A grassroots uprising of fans have been encouraging the theory that the NBA Draft Lottery is rigged, due to suspicious circumstances during the first lottery of 1985.
The lottery wasn’t weighted from 1985-1989, meaning that each of the teams that missed the playoffs had an equal chance at obtaining the 1st overall pick. The logic is that the NBA was absolutely positive that Patrick Ewing was going to be a star, and they wanted him in the biggest market available, which is New York.
Because of this weird coincidence of New York winning the “random” lottery and eventually drafting Ewing, it fueled the fire for conspiracy theorists to claim that the lottery is always rigged by the NBA to opportunistically award certain franchises players viewed as generational talents.