Dikembe Mutombo Congratulates 76ers On Getting No. 1 Pick Before Lottery

Dikembe Mutombo caused quite a stir on Twitter Tuesday when he congratulated the Philadelphia 76ers on getting the No. 1 pick in the 2016 NBA Draft before the lottery broadcast had taken place. That led to speculation that maybe Mutombo knew something the rest of us didn’t.

Mutombo quickly deleted the tweet.

Philadelphia fans on Twitter immediately celebrated the news as if it was fact and began dreaming of a world filled with Ben Simmons dunks and dishes. But after a moment’s pause, we probably should pump the brakes on this one.

It’s unlikely that Mutombo had some kind of entree into the darkest corners of the NBA’s inner sanctum, where Adam Silver reads passages from the Necronomicon as ping pong balls are pulled from a machine.*

Instead, the most likely scenario is that Mutombo saw the following tweet from Joel Embiid:

Embiid posted “#1 and #4” because that’s the best-case scenario for the 76ers in tonight’s lottery. They could get the top pick with their own selection, and could get as high as No. 4 with the pick owed to them by the Los Angeles Lakers. While that is an entirely plausible scenario, we’re fairly certain a 22-year-old who has never actually stepped on the floor in the NBA knows the results of the lottery this early.

So while this was fun for about five minutes, it’s more than likely much ado about nothing.

UPDATE: And now Embiid has gotten the news from Mutombo.

*Not confirmed this is the actual lottery process