The Dallas Mavericks shocked everyone when they won the 2025 NBA Draft Lottery and took Cooper Flagg with the No. 1 pick.
The franchise had just traded away Luka Doncic months earlier in a deal that caught the entire league off guard, so landing another potential superstar that quickly seemed almost too perfect.
Dallas went into lottery night with a 1.8 percent chance of winning. That tiny number has people wondering how it all played out, and apparently, it’s not just fans asking questions.
Skepticism grows around Mavericks landing Cooper Flagg
Pablo Torre, recently on the “Chapo Trap House” podcast, revealed that skepticism about the lottery results runs deeper than social media conspiracy theories. According to Torre, some NBA owners have doubts about how things went down.
“I’ll tell you that I remember I was at an event, and I spoke to two NBA owners. This was the day after the NBA lottery. And those two owners were both like, ‘This was obviously fixed,'” Torre said.
“I’m not saying that it was fixed for the Mavs. I’m simply saying that it’s not just you, Will, and people on the Internet, who are saying, ‘This seems fixed to me, and I believe it to be so.’ I’m saying literally two NBA owners did not trust the hand of Adam Silver to remain out of the proceedings in terms of rigging the NBA Draft Lottery.”
The whole sequence of events does raise eyebrows. Doncic, considered one of the three best players in the NBA, gets dealt to the Los Angeles Lakers in the middle of the night for a package most people thought was underwhelming.
Then, Dallas immediately wins the lottery and gets Flagg, who was always going first no matter what. The dots connect themselves. Whether the lottery was rigged does not really matter at this point. Adam Silver is not reversing anything, and Flagg is staying put in Dallas.
The rookie has been productive right out of the gate, averaging 20.4 points, 6.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists and 1.2 steals per game. He’s now locked in a tight Rookie of the Year battle with former Duke teammate Kon Knueppel as the 2025-26 season rolls on.