that won't work IMO; and there would still be loads of tanking You'd have all the organically bad teams that exist every season; only 'now', they'd have no viable path to get better. But you'd have almost all of the play-in teams tanking hard this time of year (and subtly tanking all season) timing their deliberate tanking to try and end up as the 10-14 seed in the lottery. You'd have Sacramento, Dallas, Phoenix, and the Spurs jockeying in the west; and Miami, Orlando, Chicago, Toronto in the east great....yeah, lets give the Spurs the best odds at landing Flagg that new system doesn't de-incentivize tanking, it just exchanges 7-10 tankers with bad talent for 7-10 different tankers with better talent I don't believe tanking is a significant enough problem to need correction. The length of contract guarantees is a bigger issue
More than half the teams in the league make the playoffs. What if the top four spots go to four non-finals playoff teams chosen randomly. After that, no randomness, ranked worst to best record. Perfect tanking will only gets you 5th. In a good draft, all the teams should improve.
I love all of the engagement in this conversation, but I don't think any of these suggestions are as good as (let alone better than) the current system.
Maybe the tax penalty distribution gets reduced for your team every year you're in the lottery? Or maybe if you lose too much for too long your owner has to sell the team?
The current system isn’t good at all, but most NBA managers are morons. Frankly the league isn’t very smart when it comes to strategy. The only plus for the current system is that it is very easy for the NBA to reward and punish franchises via rigging the lottery.
I don't disagree. It's just tough to imagine a solution that would improve on the current system as well as prevent the ability of the league to put their finger on the scale.
They don’t care. They are still getting a shit ton of rev share and the franchise is only going up in value.
Honestly I'll stand by my idea that you give the best odds in the lotto to the best records outside of the playoffs to the worst records. I don't care if the lotto is for the top 4 picks, the top 3 or even the top 2. You just make sure that the worst teams in the league have very little chance of landing the top guy or two or three. Then so bad teams have a chance to get better it goes worst record to best for the rest of the draft. We would probably never see a sub 30 win season again. We would definitely never see blatant tanking again... people can say that teams would tank to get that top spot in the lotto (last spot out of the playoffs) but I just don't see that coming close to hurting the NBA product the way the current incentive to lose the most games possible all season does.
That wouldn’t work either. The tanking would happen in the middle. The 7th & 8th place teams would tank to get into that 9th spot because a chance at Flagg is better than first round date with OKC,
It would only happen at the very very end of the season and that doesn't kill competition like the current system does. There might be teams competing to get out of the play-in but I think more teams would be competing to get up to that level. Right now we have around 10 teams tanking. How many teams would tank to get out of the playoffs and into the lotto??? Especially if it's just the top two picks. You're telling me that a team would miss the playoffs on purpose to get a coinflip chance at moving into the top two with the alternative being that they end up with the 14th pick an no playoffs???
I liked the one I heard about where the odds are determined based on how many wins you have against teams with a better record than you. Every game would be insanely competitive with that system. If you’re the worse team, you want that upset win. If you’re the better team, you don’t want that team to get an upset win.
The solution is, reverse the order of assigning odds. 16 playoff teams not in lottery. 14 lottery teams: best record, best odds of getting 1st pick 2nd best record, 2nd best odds of getting 1st pick • • 2nd worst record, 2nd worse odds of getting 1st pick worst record, worst odds of getting 1st pick Tank at your own peril
Yeah this is what I've been saying and it should be about as heavily weighted as it is now but it doesn't need to be for the first four picks. In fact I'd only make it for the first two picks. That still leaves the team with the worst record in the league as the least likely team to land the 1st or 2nd pick but it does give them the 3rd pick which would hopefully help them get out of that spot as the worst team. Also if we left it weighted about the same just for the first two picks, the best team to miss the playoffs would still only have around a 25% chance of moving up and I don't think a one in four chance of moving up would be worth tanking out of the playoffs.
