I don’t believe it was rigged, but I do think it shows the NBA lottery system isn’t working. The goal of a draft is to allow the bottom teams to acquire talent so they can improve. They established the lottery to avoid teams tanking. That hasn’t worked as more teams are tanking than ever. But there are too many teams in the lottery, and the worst team has never won the first pick. They need to limit the ability to win the first pick to the bottom 4 or 5 teams.
There are currently 14 teams in the lottery. They should eliminate the play-in losers from the lottery and their draft position should be determined by their finish like playoff teams. That leaves 12 lottery-eligible teams. Have 3 separate lotteries to determine the first four picks among the four worst teams, a separate drawing for teams 5-8, then 9-12. They can weight the teams chances within the different buckets if that is preferable, but it eliminates teams jumping from 12 or 14 to number 1. That will avoid teams barely missing the playoffs getting the top pick. And we should just forget the notion of stopping tanking because nothing they have tried has worked.