The Celtics kick off a five game west coast road trip on Saturday in Phoenix and some fans seem to be wondering if the team would be better off losing the opener against the Suns. The Suns and Nets are currently tied for the third worst record in the league (thanks, Cleveland) so, with the Celtics owning the Nets pick, anything that helps Phoenix in the short term may help Boston in the long term. I’m going to take a look at what the actual value of losing this game is. This is purely a thought exercise; no team should ever actually throw a game (though it has happened).

Will It Even Matter?

To determine the value of losing this game, we must first figure out the odds that the game will even matter in the final standings between Brooklyn and Phoenix. To do this, I ran 1,500 season simulations with games projected using the formula found here. This probably isn’t as accurate as something like Basketball Power Index or the methods used at 538 but it’s good enough for this.

The outcomes I care about are:

1. What are the odds that the Celtics will win the game if they try? The odds that the Suns will win regardless mitigates the need to throw the game.

2. What are the odds that the Nets and Suns will finish the season in a tie or with Brooklyn having one more win than Phoenix? Any other result makes this game moot, from the Celtics’ perspective.

Our simulations return the following results:

The Celtics have a 68% chance to win the game if they try, but only a 24% chance that they’ll win and it will matter.

What’s the Value of a Change in Lottery Standings?

Last year I created a Draft Trade Value Card that assigns each pick a relative value on a 1 (60th pick) to 1,000 (1st pick) scale. I’ll use this, along with the expected number of win shares that a draft pick will produce in their first five seasons in the league, to value the change in positioning between the Nets and Suns. Before we can do that, we have to apply lottery odds to the two teams. There is some small possibility that the Timberwolves could end up tied or below the Suns and/or Nets but I’m going to ignore that here; that leaves us with the two teams jockeying for 3rd and 4th lottery position. If the teams end tied there is no head-to-head tiebreaker, they just split the odds.

So, moving Brooklyn out of a tie for third worst record and into that spot on their own increases the Celtics’ odds of getting the #1 overall pick from 13.8% to 15.6%, for example. We can now take all of these odds and apply them to the value of each pick slot to get the weighted average value of each pre-lottery draft slot.

View full sized

What we find is that the pre-lottery difference between the 3rd slot and tied-3rd, or tied-3rd and 4th, is about 19 points of relative value (about the value of the 49th overall pick) or a player producing about 0.5 more win shares over the first five years of their career. Basically the difference is small. The reason for this is that, while there is often talk of the need for lottery reform, the lottery actually works really well at punishing tanking. The difference between picks at the top of the draft is significantly more than later in the draft, but the lottery levels out the majority of that difference.

What’s the Total Value of Losing the Game?

When we combine the two questions of “what are the odds the game matters?” and “what is the value if it does?” we get a final value for losing the game. There’s a 13% chance that throwing the game would ultimately move Brooklyn out of a tie with Phoenix and into the 3rd spot on their own. There’s an 11% chance that it would move Brooklyn from one win more than Phoenix into a tie. If we apply those odds to the value of each change we find that intentionally throwing tonight’s game would be worth about the value of the 55th overall pick in the draft, or 0.13 win shares total over the next five seasons.

Conclusions

At this point you’ve hopefully realized that there’s no real value in losing to Phoenix. If there were no lottery you might be able to make an argument for it, especially if the teams were jockeying to positions 1 and 2 instead of 3 and 4, but the difference between the pick slots isn’t huge to begin with and the lottery removes most of the relative value. Conversely, winning tonight’s game will improve the team’s odds of hosting a first round playoff series, which in turn improves the odds of winning a series. Improving the team’s record and odds of advancing in the playoffs will, aside from just being a good fan experience, make their free agents sales pitch better this offseason. That alone is worth much more than the small shift in draft capital.

Root for the Celtics to win Saturday night, like you would every night!

You can follow me on twitter @dangercart