Draft lottery simulator: every team’s chance of every pick, with seeded draws

NBA.com’s explainer describes the drawing the league used through 2026: 1,000 of the 1,001 possible four-ball combinations are shared among the teams, and if a combination belonging to a team that has already been drawn comes up, it is discarded and drawn again. That makes each draw a choice among the teams still waiting, in proportion to their combinations. Once the drawn picks are settled, every other team follows in reverse order of its record.

The calculator lists each team’s exact chance of every pick by working through every possible sequence of draws — for the MLB preset, 9,949 partial draws — rather than by simulation. Very large lotteries are simulated only.

MLB.com published the 2026 odds before the December 2025 drawing: all 18 non-playoff teams were entered for the first six picks, but three were ineligible — one had received a lottery pick in each of the two previous drafts, and two were revenue-sharing payors that had received one the year before. The other 15 teams’ chances of the No. 1 pick ran from 27.73% to 0.34%. Those figures are MLB’s base odds by record (16.5% for each of the three worst, then 13.2, 10, 7.5 and so on down to 0.2) rescaled over the eligible teams, and MLB places ineligible clubs no earlier than 10th. Teams are numbered from the worst 2025 record.

The worst eligible team, Team 2, has a 96.1% chance of a top-six pick and can fall no lower than seventh, while Team 18 has a 4.1% chance of jumping into the top six. The three ineligible teams always pick 10th, 11th and 12th.

A seeded simulation of 100,000 lotteries (seed “worked-example”) gives Team 2 the No. 1 pick in 27.83% of them against an exact 27.73%, and a top-six pick in 96.2% against 96.1%. A single draw from the same seed gives the top six picks to Teams 5, 4, 16, 2, 8, 12, in that order. Enter the same seed in the calculator and you get the same draw.

MLB’s articles do not say how the second to sixth draws are weighted. The simulator uses the rule NBA.com describes — each draw among the teams not yet drawn, in proportion to their odds — so only the No. 1 chances are guaranteed to match MLB’s published table.

For its 2026 lottery the NBA drew four picks from 14 teams. In the odds NBA.com published, the three worst records had 14.0% each and teams level on record shared their chances. With those odds, the worst team’s chance of the No. 1 pick was 14.0%, its chance of any top-four pick 52.1% — so a 47.9% chance of falling to fifth, the lowest it could go.

That format has been replaced. The NBA’s new “3-2-1 Lottery”, approved in May 2026 for the 2027 to 2029 drafts, expands the lottery to 16 teams with three, two or one ball each and draws all 16 picks, with the three worst teams guaranteed no worse than 12th. The announcement does not say how that floor is applied during the drawing, so there is no NBA preset; you can still enter any table of odds as a custom lottery.

• Limits on how far a team can move up. The NHL draws two picks and, since 2022, has not let a team move up more than 10 places; we could not open an official current NHL odds table, so there is no NHL preset.
• Traded and protected picks, which change who holds a pick but not where it falls.
• Tiebreakers between teams with the same record. Enter split or adjusted odds as your league publishes them.
• Anything after the lottery. It tells you where each team picks, not whom to pick.

For why leagues use lotteries at all and what flattening the odds changes, read how draft lotteries work; to draw a plain random order for a league with no weighting, use the draft order generator.