text: Unlike the thriving NFL or Major League Baseball, the NBA was not very well established 30 years ago. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird had started to drum up significant interest and Michael Jordan was just entering the league, but they weren’t there yet.
  Teams were losing money and in need of media write (imagine that) so much so that the NBA actually paid USA Network $40,000 to air the draft—it actually ran on a weekday afternoon that summer.
  But with another supposed superstar on the horizon—Ewing—it was thought, around the league, that if he went to some low-profile franchise (like Indiana) it wouldn’t do the league much good. Especially if the media-centric New York Knicks—which played their games in the world-famous Madison Square Garden—were in need of a star.
  So when the Knicks won the lottery that year and went on to take Ewing first overall, conspiracy theories ran rampant—and unlike Deflategate, they had more than circumstantial evidence.
  In that first lotto event, the NBA wasn’t sure how to make the whole process completely transparent. They put a bunch of envelopes in a clear plastic bin, spun it around a few times, and then commissioner David Stern reach in and pulled out the winner—the Knicks. Only when Stern went to pick out an envelope, instead of pulling out the first one he touched, he dug around for a second and pulled out the one with a damaged corner—it just so happened to be the Knicks one. And the rest is history.