NBA Officially Sets New Dates for Lottery, Draft, and Free Agency
The NBA had a busy day on Thursday, as Adam Silver's much-talked-about 22-team return-to-play plan was finally approved by the league's Board of Governors. In addition to that news, the NBA also officially set new dates for its draft lottery and draft as well.
The NBA Draft lottery is set to take place on August 25th, and the NBA Draft will proceed on October 15th. The 14 NBA Lottery teams will be seeded in the lottery and assigned odds based on their records through games of March 11. The 16 playoff teams will draft in inverse order of their combined records across regular-season games and seeding games.
The Dallas Mavericks, historically, have never had good luck in the draft lottery, but fortunately for Dallas, the team is set to make the playoffs for the first time in three years, rendering the lottery meaningless to them this time around.
However, when it comes to the draft, the Mavs actually own their first-round pick this year, which is projected to be in the 16-20 range and could be a potential asset to facilitate a trade to acquire either another player or more picks.
Other dates were also announced on Thursday, including a league start date of July 31st, a free agency start date of October 18th, with training camp set to begin on June 30th, and teams scheduled to arrive in Orlando starting on July 7th.
Per a report from The Athletic's Shams Charania, international players are to return to their team market on June 15th, while all players are to report by June 21st, followed by team testing for the coronavirus scheduled for June 22nd.
Other speculation, most notably from ESPN's Jonathan Givony, has put the dates for a draft combine somewhere in the area of August 27-28th, but that can only be considered an educated guess at this point and time.
