NBA Teams Celebrate Historic Achievement Of Being Bad At Basketball On Purpose
NEW YORK — In what sports economists are calling 'a triumph of strategic incompetence,' multiple NBA franchises gathered Monday to celebrate their crowning achievement: having been catastrophically, almost supernaturally bad at professional basketball for several consecutive years in order to receive a ping pong ball with a number on it.
The NBA Draft Lottery, an annual ceremony in which wealthy team owners gather in formal attire to watch a machine select numbered balls, concluded with widespread jubilation among franchises that had spent millions of dollars carefully engineering seasons of soul-crushing defeat.
'This is what we worked so hard to not work hard toward,' said one unnamed general manager, clutching the lottery results to his chest like a newborn child. 'Every missed shot, every blown fourth-quarter lead, every inexplicable trade we made that sent away our three best players for a 2031 second-round pick — it was all leading to this moment.'
Fans of winning lottery teams took to the streets in celebration, cheering for the possibility that their team might, within three to five years, conceivably become competitive, assuming the drafted player doesn't get injured, demands a trade, or simply turns out to be not very good.
'I'm so excited,' said Pacers fan Gerald Hutchins, 34, who has not watched a meaningful game since 2014. 'We lost 58 games this season. FIFTY-EIGHT. Do you know how hard you have to try to not try that hard?'
League Commissioner Adam Silver appeared at the podium to announce that the NBA may soon reform the lottery system, potentially eliminating the incentive to tank entirely, which officials confirmed would render the last seven years of carefully orchestrated failure 'extremely funny in retrospect.'
'We are considering changes that would make deliberate losing strategically pointless,' Silver said, as seventeen general managers behind him visibly aged ten years in real time.
At press time, three teams had already begun tanking for next year's lottery, just in case.