Minnesota Timberwolves: A word about the lottery

Tonight, the Timberwolves take on Milwaukee in the final game of a looooong 2007-2008 season. Minnesota is 21-60; the Bucks are 26-55. In other words, the eyes of an attentive nation will not be turned to Target Center tonight.

Nor will local eyes; the Wolves have been averaging a solid 0.1 TV rating over the past few weeks, meaning Twin Cities television viewers would rather do anything else than watch the Wolves.

But there is much to play for, or more specifically, to play Mark Madsen for: the draft lottery. Miami and Seattle Oklahoma City have locked up the worst and second-worst records in the league, but Minnesota is just one game ahead of Memphis, which has to travel to Denver tonight to take on a Nuggets team that could still move up from the #8 spot in the playoffs to #7 (thus avoiding Los Angeles.)

I've often referred to the race to the bottom as a race for ping-pong balls, but the days of the league dumping 66 team-colored balls into a hopper are over. These days, 14 balls numbered 1 to 14 are dumped into the hopper, from which four are drawn. This results in 1,001 possible numerical combinations, 1,000 of which are assigned to lottery teams.

(The combo 11-12-13-14 is not assigned, and if drawn, all participating lottery teams are required to perform an impromptu dance around a Mexican hat to the tune of "La Cucaracha." Note: this fact may not be true.)

The lottery teams are assigned combinations, ranging from 250 combos for the worst team on down to 5 for the 14th-worst team. If two teams are tied at the end of the regular season, the combinations are split between the two teams.

Here's where tonight's game comes into play. The third-worst team gets 156 combinations, the fourth-worst 119. However, if the teams end up tied, each gets 137, with a coin flip to determine who gets the extra 138th. You can laugh if you want at the small difference between a 15.6% chance of drawing the first pic and a 13.7% chance, but let me remind you - that 1.9% difference is greater than the chance of six teams (numbers 9-14) winning the lottery and picking first.

So I say: play hard tonight, T-Wolves - but make sure to lose.