103 replies to this topic

[Oriole85]

NBA is not like football, because contracts are guaranteed and you can tank without worry of losing pay.  I personally don't mind the lottery.  Its a good competitive balance. 

I don't think the players and even coaches are tanking -- this is a management thing. They don't care about teammates they won't have and players they won't be coaching.

[Oriole85]

Grantland: Wheel of Misfortune

 

The wheel may not end up looking much like a wheel at all; Zarren has reorganized it so that groups of randomly selected teams might hop through buckets of six picks — say, picks 1-6 in one season, and 25-30 the next season — over a five-year span, instead of the original 30-year system in which teams cycle through each specific pick one by one. Within each bucket, a mini lottery would determine which team gets which pick. The goal is to give bad teams hope of snagging a higher pick more quickly.

 

 

Simpler Alternatives?
The alternatives to the wheel would carry similar unknown and possibly damaging consequences.

• People around the league like the idea of returning to the unweighted lottery, where every lottery team has the same chance of nabbing the no. 1 pick. Go that route, and I’m tanking the hell out of the no. 8 seed and into the lottery every time — and I might even tank my way through Bill Simmons’s Entertaining As Hell Tournament, if that’s what it takes.

• Thinkers have also kicked around ideas that would make getting into the playoffs a more desirable outcome on its own. One idea would be to place 22 teams into the lottery, excluding only the top four seeds in each conference, and to guarantee some juicy picks — perhaps two picks in the 5-10 range — would go to playoff teams. But that would introduce a tank race into the no. 5 spot, and hold the potential for sending multiple impact rookies to teams that are already strong.

• By the way: the most obvious method of making a playoff spot, even the no. 8 slot, more desirable? Shorten playoff series, so low seeds have a better chance of pulling multiple upsets. But now you’re talking about an entirely different league, and moving away from something that makes the NBA great: that the very best team, or one of the two or three best, wins the title basically every season. So many of these wheel-linked changes — ending max salary limits, tweaking restricted free agency — amount to wholesale changes in the league itself. But they are the sorts of things you must consider in thinking about one sweeping change.

• Other less foundational changes have momentum. Lots of executives prefer a lottery that takes into account each team’s win-loss record over the preceding three seasons. Cuban favors a system in which the lottery team with the best record has the highest chance of winning the top pick, but with a lower chance of doing so than the worst lottery team gets today.

• Cuban (and others) would prefer the league determine every lottery draft slot via a random drawing. Under the current system, the lottery actually determines only the top three picks, with everyone else falling into draft order based on record — worst to best. A team like the Sixers isn’t really tanking for the no. 1 pick; it’s tanking for a 100 percent guarantee of a top-four pick, and a near–100 percent guarantee of a top-three pick. Randomizing down the full order of the lottery, with some weighting system, would make it less lucrative for teams to lottery jockey late in the season.
 

It would also bring some uncertainty for teams that owe protected first-round picks. The 2012 Warriors infamously tossed away games in an effort to finish with no better than the seventh-worst record, so that they could keep a pick that would transfer to Utah if it fell at no. 8 and beyond.5 Detroit represents this season’s best candidate for this kind of shady losing; it owes a top-pick to Charlotte, and its playoff hopes are slipping away. Regardless: Drawing the picks in worst-to-best order after no. 3 makes it easy for teams to manipulate their place in line with some blatant late-season “resting” of players.

[Oriole85]

Well it's tonight, let's see what team Adam Silver "favors." I always looked forward to this when the Wizards we're in it. I'll still watch at commercials of the O's games, but can't say I'm that interesting this year.

[Oriole85]

@Ourand_SBJ The NBA Draft Lottery averaged 3.4M viewers, giving it cable's 13th biggest audience for the week.