In 18 years of the current system used by the NBA Draft Lottery (1000 balls, teams given weighted number of chances based on final record) the team with the worst record has won the 1st overall pick only twice (Cavs in 2003, Magic in 2004).
In 18 years the average position (from worst record) of the team winning the first overall pick has been 3.8. Teams with the 5th-9th worst record have won the first pick** 44% of the time**. Teams with the 3rd-9th worst record have won the first pick 66% of the time (oddly, the 4th worst record has never won).
Is it just me, or does that strike anyone else as bullshit?
Nope. First off, 18 is a really small sample size to be making any meaningful declaration. Secondly, look at the alternative. Teams doing poorly already bench players and give up with a few months left to try to improve their lottery pick - do you want them to completely tank in the hopes of getting the newest young star?
They could tweak the formula and give the worst team a better shot, but I don’t think it’s unfair. The main goal for the league is to be entertaining, so the current system and the draft lottery are supposed to serve that end. The worst team isn’t entitled to the first pick, they just get the best shot at it. That’s fine with me. If you guarantee the worst team the top pick you’re giving them a direct incentive to lose, which is less entertaining than a lottery isn’t good for the NBA.
One bizarre part of draft coverage every year is that if the team with the worst record doesn’t get the first pick, some analysts will say that team “lost” and we get discussions like this one. That’s not how this works. And I think drafting well is more important than what order you draft in. Other than Kevin Love, “draft loser” Minnesota has made a lot of shitty picks.
If you spent $10 a day for the rest of you life and never won the lottery even one time, would you consider it bullshit? I’d consider you bad at math. In the NBA Draft Lottery, the worst team starts with a 1-in-4 chance of winning. That, of course, means that they have a 3-in-4 chance of not winning. In addition, probabilities have to allow for the fact that the worst team, even with the best odds, may never get the 1st pick, just as the possibility exists that you can flip a coin forever and have it come up tails every time.
The part that strikes me as most unfair is the inclusion of all 14 teams that did not make the playoffs. If the point is truly to give the worst teams the best chance to improve, shouldn’t the lottery only include the 3-4 worst teams, like it did when they first started the lottery?
If I spent $10 a day on the lottery for the rest of my life and never won when the odds were 1-14, yes, I’m pretty sure I would consider that bullshit.
The odds aren’t 1 in 14. Several teams have a better than one-in-14 chance every year - Minny had a 1 in 4 chance - and most of them have a lower probability. And as you point out (although it contradicts the hypothetical), the team with the worst record has won the lottery twice in 18 tries.
This seems reasonable, but the incentive-to-lose thing would kick in around wherever you drew the line - if you gave ping-pong balls (or whatever) to the teams with the worst 6 records, you’d get into weird situations late in the season with teams in the 5 through 9 slots, and so on. At least with the divide being between the playoffs and the lottery, there’s an obvious counterincentive.
I’m not entirely convinced this does or would occur. The possibility certainly exists, but the NBA is a star-driven industry, arguably significantly more so than any of the other American pro sports leagues, and the players as a whole are groomed to have a me-first attitude. I have a difficult time believing guys like Antawn Jamison, Michael Beasley, Deron Williams, and other veteran players would oblige an order to purposely lose. I’m also fairly certain it would be pretty obvious if a team decided to intentionally lose.
Right, I get that. By analogy, if you played a lottery with a one-in-four chance to win and won two times out of 18 plays, would you consider that unfair? Maybe it’s less than you would expect intuitively, which would probably be four or five wins, but it seems pretty squarely within the realm of random chance. They’ve altered the formula for the lottery before and they could do that again.
There didn’t used to be a lottery at all, and even since the lottery was created, they’ve tinkered with it. It used to be ping-pong balls, but after Orlando won twice and drafted Shaq (they had the second worst record in the league after Minnesota that year) and Chris Webber (when they finished at .500 and missed the playoffs due to a tiebreaker), they changed it to the current system, where teams are assigned various four-number combinations by a computer and later the computer chooses the winning combinations and… it’s bad TV. That year they also adjusted the probabilities so the worst teams had a better shot at winning.
The old ping-pong ball system had 66 ping pong balls. The worst team got 11 balls, the best non-playoff team got one. So Orlando getting Webber was about half as likely as the Cavs getting the first pick yesterday - although three teams had a lower probability than the Cavs. Here’s Wikipedia’s article about the draft lottery.
There is not much dispute that it does. Some players have pride, but some don’t. They get paid anyway.
Basketball is unique in that a single great player can significantly alter the fortunes of a franchise for a decade or more. The incentive to “tank” when a potentially great player is available in the draft is very high. While I appreciate the fact that teams have to look to their future, the reality is that they are in business to provide live competitive entertainment, deliberately losing games is not acceptable.
This new method is better than the original lottery, since it’s weighted towards the bad teams, and nobody is sticking ping pong balls in the freezer.
At most, I would cut the lottery to the first or first two picks down from the first three. That guarantees the worst team a pick better than #4.
It’s not at all obvious. When a team shoots 30% for the game and loses by 50 points, are they tanking it or was it just a bad game? When a team falls behind by 15 in the first quarter and the coach puts his star player on the bench for most of the game, is he protecting the player in a lost cause or tossing the game on purpose?
If anything, point shaving, gambling, and ref-fixing scandals have proven that it’s impossible to tell when someone’s cheating in basketball. They are never exposed as they happen, it’s always someone ratting it out after the fact. In fact, the basis of the creation of the lottery has no proof, either. There is no direct evidence that Houston tanked in 1984 to get Hakeem Olajuwon. Yet the suspicion was so great that the NBA decided to end discussion about the possibility that someone might actually do it. That is a testament to how easy it is to intentionally lose games.
I see my explanation of how the current draft is off - ping-pong balls are still involved. Computers are used to assign the four-digit combinations, and then the ping-pong balls are drawn and matched up with the combination. Still less telegenic then a straight-ahead lottery, which is why only the results are televised.
And on top of that, it has to be demoralizing if you know your team is going to be bad no matter what you do, or that teammates or management aren’t trying to win this year.
OTOH, doesn’t having a weighted lottery still provide incentive to lose? I fail to see the point, particularly after reading this paper (you may or may not be able to get to the actual article), but the abstract provides the conclusion, which was
I voted for “other.” I’m not going to say it’s perfect, but it helps to keep crappy teams from throwing games towards the end of a season to ensure the #1 pick. The NBA season is long enough that teams could start aiming for that #1 pick with plenty of games to go. The Cavs kind of did that in '03 even though the #1 pick wasn’t guaranteed. Is the system rigged? I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me with the NBA.
Exactly, there’s much less incentive to tank when you’re changing your odds of getting the star from 15% to 25%, than when you change your odds from 0% to 100%
I actually haven’t voted. I don’t think there is a perfect system. I do think that what the NBA has now is fine. If they made a small increase or decrease in the odds for the worst teams, that wouldn’t bother me. On the other hand if they made big changes in response to people going “Dude, it’s fixed!” or ignorant whining about probabilty (I don’t mean the OP), that would annoy me.