When Allen Iverson was essentially suspended with pay by the Philadelphia 76ers earlier this month while the team tried to trade him, at least one commentator made the point that it appeared Philly was considering "tanking" the season in order to win the right to draft Ohio State's Greg Oden, who has already been elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame after four games at the collegiate level.  (Sorry, I made that up.)

Maybe it was because the commentator was ESPN's Scoop Jackson, who AwfulAnnouncing has trained me to question at every opportunity, but the statement triggered alarm bells in the portion of my brain that handles common sense.  For starters, it didn't make any sense - the NBA isn't like Major League Baseball or the NFL, where the team with the worst overall record gets the number one pick.  We might not like to think of it in these terms, but an organization in either of those sports can play to lose in order to obtain a strongly desired player (as the Houston Texans were accused of doing in order to draft Reggie Bush in 2006, before they felt guilty and chose Mario Williams instead).

The NBA is different, however, because of the lottery - the team with the worst record has the best chance of winning the top choice in the draft, at about 25%, but is in no way guaranteed that selection.  From the looks of it, Scoop was just tossing something up against the wall in an attempt to be original; I was pretty certain it wouldn't stick because he didn't appear to have done his homework on the situation.

So I decided to do it for him, tracking down a list of the twenty-two lottery selections since 1985, the teams that made them, and the overall ranking of those teams.  The first finding did not bode well for Scoop: only four teams that finished the season with the league's worst record had later won the right to draft first, indicating that the Sixers have little to gain by winning the fight to finish last.

Further digging, however, indicates that Scoop might actually have been onto something, as there were eight other occasions in which a team finished with a record in the bottom three, including four in a row from 1996 to 1999 (a stretch that began when Philadelphia selected Iverson first overall after finishing next-to-last in the league during the 1995-96 season), for a total of twelve instances where a team drafted first after compiling no better than the third worst record in the league.  I feel fairly comfortable stating, then, that Scoop Jackson actually made a good point regarding this situation.

It should also be noted that Jackson's comments regarding the Sixers' commitment to winning, particularly his use of the word "tank", were not off base; the team was bad even before Iverson sat down for good on December 6, but they haven't done any better since, losing seven games in a row without The Answer.  They are currently in position of the league's worst record at 5-19, half a game ahead of Memphis and 1.5 up on Charlotte.

They might not want to fit Greg Oden for a uniform just yet, but it might not be a bad idea to find out how he feels about cheese steak.