Tuesday night, prior to Game One of the Eastern Conference Finals, is the NBA Draft Lottery.

The Lottery represents the most important night of the playoffs for almost half of teams in the NBA, as with one bounce of a ping-pong ball, a team’s fortunes can be changed forever.

But whose fortunes need changing the most? For some teams, drafting Derrick Rose or Michael Beasley is their sole hope for success in the near future. But for others, such a move would merely add another piece to an already stable nucleus.

This year is a particularly interesting one, as many of the teams who actually need a star such as Rose or Beasley have little to no chance of actually landing one of them.

Below, I have ranked the lottery teams in order of how important winning the lottery is to the club’s future.

14. Portland Trail Blazers (0.6 percent chance of winning the lottery).

By far, this is the lottery team that is most set for the future. In Brandon Roy, Greg Oden, and LaMarcus Aldridge, the Blazers already have a nucleus that will be in place for years to come, complete with two potential franchise players. 

Roy is already a star, and if Oden recovers from knee surgery there’s no reason to believe he won’t be too. Sure, adding a true point guard such as Rose would be a boon for the franchise, but it is by no means a do-or-die proposition. The Blazers won their lottery last year; landing Rose would just be icing on the cake.

13. Chicago Bulls (1.7)

While the Bulls are nowhere near as set for the future as the Blazers are, they still have a pretty large core of young scorers to build around. In Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, and Kirk Hinrich, Chicago has more young talent than any lottery team other than Portland.

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