Originally Posted by
peacebyinches
The dirty way to figure this out would be to say that each year there was only one player of his being drafted, with 31 teams picking (3 of which would be in the top tier) and this 'event' happened 33 times. The chance that none of the players was drafted by a top 3 team would be:
(1-(3/31))^33
or about 3.5%.
Since there were multiple first round picks in the same year (since he only coached for 26 years) then you have to tweak the odds a minor amount to account for the 'without replacement' part of this scenario (i.e. adjusting the odds for a single year where there would be 2 players NOT being picked by one of the 3 best of 31 teams) and incorporating that, so the odds decrease for the 33 picks somewhat, but it won't be significantly different than the approximate 3.5% chance that none of the players get drafted by a top 3 team using the shortcut.