The evidence seems to suggest that you are wrong about the draft not producing parity - in most of the pro sports, before the institution of a draft a very small number of teams were consistently dominant. I think it’d be even worse now. Suppose you eliminated the NBA draft in May of this year. Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Marcus Smart, Elfrid Payton, even Joel Embiid… all were suddenly free agents, free to sign with any team they wished (within the limits of the salary cap).
Where do you suppose they’d go? You think Jabari Parker would go to Milwaukee and play for the Bucks? They could, perhaps, offer him more money under the cap than many other teams, but his endorsement opportunities in a bigger city would be greater and the salary cap ultimately limits the degree to which the Bucks could outbid anyone. More importantly, going to the Bucks would be a losing proposition for Parker. They will be terrible this year whatever they do; what possible inducement would cause a good player to go there unless forced? It’s very likely that the top 10 names would have gravitated toward the best 5 franchises in the league. The only exceptions would be the Lakers and Celtics, whose prestige would draw players even though they are not currently winners.
But for the Bucks? There would be no hope. No top player would go there, because they’d have no way to win and no realistic chance to get better… ever. This would just keep getting worse each year, as the best players gravitate toward the top rosters, which ensures that they remain the top rosters and that the Bucks remain awful.
Under your system, the Bucks would be a permanent Washington Generals to the better teams in the league, guaranteeing noncompetitive basketball every time they play… or they’d fold. Under the current system, they have a chance to improve. Maybe Jabari Parker will be a superstar. Then the Bucks are fun to watch.
And again, I’m a consumer. I care about what makes the league more entertaining. So far you have not convinced me that your solution would improve the product in any way that matters to me.
Actually I think their latest draft may have found them a QB they can build around.
I think RickJay’s post brings up a very good point, how little competition there is without a way to distribute talent to the less successful teams. I don’t really follow European leagues at all, but if a smaller team stumbles upon a really good player, don’t they tend to sell him off to one of the big shots rather than build around him?
Er, didn’t you just describe what happened when the Bucks drafter Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? They were “fun to watch” for a few years, and even won a title, but then Kareem saw the light (of a sunset over the Pacific), left for the Lakers, and where have the Bucks been since then?
There are a couple of other problems that haven’t really been mentioned.
First, middle of the road teams tend to stay that way. When the Colts traded Elway to Denver, they ended up being a team that usually ended up being just short of making the playoffs, but too good to get a decent draft pick to be able to improve. The same goes for the perennial #17 and #18 teams in the NBA - in fact, when (IIRC) Charlotte got the #1 draft pick even though they had the best record among the “lottery” teams, the NBA made it much harder for that to happen again (I think the odds changed from 65-1 to 199-1)
Second, it’s too easy for the “have-nots” to trade high draft picks to the “haves”. I think the NBA should change its draft rules so that, among the first 14 picks, teams with their own choices draft ahead of teams that traded for them. There is some alleviation of this with the “conditional pick” trade (i.e. a trade that involves a draft pick, but only if it is not in, say, the top 10), but I don’t think it goes far enough.
From what I can see, it’s more that there are teams in the lower levels of their league structure that essentially play the role of at-large farm teams for the major league teams, and sell their good players to the highest bidders.
What this means is that money becomes the biggest determinant of whether a team will do well over the long haul, and generally speaking, if a team’s good, they’ll rake in more cash than worse teams, and perpetuate that cycle.
At least the draft and salary caps keeps teams like Green Bay from being perpetual sewer dwellers, and keeps Dallas from being perpetually dominant due to wealth differences. If we had a European system, you’d see the teams with the deepest pockets being the most successful over time, like you did in baseball for a while there.
There’s not a doubt in my mind Oakland could win the Super Bowl in 2019 or 2020.
Remember, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Super Bowl. TAMPA BAY, for the love of God. All you need is one guy to get fired and a smarter guy to take his place.
How would we feel about ditching the draft, but maintaining a rookie salary cap with a sliding scale, such that the worst teams can spend much more (say, 2-4 times) than the best teams?
It would be less palpably unfair to incoming amateurs – at least they’d have a say in where they played before being locked into a below-market contract for several years. For die-hard fans it would be much more interesting: the strategy permutations are endless, especially if we let teams trade cap space, and it would presumably go on for weeks instead of 1-3 days. Bad teams with good management could improve more quickly with more opportunities to exploit their advantages in scouting etc.
About the only con I can think of is the question of how much of a discount rookies would be willing to give in order to wind up in a good situation (on a contender, or with a clear path to playing time, or in a big city to improve marketing possibilities, etc.). I think it depends on the sport. It’s easy to imagine a top basketball prospect deciding he’d rather take $2M/year to play with Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in L.A. as opposed to $4M to play with Ersan Ilyasova in Milwaukee. So it probably wouldn’t work in the NBA, but I bet it would in baseball, where there’s a much bigger disconnect the team you’re drafted onto and the actual composition of the major league roster by the time you get there, and where your signing bonus is going to be a huge majority of your total compensation for probably several years (so you better make the most of it). The NFL is somewhere in between, but I suspect it’s closer to baseball in most instances.
It’ll never happen, but I think it would be really interesting.
