to outperform the Toronto Raptors in their tanking efforts for two months to end the 2024-25 season.
MORE: Areas of improvement for Sixers' strong rookie class
The cumulative results of this exercise so far:
| Draft Pick | Simulation Outcomes | Simulation Outcome Percentage | Actual Percentage Odds |
| 1 | 3 | 30.0% | 10.5% |
| 2 | 0 | 0.0% | 10.5% |
| 3 | 1 | 10.0% | 10.6% |
| 4 | 1 | 10.0% | 10.5% |
| 5 | 0 | 0.0% | 2.2% |
| 6 | 2 | 20.0% | 19.6% |
| 7 | 2 | 20.0% | 26.7% |
| 8 | 1 | 10.0% | 8.7% |
| 9 | 0 | 0.0% | 0.6% |
| Keep or Lose Pick? | Simulation Outcomes | Simulation Outcome Percentage | Actual Percentage Odds |
| Kept Pick | 7 | 70.0% | 64.0% |
| Lost Pick | 3 | 30.0% | 36.0% |
MORE: Daryl Morey's full exit interview
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