76ers win draft lottery; Lakers at No. 2

NEW YORK – The Philadelphia 76ers have lost big for three years, when they appeared to value draft picks more than players.

They got a huge victory Tuesday night, and maybe the wins on the court will soon follow.

The 76ers won the NBA draft lottery, giving them the No. 1 selection in June.

“The pain that we’ve all gone through, the pain of losing is real. You can’t camouflage it,” said coach Brett Brown, who represented the 76ers on stage. “The city has been incredibly patient, tolerant, choose any word you want. I think this validates some of the pain we went through.”

The Los Angeles Lakers finished second but also felt like winners, as they would have dealt their pick to Philadelphia had they fallen out of the top three.

The Boston Celtics, with a pick dealt to them by the Brooklyn Nets, remained in the No. 3 slot.

Nobody moved up in the lottery, which sets the top three picks. The remainder of the 14 teams are slotted in the inverse order of their win-loss record.

The 76ers finished 10-72, just off the worst record in the history of the 82-game schedule, and had a 26.9 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick (their own 25 percent chance, and Sacramento’s 1.9 percent chance, since the 76ers had the right to swap picks with the Kings from a previous trade.)

They would have garnered another top-five selection had the Lakers tumbled a couple of spots, since they would have been entitled to the pick the Lakers originally dealt to Phoenix for Steve Nash that the 76ers later acquired in another trade.

“It’s been a long year,” Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak said. “Because of the contingencies of the deal, there was a significant chance we would lose the pick. That would have been disappointing. We would have gotten over it and moved on to the summer, but that would have been disappointing.”

Philadelphia certainly won’t complain, not after doing no better than No. 3 in the previous two drafts during a three-year process where the focus was more on building for the future than trying to win in the present.