CHICAGO — Two arduously long years of tanking. Two awful results.
Brooklyn suffered lousy lottery luck for the second straight season on Sunday, going in with the joint-best odds to win but tumbling all the way down to sixth in the draft.
The Nets had tanked their way to the third-worst record in the league at 20-62, tying them with Washington, which won the No. 1 pick, and Indiana for the best odds to win the lottery (14.0 percent) or land a top 3 pick (40.1%). But after falling from sixth to eighth a year ago, they slid from third to sixth on Sunday.
The sixth spot had actually been their likeliest landing spot at 26.02 percent.
But the lottery has rarely been kind to the Nets. They have had top 8 odds 10 times and only moved up twice and couldn’t make it a third, despite having Vince Carter on the dais, owner Joe Tsai in the drawing room and even superfan Mr. Whammy in the studio, having made the trip from New York.
Brooklyn will miss out on the franchise-changers at the top of the draft, and now could be picking from a host of guards in like Houston’s Kingston Flemings, Arkansas’ Darius Acuff Jr., Illinois’ Keaton Wagler and Louisville’s Mikel Brown Jr.
