Odds of Suns winning lottery and of other, umm, things

The Phoenix Suns have found themselves in frustratingly
familiar territory, awaiting the bounce of some ping pong
balls to determine where they’ll be selecting in the NBA
Draft.

The Suns, who finished with the second-best record of any
team that missed the postseason, are slated to pick 13th.
Of course, they could still move up into the draft’s top
three, of which there is a 50.1:1 chance of happening.

Of course, if you want to get greedy and aim for the
number one spot (and a chance to draft Kentucky’s Anthony
Davis), you better hope Lady Luck is on the Suns’ side,
because the chances of that happening stand at 500:3.

How do those odds stack up to other things that could (but
don’t often) happen in life? According to one
site, not too well.

• Fancy yourself a bowler? The chances of you putting
together a perfect 300 game are 11,500:1. How about a
golfer? Well, as you know it’s tough to ace a hole, as the
odds of that are 5,000:1.

• So maybe golf isn’t your game, big deal. There are
plenty of Olympic sports out there, and the odds of
winning a medal in one of the games are 662,000:1.

• The good news is that the odds of catching a ball
at a major league baseball game stand at a reasonable
563:1, though the chances you’d have of getting away with
murder (say, of someone who stole the ball from you) are a
disturbingly 2:1. Conversely, the odds of being murdered
yourself are 18,000:1, so at the very least your attacker,
who is likely to get away, may not actually exist.

• Don’t worry about that, though as it’s not all bad.
Hell, the odds of dating a millionaire are 215:1, though
the odds of dating a supermodel are a disappointing
88,000:1. Hey, who says money can’t buy happiness?

• One thing money can buy, though, is a private jet,
which is good when you realize the odds of being on a
plane with a drunken pilot are 117:1. Even worse are the
odds that a plane — flown by a drunken pilot or not —
will lose parts that ultimately fall to the Earth and kill
you, because the chances of that happening are
10,000,000:1.

• But hey, none of this will even matter if the Earth
we know ceases to exist, which would be the case if the
planet experiences a catastrophic collision with an
asteroid. The good news there is that the odds of that
happening within the next 100 years are 5,000:1. Then
again, your chances of dying from a shark attack are
300,000,000:1, so there is that.

Whatever you think, until their card is shown, the Suns
have a chance to come up big Wednesday night in New York.
Sure, the odds are against them, but you never know…

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