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The Philadelphia 76ers and Boston Celtics both were postseason participants in 1986, but they had acquired draft choices from non-playoff teams. Williams, who was with the 76ers at the time, remembers "Red Auerbach blowing cigar smoke at me" before the Celtics' card came out at No. 2. Philadelphia traded the pick, which became Brad Daugherty, to get Roy Hinson. The Celtics took Len Bias, who died of a cocaine overdose before playing a game.

In 1987, the NBA stopped the lottery at the third selection, ranking non-playoff teams in reverse order thereafter. In 1990, it made a more dramatic change, going to a weighted system, and giving the worst of 11 non-playoff teams the most chances (11), the second-worst team 10 chances, and so on, with the best getting just one.

Under that new system, Williams and the Magic won a huge prize in 1992: O'Neal. Then, even though Orlando had the best record among non-playoff teams, he won again in 1993. He traded the pick for the rights to Penny Hardaway, but that unexpected and unwelcome result caused the NBA to alter its weighting system significantly, giving the sorriest teams more of a shot for success.

"Now it is so complicated an MIT professor couldn't figure it out," Williams said. "But long story short, they do not want teams cutting corners down the stretch to get a better pick. I think they've got it tweaked about as well they can tweak it. You've got to keep the integrity of the regular season and avoid that temptation to get a better pick. We are not mature enough, so the league office has to do it."

That instinct actually inspired academic research, such as the study published in The Journal of Labor Economics. Co-authors Beck Taylor and Justin Trogdon examined whether NBA teams, when presented with the prospect of a higher draft choice, lost at a much higher rate than other data suggested they should at the end of a hopeless season. They found "strong evidence that NBA teams are more likely to lose when incentives to lose are present."

How? Taylor and Trogdon couldn't pin that down for sure.

"I always suspected that players were so competitive, that it was more through coaching decisions, whether or not to rest or play a player," said Taylor, now the Dean of Economics at Samford University. "My guess is that players on the court weren't changing behavior at all."

When the NBA changed to a lottery system for the 1985 draft, with seven teams given an equal shot at the top, Taylor and Trogdon found that, during the 1984-85 season, teams started meeting expectations down the stretch.

"That eliminated all incentive to lose to win," Taylor said. "That went on for some time."

But that didn't satisfy all. Ewing going to the Knicks, for instance. Or David Robinson going to the San Antonio Spurs when they had the fourth-worst record in 1986-87.

So the NBA kept tweaking, adopted a system that was weighted based on record. Taylor and Trogdon reviewed teams' habits in the 1989-90 season.

"We suspected that would bring back the negative incentive to try to get a better pick," Taylor said. "Controlling for venue of game, and team's quality and other team's quality, we found that teams eliminated in 1989-90 had a higher probability of losing than was predicted by other factors."

Though, according to Trogdon, "it was not as strong an effect as when they were guaranteed to get a certain pick."

As a result, the NBA may have found as happy a medium as possible, considering its competing aims.

"The league has to balance parity and the quality of play down the stretch of the season," said Trogdon, a research economist at RTI International. "In the long run, if you want to give these teams that are performing poorly a chance to get better, then you have to trade off this risk that you are creating an incentive not to try as hard."

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