The original point was that if Milwaukee or Denver end up 1 or 2, it has nothing to do with what happened with the draw today. The post I responded to seemed to indicate, tongue in cheek, that it was a possibility. It's not.
You're so sure about this. Maybe I can seed a little doubt...
The NBA used to put cards with each team's logo on them into unmarked envelopes and then randomly select the winners. Since 1990 they use a lotto ball system where 14 numbered balls are put in a hopper and 4 of them are randomly drawn to produce a number combination. Unlike the state lottery, the order is not significant -- just the particular combination of 4 numbers. The first combination drawn decides the #1 pick, the next one #2, and the last one #3. Before the lottery 1000 different combinations of numbers are divided up between the lottery teams based on the
agreed upon odds. Since we're in a 3-way tie for 8,9, and 10 the allotted number of combinations for those 3 picks (28, 17, and 11 respectively) are added up and divided by three with the result being that two teams get 19 combinations and one team gets 18 combinations.
That's the basics of the lotto draw, but depending on your view of quantum physics I think it's also possible to take it one step further -- and this applies to your suggestion that these are two
distinct events and have nothing to do with each other. I suppose most people would say that we won the coin flip but we don't currently know if we've won the lottery but I think the way in which those two events are directly related makes this point of view a conceptual impossibility. The coin flip doesn't just determine the order that those 3 teams draft in should none of them win a top 3 pick, it also determines
which combinations are allotted to
which team. In other words, we were given 19
particular number combinations as the result of this coin flip not 19 identical balls with a Kings logo on them. If our combination gets pulled or not pulled, it will partly be the result of this very coin flip because if the coin flip had slotted us 9th we would have received an entirely different allotment of 19 number combinations and yet another allotment of 18 combinations if we were 10th. It's not two distinct events, it's one event with a time gap of about 5 weeks separating the setup from the payoff. Were it possible to somehow trade or alter your number combinations in the intervening time gap between the coin flip and the lotto draw that would be a different situation, but that's not the case.
For this reason I don't think we really know the results of who
won this coin flip until after the lottery. Drafting 8th is definitely better than drafting 10th, but it's not better than drafting 1, 2, or 3. Odds are we won the coin flip since the likelihood of all three teams staying where they are is much greater than the likelihood of any of them moving up. We
are talking about pretty slim odds of 56 out of 1000 here for each of the top 3 picks. But those odds only apply to us right now because we haven't witnessed the lottery draw yet. You could say we exist in a superposition of both winning and not winning until the lotto draw is determined -- photons bounce off of ping pong balls and back to our eyes and the waveform is collapsed into one state or the other. That's one theory, but one that I don't personally agree with. You could also say that we
have already won or lost, we just won't know which is the case until our 4th dimensional brains pass further along in the time dimension and witness the final event. On May 20th we'll be able to say definitively in retrospect whether we won this coin flip or not but as of today, the outcome is determined but unknown.
I like that theory better and I'm tempted to endorse it. It means that probabilities are fictions invented by our inability to conceptualize time as anything other than a straight axis with a single degree of freedom. The only real uncertainty is in our relation to any given point on the time axis. But I have to admit that I don't think it's the
best explanation and the more I think about it, the less I believe it. The reason I find this theory hard to believe is because it creates an imaginary point in time from which you can look back and see the outcome of every event that has ever occurred (or will ever occur). The probability of all events is reduced to either zero or one like a story which has already been written but is being told to you for the first time. What I would say instead is that we have both won the coin flip
and not won the coin flip. And when May 20th arrives we (collectively) will witness the outcome where we lose the lottery but win the coin flip, the outcome where we win the lottery (and thus also the coin flip), and also the outcome in which we lose the lottery and also lose the coin flip. All three of them are true and probability tells us how likely it is that we observe one or the other. For example, 19 times out of 1000 we witness our number being pulled and Adam Silver announcing that we've won the top pick (and get to trade it to Philadelphia). If there's some way to choose to live in one of
those possible worlds instead of the other 981 possible worlds I wish somebody would tell me how, but even if there isn't I believe that those worlds exist. Or at least I'm more inclined to believe in them than superpositions or predetermination.
