My idea is to base next season’s draft order on the team rankings at some arbitrary point during the season, instead of a lottery at the end of the season.
The concept is straightforward: have the draft order decided at such a time when nobody would be tanking games because everyone is still pretty much alive. Maybe the all-star break.
What do you guys think?
That sort of devalues the season, and if anything it might encourage teams to throw in the towel earlier. I’m wondering if the draft lottery formula could be tinkered with so it doesn’t matter quite as much if you’re the second- or third-worst team.
How would it devalue the season? Speaking of which, the fact that half the league qualifies for the postseason devalues the regular season more than any draft ever could. The NHL is even worse about that.
The current draft lottery has already been tinkered with in the way you suggest. There is no difference between the worst and second-to-worst team; they flip a coin to see which of them gets the most lottery balls.
Would teams really tank before the all-star break to try and game the draft order? I doubt it. Even if they did, there would be no reason to tank any games after the all-star break. I thought of this while watching PTI, where they quoted an NBA player who actually said that now that they’d locked up the worst record in the league, they could start trying to win some games. That’s a nice fuck you to the fans who bought tickets for the games they tanked.
Because teams should be judged on their results from the whole season.
True, but a separate issue.
Cite please? I think you’ve got that wrong. As I understand it, the system is weighted so each team has a certain number of chances to win the first pick, with only the top three picks actually determined by a lottery.
How so? There are exactly the same number of teams in the NBA and the NHL, and the same number of teams make the playoffs. Until Charlotte rejoined as an expansion team, a greater percentage of NBA teams made the playoffs.
Simple… have them hire Billy King as GM.
Good to know. The fact that they both admit >50% of the teams to the post season boggles my mind.
They are; that’s what the playoffs are. The concept of devaluing a regular season only applies to the post-season. (eg: Does everybody get in anyway, so what’s the point of the regular season in the first place?) The draft is unrelated to that debate. Nobody would consider their succesful late-season surge to claim the final playoff spot “devalued” because it didn’t lower their draft status the following year. Am I missing a nuance in your position?
We’re both half right. There is no “worst two flip a coin” as I thought, but all non-playoff teams get entered into the lottery. (I’ve cited the lottery rules below.) Which brings me to the other bonus of the suggestion in the OP, which is that I believe it would result in a truer ranking of worst-to-first in the draft order while making it much harder for teams to game the system.
As a further refinement, I’d make the cutoff 50 games. (The specific number could be adjusted to some optimal value.) Not all teams will have played their 50th game at the same time, which is a bonus because it makes gaming the system even (slightly) more difficult. Take all the records of all the teams after their 50th game, put them in order of worst to first, and you have your draft order. No lottery needs to be involved at all, though I might consider a two or three-team lottery for the bottom three teams, and also for any tiebreakers. No need to expose this process to the public; the NFL conducts its coin-flip draft order tiebreakers behind closed doors without issue.
The more I consider it, the more I think it would be far superior to any alternative I’ve heard, including the one they actually use. Here’s some links related to the debate:
Throwing Games and the NBA Draft Lottery
It was this exact reasoning that spawned my OP.
Here’s a cite for the lottery procedure: http://www.nba.com/history/draft_evolution.html
Bill Simmons has been talking about this lately as his Celtics are positioned for a good lottery pick. One thing he touches on is that putting the best rookies on the worst teams is not necessarily a good thing. I’m not sure I agree, but it’s something that people don’t usually consider.
How about modifying Ellis’ suggestion a bit with the following formula for draft position: losses in the first 3/4 of the season plus wins in the last 1/4. The best picks will still go to the worst teams roughly in order, but at the end of the year they’re playing to win the best draft choice. Might be better than watching your team just run out the string of the last dozen meaningless games. It’s late so maybe I’m being silly, but this seems like a good idea. Maybe I’ll send it in to sports guy :).
Just in general though, as long as you tie good draft position to bad performance teams have an incentive to tank. So to change things, you have to do something to take that incentive away.
I think the solution is very simple. A hybrid of the weighted system and a straight worst-to-best ordering system would be ideal. In the NBA parity is a much more esoteric concept than in the NFL. The fact that many teams use a 7-man rotation makes the impact of one player abnormally lopsided. That means that an injury, a draft choice or a free agent signing can have a sweeping impact on a teams fortunes. As a result I think that the importance of allowing the teams with the worst records to draft first is minimal. Let’s remember that the Spurs drafted Tim Duncan in a year in which they went from winning 62 and 59 games to winning 20 games. To imply that they were a bad team neglects the impact of the loss of one player, namely David Robinson. Situations like that make the argument for stacking the draft based solely on record in the name of parity very dubious.
Then again, that doesn’t mean that I like the idea of throwing everyone into a equal lottery. Teams that lose franchise players to free agency and retirement shouldn’t have to rely wholly on luck to rebuild and theres a huge difference in impact between players typically drafted in the top half of the draft versus the bottom half.
All that said, I like this idea: A tiered lottery system. Every team that misses the playoffs is eligible for the top pick. With 14 teams currently missing the playoffs each season, I suggest that the bottom 4 teams get 4 balls each. The next 5 get 2 balls and the last 5 get 1 ball. With a grand total of 30 balls in play, that means that the worst 4 teams each have a 13.3% chance of winning the lottery, the next tier gets 6.6% chance and the bottom tier have a 3.3% chance.
This has a couple benefits. First it should eliminate the motivation to tank in order to get the bottom draft pick to get one stud player. By making the best chance a mere 13.3% you marginalize the motivation when weighed against the cost of alienating fans and likely lost revenue at home games. The likelihood of a team tanking in order to slide from the 5th worst to the 4th worst seems small, and when it happens it should be limited to one or two teams at only the last couple games of the season. Second, it slightly lessens the penalty that teams barely missing the playoffs suffer. A team falling within a game of a playoff spot is currently saddled with minuscule 0.5% chance currently, this seems needlessly punitive.
To help insulate against a terrible team having terrible luck and ending up with a pick in the middle of the round, outside the top 10, once the top 4 teams are selected from the lottery any of the teams in that first tier who are not selected slot into the 5th-8th picks as needed. The same procedure follows with each remaining tier.
I like the idea of a good team that just barley missed the playoffs getting lucky and landing in the top 3. This provides an opportunity for more dynasties to be created which history has shown to be good for ratings and popularity of the league.
I think the idea of an arbitrary midseason ordering is a pointless one. Teams out of contention or with little chance of longterm success would simply jerrymander their losses in order to get optimal placing at that 50-game mark. All it would accomplish is to make teams tank earlier. The only way to eliminate tanking is to marginalize the benefit in doing so. The best way to do that is by making the draft order less dependent on the precise order of finish. The lottery is one step to help that process and before the adjusted the weighting it worked pretty well. The league reacted to the Magic getting 2 first round picks in a row by making the odds favor the bad teams more dramatically, but it’s unclear why they felt the need. I can’t recall much negative happening as a result of that windfall for the Magic. Has it really been a boon to the league to have the Grizzles, Raptors and Hawks drafting in the top tree almost every season?
I like it. In addition to either my original idea or your variation, the exact cutoff number could be kept secret by the league, with a spread of maybe half a dozen games. So the cutoff would be anywhere from games 48-53 or something.
Omni, you raise some fine points. Since I’m neither a fan nor even remotely interested in basketball, I can’t refute anything you’ve said.
I do wonder about the “teams would just tank earlier” scenario. How would that work? I’m wondering what the standings looked like 45 games into this past season. Were most teams bunched up, or was there a vast divide between the haves and have nots? I also wonder how closely the “worst to first” lineup from then compares to the standings now. I’d imagine it was fairly close, but that’s just a guess.
One thing to consider is that if a team tries to tank games 40 to 50, it wouldn’t necessarily kill their chances for a playoff spot. And that would be disincentive to tank, since you might be eliminating yourself from the postseason. If at 40 games you already have no chance to make the postseason, what’s your record? 0-40? Since more than half the teams make it, anyone with 41 wins is almost guaranteed to make the playoffs. (Not always, but generally true. Anyone with a .500 record or better sitting home right now?)
Could you imagine teams trying tank the next several games if their record was 20-20? 18-22? 15-25? I would think a 15-win team could mount a reasonable effort at a playoff run, especially if the slow start were due to injury. Tanking would be counter-productive unless you were truly awful, like say you played at MSG.
One thing to remember about tanking is that it’s made more palatable by the fact that the season is almost over and they’re already looking ahead to the offseason. If the pros ever have thoughts that a rookie might come in and help, (which I doubt,) that thought becomes much less relevant when you still have half a season to play.
I just don’t see any real incentive to tank games 40-50, and even if they did I don’t see it as the complete give-up that tanking the end of the season is.
Isn’t the whole purpose of a draft lottery (instead of last place picks first, and so on) to discourage teams from purposely tanking to finish last for the first pick?
Where does it end?
the other option would be to delay the seeding two years. If the Grizzlies finish dead last in 2006-2007, give them the best lottery odds for the draft that takes place after the 2007-2008 season.
This would prevent teams from being especially motivated to tank when a strong draft class is coming along. Since you don’t necessarily know if the class two drafts from now will be a good one, you’d be less likely to see value in tanking.
Of course, all this assumes tanking actually takes place, which I haven’t seen proven.
It is simple, don’t reward the worst teams. Weight the lottery amongst teams not in the playoffs in the reverse way they do now. The best non-playoff team gets the most ping pong balls.
I don’t know how similar the order of finish would have been at the 40 game mark versus the 50 game mark versus the 82 game mark, but there seems a fundamental flaw. As you rightly point out, a team with a bad record at the relative midpoint of the season is still very much in contention. As a result it seems that moving the slotting process to that point pretty much undermines the entire motivation for having a draft that helps promote parity.
One other issue would be that you obviously have no idea who the teams who will be in the playoffs are yet. So you necessarily have to include every team instead of just the bottom 14. That’s going to create a pretty big issue. This season you could have a situation where a bad team at the midpoint, like the Heat following their injuries to Shaq and Wade this season, gets the top draft choice because their record was in the bottom half at that point. Then that team gets healthy and is a legitimate contender at this point.
Fundamentally if you aren’t going to base the draft on the order at the end of the season, you have to answer the question of why base the order on records at all. Make it a straight lottery then. Your scenario rewards teams that get “lucky” by being bad a just the right time. If it’s going to be luck, make it all about luck.
I like this idea a lot.
I concur. Mr. RickJay, you win.