Dikembe Mutombo on his early tweet congratulating 76ers on draft lottery: ‘There was no conspiracy’

Dikembe Mutombo may have inadvertently revealed Tuesday something many of us have long suspected -- the NBA draft lottery is fixed!

Or perhaps the basketball Hall of Famer can see into the future.

Or maybe he just got a little over-excited on draft lottery day.

At 1:36 PDT Tuesday, Mutombo tweeted out congratulations to one of his former teams, the Philadelphia 76ers, for snagging the top overall pick for this year’s NBA draft.

While the Sixers eventually did end up with the right to pick first, the draft lottery hadn’t happened yet. It didn’t take place until more than three hours after Mutombo sent out his since-deleted tweet.

Mutombo later tweeted that he was just super-psyched that the Sixers had a 25% chance of landing the No. 1 pick, better odds than any other team in the lottery.

A 76ers PR representative confirmed to Deadspin that Mutombo had no inside knowledge of a secret plan to reward the team’s years of ineptitude with a fixed win in the lottery.

Shortly after claiming that No. 1 pick, the 76ers sent a sly-looking emoji Mutumbo’s way on Twitter. That tweet has also been deleted (Deadspin has a screengrab here).

So what really happened? Mutombo explained Tuesday night that he received an email from the 76ers asking him to send out a congratulatory tweet if the team got the No. 1 pick. The email, which has since been provided to multiple media outlets, provided some prewritten tweets for the former player to choose from.

Mutumbo said he copied and pasted one of them onto his Twitter feed -- then accidentally clicked the “tweet” button, which sent it out several hours before the draft actually took place.

“It was like maybe 30 seconds, then I realized, ‘Whoa! What did I do here?’” he said. “But it was too late. It was out in the air.”

He added in a phone interview with USA Today: “I want to let people know there was no conspiracy.”