Draft Order Randomizer

What a snake draft is, and what the turn means in basketball

A snake draft reverses direction every round. The team that picks first in round one picks last in round two, then first again in round three, and so on down the board. Its purpose is fairness across the whole draft rather than in any one round: the first pick is the best player available, but the team holding it then waits the longest of anyone for its next turn, twenty-three picks later in a twelve-team league. The team picking last in round one picks first in round two, two picks in a row, which is called the turn, and in a category league the turn is worth thinking about. A twelve-team room drafts thirteen players a side, and the first two or three rounds are where the elite centers and the elite point guards go, the two positions the board is thinnest at. A manager at the turn can take one of each back to back, a center at 1.12 and a point guard at 2.01, and build a punt around them before anyone else has finished their second pick. A manager at the top gets the best player in the pool and then watches twenty-two picks go by. Neither seat is better; they ask for different drafts. A linear draft keeps the same order every round. It is rare in basketball leagues because the first seat is so much better than the last, but some office pools use it as a handicap and some keeper leagues use it deliberately: the lottery loser draws first every round. The page draws either way; it only changes what the numbers beside each team mean. In snake mode each team’s first two picks are printed beside its name, in the round-and-pick form the mock draft room uses.

How a lottery weighting works

An equal draw gives every team one ball in the hat. A weighted lottery gives some teams more. The usual reason is last season’s standings: the team that finished worst gets the most balls, the champion gets the fewest, and the order is drawn one pick at a time, each ball pulled without replacement. The page’s lottery-by-finish setting does exactly that. You enter where each team finished last season and a team’s weight is its finishing position, so in a twelve-team league the last-place team holds twelve balls and the champion one. The odds column shows what that means for the first pick before anything is drawn: twelve of seventy-eight, a little under sixteen percent, for the bottom team, and one in seventy-eight for the top. That is a gentler curve than the real league’s, which gives its three worst teams the same fourteen percent each and then falls away fast, and gentler on purpose: a fantasy league that finished last did not lose on purpose, and nobody wants the tank to be worth it. Custom weights let a commissioner do whatever the league constitution says. Some leagues weight only the non-playoff teams and give the playoff teams a flat draw for the remaining seats; you can do that by giving the playoff teams equal small weights. Some give a bonus ball for winning the consolation bracket, some copy the real league’s fourteen-fourteen-fourteen table. Whatever the numbers, the draw itself is the same procedure: the first pick is drawn from the full hat by weight, the winner’s balls come out, and the second pick is drawn from what is left. It is written into the shared page code rather than described in a footnote, and the mock draft room uses the same random generator.

How commissioners run it, and when

The way that works best is to run the draw in front of everyone. Put the team names in, share your screen or pass the phone around, press the button once, and copy the list into the group chat along with the link. Anyone who thinks the commissioner drew three times until his own name came up first can open the link and watch the same seed produce the same order. If the league prefers a bit of theatre, the copied list reads well from the bottom up: announce the last pick first, the way the real lottery does, and let the top three sweat. Timing matters more in basketball than most managers think. The season opens in the third week of October and a draft in the last week before it is usual, but the order is worth drawing a week or two ahead of the draft itself, because the seat you draw changes what you should mock. A manager who draws the twelfth seat should be practising the turn; a manager who draws the first should be practising twenty-two picks of patience and the run on centers that happens while he waits. Some commissioners draw the order the night of the draft so nobody prepares for a seat they may not get; that is a choice, and it costs the league its mock drafts. Either way, do it once, and do it where it can be seen. A draw that is redone until it looks right is not a draw. If a team name is misspelled, fix the name and redraw with the same seed by editing the link, and the order stays put, because the seed decides the sequence and the names are just labels on the seats. If a team joins or drops out after the draw, the honest thing is a fresh draw with a fresh seed, and to say so.

Why the link is the receipt

Randomness on a computer is a sequence that starts from a number called a seed. Give the same seed to the same procedure and you get the same sequence every time, which is what makes a draw reproducible rather than merely random. When you press the button here the page picks a seed, draws the order from it, and writes the seed into the page address beside the team names and the settings. That address is the whole draw. Nothing is stored on a server and there is no account, so there is nothing for anybody to edit after the fact; the only way to get a different order is a different link, and a different link is visible as one. The same idea runs the mock draft room, where a seed reproduces an entire draft against the same computer seats, and it is the reason both pages can be shared into a group chat without anyone having to trust the person sharing them. Once the order is settled, the mock draft room is the next stop, seat number in hand, and if your league bids instead of picks, the auction values page prices every player for your budget.