CHICAGO — One was the loneliest number for Michael Winger, but for the Washington Wizards, it was the best ping-pong ball.
An explanation is in order: Winger is the president of Monumental Basketball, which manages the Wizards, and he was their representative inside the sequestered room where the NBA draft lottery was taking place Sunday afternoon in Chicago. The first ball was numbered “4” while the second had “2” on it.
“I knew it was us,” Winger said.
He was right.
The third ball was “1” and made it official. The fourth ball was “13” and meant nothing. The 4-2-1 combination ensured the Wizards had won the lottery and earned the right to pick No. 1 overall when the two-day NBA draft starts June 23 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a huge step forward for a team that finished with the league’s worst record this season.
And for the next 45 minutes, before the rest of the world found out during a television broadcast, Winger was essentially stone-faced.
“I could have celebrated by myself, looking around for somebody to high-five,” Winger said. “There wouldn’t have been anybody there.”
The celebrations are underway now.
Winger, former Wizards star John Wall, vice president of player personnel Travis Schlenk, coach Brian Keefe and assistant coach David Vanterpool posed on stage after the lottery ended, all smiles. There haven’t been a lot of moments worth smiling about for the franchise over the past three years, but that may finally be changing.
“It’s our fans that have endured the most,” Winger said. “And to me, this No. 1 pick is for them. It’s a reward for hanging in there with us. It’s a reward to continue to support us despite sometimes really bad basketball. They knew and they supported a multiyear teardown, a multiyear reinvention of the franchise.”
It will be Washington’s first time with the No. 1 pick since drafting Wall in that spot in 2010. The five-time NBA All-Star point guard, who played for the team for a decade before finishing his career by playing one season each for the Houston Rockets and the Los Angeles Clippers, was the Wizards’ on-stage representative for Sunday’s telecast at the Navy Pier, and he immediately said he expects things to change quickly in Washington.
“They could be a team that I feel should be in playoff contention next year,” Wall said.
Washington had a 14% chance of winning the No. 1 pick, tied with the Brooklyn Nets and the Indiana Pacers for the best odds. The Wizards had basically a 50-50 chance of getting either a top-four pick or the No. 5 spot.
And so three consecutive years of losing — the three worst seasons in the 65-year history of the franchise that began as the Chicago Packers — finally paid off for a team that went 17-65 this season and even allowed Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat to score 83 points for the league’s second-highest single-game total ever.
The Wizards swung deals during the season to land a pair of NBA All-Stars, getting guard Trae Young from the Atlanta Hawks in early January and forward Anthony Davis from the Dallas Mavericks a month later, and now they can add whichever college player they want.
Things won’t completely change overnight, but they seem very different in D.C. already.
“This is another step in our journey,” Keefe said. “Obviously it’s a great day, and we’re looking forward to going through the process and finding who we’re going to take with that pick, but I’m just thrilled for everybody that works with the organization and, most importantly, the community.”
Winger brought a photo of his family with him into the lottery room, perhaps the bit of luck he needed. And there is a certain symmetry to how the 4-2-1 combination was what delivered for the Wizards; those numbers add up to 7.
“The day I was born,” said Keefe, born April 7, 1976.
The Utah Jazz will pick No. 2, followed by the Memphis Grizzlies and the Chicago Bulls.
The Clippers got the fifth pick via a previous trade with the Pacers, with the remainder of the 14 lottery picks going to, in order, the Nets, the Sacramento Kings, the Hawks, the Mavericks, the Milwaukee Bucks, the Golden State Warriors, the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Heat and the Charlotte Hornets.
The draft combine starts Monday in Chicago, and there are four candidates generally considered front-runners to be the No. 1 pick, all of them entering the draft after a single college season.
BYU’s AJ Dybantsa led the nation in scoring at 25.5 points per game, Duke’s Cameron Boozer was the AP men’s college basketball player of the year while averaging 22.5 points and 10.1 rebounds, Darryn Peterson, averaged 20.2 points in 24 games for Kansas, and Caleb Wilson averaged 19.8 points and 9.4 rebounds on 58% shooting for North Carolina.
All four of those players, and a few other likely first-round selections, were among those in the studio Sunday for the announcement of the lottery results.
“Obviously we’re going to find out on June 23 where I’m going to land,” the 6-foot-9 Dybantsa said. “I’m betting on myself to be a No. 1 pick. I think I’m very adaptable, I can play anywhere.”
It’s now possible that Boozer could be selected by the Bulls or the Jazz — two teams that his father, Carlos Boozer, played for in his NBA days.
“It could be surreal, for sure,” the younger Boozer said. “I don’t know what the future holds, but it’s super exciting for sure.”
This was the eighth, and likely final, year of this version of an NBA draft lottery with the worst teams having a 14% chance of winning.
Framework fell into place last month on changes meant to further discourage tanking, and the NBA Board of Governors is expected to ratify that plan in the next few weeks, with general managers meeting Tuesday in Chicago to discuss them presumably for one last time.
The three worst teams, starting next season, would have a 5.4% chance of winning, with the next seven teams all having an 8.1% chance of winning. The lottery would grow from 14 to 16 teams if the plan is approved as expected.