So there’s been a lot of talk lately in my area about fixing the draft. The current situation with the Lakers is that they have a protected top 5 draft and they really don’t want to lose it. This means that if they luck out and get a pick within the top 5, they keep it. If it goes to 6 or higher, they have to give up the pick to Philly.
The Lakers, most of us believe, are doing a half tanking, half playing for real strategy which is not satisfying anyone. Philly is quite obviously been tanking for 2 years now because they intend to stock up on cheap young guys and rebuild that way. People say that tanking is bad for the sport and they want to remove incentives for teams to try and lose on purpose to get a high draft pick. Here’s a couple of ways I’d “fix” things:
As much as I dislike David Stern, I don’t believe any of the conspiracy theories. I do hate him for nixing the Chris Paul trade and being a coward on Donald Sterling for years. However, I feel that the office of the commissioner rightly has a lot of power and in the case of the draft, I’d give him more. I would be fine with giving the commissioner total or near total power to drop teams down in the draft if he thinks they are tanking. In the case of Philly, if Adam Silver is convinced that they’re taking for draft picks, I’d be fine with allowing him to drop them down the draft order or even taking their draft picks away altogether.
Like some other controversial powers of the commissioner, I think that they don’t even need to use it all that often. Do it once or twice and teams will be too scared to tank on purpose. That would fix it and I think it would be the easiest fix out of all the ones I’ve been hearing about
The other big fix is doing nothing. Personally, I don’t mind tanking. Its for a greater purpose, no teams are doing it just to stay bad. They want good, cheap rookies that they can develop into good players and win later. If you look at it like that, tanking is a completely reasonable strategy and doesn’t need to be discouraged. In fact, I would remove any official rules and punishment against tanking, if there is any. Let teams throw the ball into the stands, or pass the ball to the other team. Imagine how hilarious that would be! Lets say the Lakers were down by 1 with 10 seconds to go and Jeremy Lin drives to the basket for a layup and in the next second the ball sails over the backboard and into the stands. Oh well, he shrugs. It would be fun basketball. Maybe a teammate signed on for the next season with incentives from ownership steals the ball from a teammate who is gone at the end of the year, you wouldn’t see that coming!
I think most fans know that such a plan would be the smart thing to do. I don’t buy the whole claim that teams tanking get in the habit of losing and that hurts the team. Players change all the time, no team would be dominated for very long by players that just know how to lose. Teams get better with better players and the way to do that is through the draft. The high seed you pick is going to be some kid used to winning as a star NCAA player, so he would totally change the mindset of the team.
Look at a team like Minnesota. They’ve been bad for so long because they try too hard. They’re in the sweet spot of not being bad enough for a transcendent draft pick, and not good enough to lure free agents and talent to them. I would like to see them win 5 games next year and go for the #1 pick, and if they don’t get it, win 4 games the next year. Let their players toss balls into the stands, botch dunks, and pass it to the other team. I think players are competitive and won’t do that to the extent that it would look like a Globetrotters game, but possible punishment is holding them back from doing what needs to be done
The kind of half-assed pretend tanking is what I can’t stand. It fools the fans into having false hope. It lies to their faces. And it hardly works. The Lakers had 2 recent games against Philly and won them both. WTF were they thinking? We could have almost guaranteed ourselves the 3rd worst record at least if we lost both of them but they fucking won them both! One in overtime! Now they are sitting at #4 worst record and have a decent shot of being skipped over by 2 teams for the draft. If we lose the pick, that completely sets us back at least another year or two. We lost Kobe, Nick Young, and Julius Randle to injury. We can’t guarantee that kind of luck next year. We know we’re not going to win anymore with Kobe so we should have at least guaranteed ourselves a pick.
Right, so the problem is that the system is set up in a way that gives incentive to tanking. The league has two goals: supporting parity by improving poor teams, and providing entertaining and competitive games. The problem is that these two things conflict.
My favorite fix for this is the Gold plan: teams are ranked for the draft based on the number of games they win after being eliminated from playoff contention. This still gives an advantage to the worst teams, because they will be eliminated sooner, but they have to try to win their end-of-season games rather than tanking them. Those games you mention between LA and Philly would suddenly become competitive in the exact opposite way they are now; both teams would be trying to win to move up the draft board, rather than trying to tank their way up it.
There are downsides to this plan of course, but I like it, especially because it gives meaning to a large number of currently meaningless end-of-season games for teams out of the playoffs.
Has there been consideration of using teams’ record over multiple seasons instead of just the one most recent season? Make it three years worth of wins and losses and teams would really have to commit to long-term, obvious Major League-level nefariousness to make a difference. Honestly bad teams would be more likely to get better picks.
Then again, that would reward ineptitude in the front office rather than underhandedness.
I think its more of a conflict between short term goals and long term goals. Suppose a team can tank and get a Lebron type player, or maybe let’s not shoot that high, but a Dwight Howard or Patrick Ewing or John Wall. I think giving up a season of good ball is perfectly fine to try and get someone who, due to the rookie contract and the fact that no high pick has ever turned down their first extension, will be projected to be good and entertaining for at least 5 years after. Ask any Lakers fan if they should go out and try to win, or lose this year and try to get a top 5 pick and I bet most of them are on Team Tank.
Short term goals solve short term problems. “How will we fill the arena in the next week?” vs. “How will we fill the arena 5 years from now”. In that sense, I think its perfectly fine to tank and encourage my team to do so.
People say the same thing about Popovich’s resting of players. Sure, its not good for a nationally televised game against some other rival, but the Spurs fans respect and trust him. I don’t think there should ever be any penalties against what Pop is doing like a lot of announcers like to imagine when they call those games. Its working, the Spurs have extended their old players by a lot. We saw Klay Thompson do it a few times this year, resting a sore something or other. I think more time should be dedicated for the NBA to try to convince fans that this is a good way to go rather than fight the coaches into preventing that
I heard this on the radio too but practically, you’re going to have a lot of teams that have 20 games of such motivation vs. a bunch of teams that have like 1-5 games. Even if we take the percentages, I really don’t think that’s fair. OKC and the Pelicans are fighting for the 8th spot this year, and you have a few teams in the East doing the same. They could conceivably be eliminated by the last game of the season, and then how will we determine it?
Plus, this doesn’t address the issue of parity that the whole draft thing is supposed to fix. Better teams will still win more, so they will get better while the bad teams will get worse. It makes perfect sense to give bad teams better picks, this would invert that.
First, it gives a team incentive to tank faster so it gets out of the playoffs faster. Making it the team with the best record after being eliminated from the playoffs won’t work, as it rewards a team eliminated in its 81st game that loses its 82nd and, as a result, gets the best chance in the lottery.
Second, it rewards a team for having a weak schedule at the end of the season.
If anything needs to be changed - and I don’t think that it does - the teams at the bottom should be closer together in terms of their selection chances, but there still needs to be a sufficient gap between then and the teams that just miss the playoffs.
The problem then becomes teams tanking to get in the bottom tier instead of the top tier.
I like the idea of rewarding wins after entering the lottery, though truly bad teams simply don’t get many wins, even when they try.
Maybe have a rolling lottery, where the 5 worst teams get a chance for the #1 pick, then add team #6 for the 2nd pick, team 7 for the 3rd pick, etc. that way, a fairly good team can’t get the top picks, but can move up the board from their natural position. You can also have default picks, like the worst team must win the 5th pick if they are still on the board.
I think the idea of using multiple yes of records for seeding makes sense, but the reality is that you need to fix the competitive balance at the same time, or else you aren’t sufficiently changing the incentives. The fact is that the predominating wisdom is that you need at lest two superstars (or multiple stars and some luck) to win a chanpionship, and there aren’t that many to go around. This thinking means teams w/o a star see tanking for a star as a more viable alternative to free agency or building a fundamentally sound team with slightly lesser players. I think one way to combat this would be to get rid of the max salary for individual players. That way, few teams could sign more than one or two marquee players, and role players salaries would be more in line with market prices. By keeping the market for players like Lebron James attifically low, it incentivizes star players to play on a handful of teams.
David Stern fixed the '85 draft and has destroyed the integrity of the game.
Remember the Tim Donaghy scandal? Where he admitted that NBA refs fix games by selectively calling fouls to influence point spreads?
Remember how David Stern actively sought to correct the problem, by sweeping it under the rug and laughably suggesting Donaghy was the only official to ever do it?
I’m damn f***ing tired of commissioners exerting excessive power and ruining the credibility of their sports. Your solution of giving more power to the NBA commissioner, is garbage.