Ping pong balls are the worst.

When I was a child I got hit in the eye so hard with a ping pong ball it was swollen shut for three straight days. A buddy of mine tried to take his anger out on the circular piece of plastic after dropping a match; instead it was my eye socket paying for his loss.

In college ping pong balls were used for drinking games, but usually ended up on the floor – dirty and gross and then thrown into a perfectly good drink. Nothing like swigging down cheap beer with a side of vent lint in it.

Last January, like everyone else in America, I tuned in to the $1.5B Powerball drawing fully expecting to win, before seeing they selected the country’s next billionaire via ping pong balls. I ripped up my ticket after missing the first two numbers.

And once again on Tuesday night, the Nuggets were done no favors by those pesky ping pong balls, fulfilling their annual duty (at least when they miss the playoffs), of not moving up in the NBA Draft Lottery.

Mile High Sports President James Merilatt did an excellent job in this space on Monday breaking down the Nuggets tortured history in the lottery, noting that “despite being in 13 of the previous 31 lotteries the NBA has held, Denver has never landed the top prize; in fact, they’ve never even improved their position, always finishing with the same or a worse pick than if win-loss record still determined the draft order.”

Make that 14 of 32, as the Nuggets held pat at pick No. 7 on Tuesday night. In fact, no team moved up, and the draft order panned out exactly how it would have if the NBA was like the NFL, going from worst to first based on the previous season’s win-loss record.

And as usual, it didn’t come without some suspicion. You can put on your tinfoil hat and spend hours Googling conspiracy theories about NBA lotteries in the past (it’s kind of fun), but what happened last night might go down as one of the better ones we’ve had.

Sometime yesterday afternoon former Nuggets legend Dikembe Mutombo tweeted out a quickly deleted congratulatory message to the Sixers for winning the lottery. It was captured via screenshot by current Philadelphia player Joel Embiid.

Hmm.

Theories immediately popped up all over the Internet that Mutombo, who played for the 76ers from 2001-2002, somehow was leaked the results. That fire obviously began to rage harder after it was revealed Philly did indeed secure the top spot, despite only having have a 25 percent chance of getting the first pick.

Yes, the Sixers had the best chance of any team to win the selection, but you didn’t have to earn an “A” in your high school statistics class to realize the odds weren’t in their favor to pick No. 1 overall. If you conducted last night’s lottery 100 times, the 76ers would only land the top pick 25 times; that’s what makes Mutombo’s tweet fairly suspicious.

Is the lottery rigged? Probably not.

That would be felony-level fraud committed by one of the world’s biggest sports organizations and one of the biggest athletics corruption story of all time, if not the biggest.

Yet it’s hard not to wonder every once in a while, especially living in a city with tortured luck in the process like Denver. If you are a draft lottery truther then the events of last night (especially when you throw in the Mutombo tweet) did nothing to change your mind.

But just because the Nuggets will pick at No. 7 and didn’t move up doesn’t mean they’re doomed; actually, far from it. Steph Curry was the No. 7 overall pick back in 2009, going after the likes of Hasheem Thabeet and Jonny Flynn; it’s safe to say that’s worked out just fine for the Warriors.

Last year the Nuggets got a gem of their own at pick No. 7, as Emmanuel Mudiay had a very solid first year and then finished seventh (Ha!) in the rookie of the year voting.

There are players GM Tim Connelly can grab at the slot who can make an impact next year and beyond, there’s no doubt about that. But after another frustrating lottery night it’s hard not to wonder why those ping pong balls had to betray Denver yet again.

The easy answer is to say ping pong balls are the worst, and I’m sticking to it until the Nuggets win a draft lottery – or I win Powerball.

Either one would do the trick.