"We don't have that information" is true even if "we don't have that information handy but could get it easily enough" is also true.
If NJ sold over 20 million tickets and knew in less than half an hour that they sold a winner we can assume at least one of a few things is true 1. They've either got a very fast computer, or 2. the entry for the winning ticket was somewhere towards the beginning of the database, or 3. the database can be searched without starting at the beginning. #2 suggests that either the winning ticket was bought early (or late if the order is reversed) or the database is already sorted in some fashion. #3 would also suggest that the database is already sorted numerically when sales close. I'd hope they're using state of the art equipment that would be fast, and it just makes sense that the database would be sorted on the fly as tickets are sold, and possibly split into categories, such as mega ball or first number. That all means that it should also be pretty easy for them to check on the more obvious combinations such as 1,2,3,4,5 and 5,10,15,20,25, diagonal patterns, etc. It's entirely possible that they don't consider that info to be useful and therefore don't track it (making the claim about not having the info true), but it should be fairly easy to check if they wanted.
In the early 80's NY was definitely paying attention to such things. Over 10,000 people were playing the diagonal pattern starting with #1 and dropping down 1 and over 1 on every drawing and the lottery took out newspaper ads telling people to stop doing it.