They did trade 2 first rounders each to Cleveland and Toronto. That's besides the point. I agree with your premise, adn think a compensation sort of system would be very interesting. Either a team giving up a pick, or maybe just a sandwich pick. Difficulty is, it could cause teams to not look to spend money in free agency, because signing a decent player if you are a lottery team is not likely worth losing your pick. But, th epick with that player could push you over the top and into the playoffs.
First round picks are a lot more valuable in the NFL. Almost no player is viewed as worth two first round picks. In the NBA, I think any team would trade two first round picks for a superstar. So, it's not necessarily a bad thing, for parity, to compensate the team losing a player...but I don't think it would be anywhere near as powerful a disincentive in the NBA. It would be more akin to the MLB compensation system...it's not a great outcome and really doesn't dissuade teams from signing premium free agents (though it does dissuade teams from signing second/third tier guys sometimes), but it's a bit of benefit to the team losing players.
well even just this year, julio jones was essentially traded for more than two #1 picks, also jay cutler fetched a few as well....i think more often, any player worth that much is not available in the first place. what also drives down prices alot of times is that teams are basically forced to get rid of players in the nfl because of the hard cap, lowering their leverage.
Hypothetically, Bird Rights are much more valuable for proven players than a franchise tag. A franchise designation would put a team like Portland in a worse position than it is now if the accompanying unrestricted free agency that the NFL has followed it. No thanks.
Not in their current CBA. The NFL's draft/contract structure is so out of scale that a high pick that doesn't pan out can cripple a franchise for years against the cap. At least in the NBA, a rookie-contract failure (in terms of on-court production) such as Greg Oden can be offset by the relatively low cost of his rookie contract. As a Raider fan, JaMarcus Russell's deal killed the franchise for four years because of the money guaranteed to him.
By the "draft pick value chart," picks in the future get devalued, so a first round pick next year is worth a current second rounder and a first round pick two years in the future is worth a current third rounder. It's pretty rare that anyone gives up two first rounders for the current year, from what I can remember. And even a first rounder this year and first rounder next year is pretty rare, though certainly not unheard of. You're talking about how you value NFL first round picks. What I was saying is that NFL teams seem to value them much higher based on how rarely they trade multiple first rounders (in terms of current year value). Even one first rounder gets traded less commonly in the NFL than in the NBA.
There is much more diversity in player types in the NFL over the NBA. The NBA is basically about 3 or 4 body types. The NFL is about multiple body types, with multiple schemes, for about 10 different positions. The added bonus in the NFL is that mid-first picks can actually be better for average teams than a top pick for a bad team. It does take one player to turn around an NBA franchise, but outside of Brandon Roy, who is the last multiple All-Star player on a winning team that was drafted outside of the Top 3 picks in the past five years?
These are good reasons for why NFL teams value first rounders more and I essentially agree with you. For a number of reasons, the draft is more essential to NFL teams because they need more players. More specialized roles (you can swap perimeter players through roles or play a natural PF at center, but it's harder to swap a linebacker into a safety role, let alone a wide receiver role), more good players required to win, more units necessary for a variety of schemes. My point was simply that draft pick bounties on free agent signings are a significantly more powerful disincentive to sign away another team's free agent in the NFL than the NBA. You'll never see an NFL team sell a first round pick for cash (if such a thing is even allowed by rules...but even if it were, no team would consider doing it).
