I'm probably too late to the thread for anyone to read this but hell I'll post anyway.

Other people have pointed out that the math is wrong. But even when you correct the math the probability of Taylor Hall's teams winning at least 5 out of 9 draft lotteries is still super small.

However, when we look at scenarios like this if you really think about it we aren't just interested in the probability that Taylor Hall wins at least 5 out of 9 draft lotteries.

The outcome we are really interested in is "there's a crazy pattern to the lottery results for Taylor Hall's teams".

For example, say Hallsy's team dropped several places for each draft lottery he was in. That would also be an unlikely outcome. So unlikely that we'd probably see posts like

"holy shit there's only a .001 (made up number) chance that Taylor Hall's teams dropped places each lottery".

Or say Taylor Hall's teams had some sort of crazy win/lose pattern where his teams won the lottery on even years and lost on odd years. We'd also see posts saying "holy shit that's insanely unlikely"

If we sum the probabilities of all these unlikely events together, what we'll see is that some weird pattern emerging from Taylor Hall's team's draft lottery results isn't really that unlikely.

So in a sense assigning a probability to this outcome after the fact doesn't really mean anything. Of course some strange pattern emerged, there's a bunch of possible strange patterns.

Just my 2 cents, I appreciate the post in any case