Vegas Watch

First off, Sportsbook followed The Greek's lead and put up odds on the Draft lottery. Strangely, some of them are pretty close to the true odds. The Knicks should be +1216; Sportsbook has them at +1200. I'm not really sure what they get out of this- if they want to have more attractive odds than The Greek, why not put them at +1000? At +1200, they are barely making any money.

They also have odds on who the #1 pick will be; this is somewhat more interesting, since we don't already know what the actual odds are.


This matches my intuition- it's essentially a coin flip between Beasley and Rose, and it'd be a shock if anyone else went first.

Obviously, a lot of this depends on which team wins the lottery. So I figured I'd mess around with ESPN's Lottery Mock Draft thing, and see which teams picked which players when they landed the top pick.

Here are the results, along with the percentage of the time that the team in question is expected to get the #1 pick.

The Pacers (0.8%) and Trail Blazers (0.6%) are noticeably absent from this list. That's because they never won in the ridiculous number of lotteries I ran, so I don't know who they would pick. Edit: Apparently he has both teams taking Rose. Which kind of makes the next paragraph irrelevant.

I question the uniformity in the bottom of this list, with each of the last six teams choosing Beasley. This may be true, but it's also possible that Chad Ford didn't actually break down the "2,184 potential lottery scenarios", and Beasley was the pick for these teams by default.

Mostly on the strength of being theoretically picked by the Heat, Timberwolves, and Grizzlies, Beasley looks like the favorite. I wouldn't bet on him with this information, since I have no clue how accurate Chad Ford's predictions on this are- it's likely that the oddsmakers' predictions are superior. We'll see if the odds change after the lottery, which is on May 20.