After sweating lotto draw, Lakers brass kisses pingpong ball

10:30 AM ET

NEW YORK — John Black paused along the buffet line, spooning sliced cucumbers and dressing onto a lonely plate. The Los Angeles Lakers’ vice president of public relations then spotted a friend of three-plus decades, Pat Williams, an executive with the Orlando Magic, filling up at the coffee station.

“Boy,” Williams told Black, clasping his arm, “there is tension in the room tonight.”

Black nodded. He asked aloud if any team had ever faced the Lakers’ all-or-nothing odds: They’d preserve their draft pick if it fell among the top three slots, or, if it sunk below that range, they’d lose it altogether to the Philadelphia 76ers. Such a scenario would have left the Lakers with nothing to show for suffering through their worst season in franchise history, which, Black admitted, would have been “brutal.”

The Lakers teetered on a similar tightrope at last year’s NBA draft lottery, only with a bit more margin for error. At the time, after an abysmal 2014-15 campaign, they only risked losing their first-round pick to the 76ers — thanks, in a convoluted way, to the 2012 Steve Nash trade with Phoenix — if the pick fell outside the top five slots.

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There was only a 17 percent chance of such a situation unfolding a year ago, but it still would have been catastrophic, hence Black suffered through a sleepless night filled with worry before representing the Lakers in the secluded lottery drawing room at the New York Hilton Midtown, where 14 pingpong balls whirred around a clear glass drum to determine the NBA draft order in June.

But by the end of that night, Black beamed. Lottery luck had blessed the Lakers: Instead of coming up empty, they moved up two spots and landed the No. 2 pick, which they used to draft guard D’Angelo Russell from Ohio State.

To help duplicate that good fortune, Black returned to the 2016 lottery (held at the same venue) wearing the same charcoal grey suit that he wore the year before, the same purple-striped tie, the same glittering gold-and-diamond ring from the Lakers’ 2001 title campaign, a token he chose because of the team’s mighty 15-1 postseason run to champagne.

The Lakers beat the 76ers in those ’01 Finals, and they hoped to prevail over them again Tuesday, but the Lakers faced a 44.2 percent chance of losing their pick, leading to yet another sleepless night for Black, who declared himself a “nervous wreck.”

“He’s sweating here again,” Williams said.

Inarguably, the league needs its glamor franchise to succeed, it needs the Lakers to rebound quickly from the worst chapter in their otherwise remarkable history, and Williams said he could sense that sentiment.

“For the Lakers to keep their pick and rebuild with young draft picks, that’s the feeling back here,” Williams said.

Black picked at his vegetables, then, at 7:14 p.m. ET, an NBA spokesperson called for everyone — all 14 representatives from competing lottery teams, 12 media members (including three Lakers beat reporters who flew in from Los Angeles) and an NBA Entertainment television crew — to take their seats.

It was time to begin.

Black sat front and center at a table draped in cloth, a few feet from a water cooler-sized container designed by a company that makes state lottery machines.

Wyc Grousbeck, a Boston Celtics co-owner, sat to Black’s left, and to Black’s right sat Kylie Rubin, the 10-year-old daughter of Michael Rubin, a member of the 76ers’ ownership group. “We decided to bring out the big guns,” 76ers co-owner Art Wrubel explained of the young girl seated between himself and Black. And at the far end of the table was Julie Fie, a spokesperson for the Phoenix Suns.

Two flat-screen TVs mounted to the front wall before them listed lottery …

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