OT Stan Van Gundy Says He'd Get Rid of NBA Draft, Make Rookies Enter as Free Agents

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/...f-nba-draft-make-rookies-enter-as-free-agents


Carlos Osorio/Associated Press
NBA owners recently passed draft lottery reform to try to eliminate tanking, but Detroit Pistons head coach Stan Van Gundy doesn't believe that step was drastic enough.

Speaking to reporters Friday, Van Gundy stated that if the league truly wants to eliminate tanking, it should abolish the draft, do away with the rookie salary scale and make all incoming players free agents.

"I'd get rid of it, just get rid of the draft altogether," Van Gundy said. "We'd just deal with the salary cap. Make all [rookies] free agents coming in, and if I want to go give a guy $50 million a year, good, but I got to do it under the cap."

Van Gundy added that if rookies became free agents, he thinks it would open the door for small-market teams to offer more money than those residing in big-market destinations, which would help the league's parity problem.

"They say everybody would want to go to L.A," Van Gundy said. "Well, how much money are they going to give up to go to those places?"

Van Gundy also suggested the NBA could level the playing field by eliminating max contracts.

"I think if you did that and you had no individual max on players, we'd start to get some parity in the league, but the league really doesn't want parity," he said, per the Detroit Free Press' Vince Ellis. "They want the superteams, and I get that. It's worked well, business-wise."

As far as the new rules are concerned, the NBA's Board of Governors passed new legislation Thursday that adjusted the lottery odds. Now, the teams with the three worst records at season's end will each have a 14 percent chance at securing the No. 1 overall pick.

The team with the worst record previously owned a 25 percent shot, while the second- and third-worst records had 19.9 and 15.6 percent odds of landing the top selection. Furthermore, the lottery draw will now include the top four teams, as opposed to the top three under the old guidelines.

It would never happen but this is actually a good idea. It would cause teams like GS and OKC to not be able to afford star rookies.

It sounds stupid on the surface, but it does make quite a bit of sense.

On the other hand, GSW built their superteam with under-valued rookies, free agents, and trades. SVG's proposal would make it tough to restock in the future when the core eventually breaks up, but I'm not sure it would have any hindsight effect on the team as it currently stands.

I just think about what it's like to be a fan of a really crappy team, the only thing you have to look forward to is the draft. Crappy teams rarely ever win the FA battle (unless it's a mega market).

Under this plan, the bad teams would end up dealing out mega contracts to attract rookies and the vast majority wouldn't live up to their deals, so they'd just sink even lower.

We would never get a star player again. Might as well pack it up if that were to happen.

If you need an engineering degree to qualify as an Engineer today, Why isn't a basketball degree require to qualify as a professional Basketball player?

MarAzul said:

If you need an engineering degree to qualify as an Engineer today, Why isn't a basketball degree require to qualify as a professional Basketball player?

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This is..... a silly question.

Natebishop3 said:

We would never get a star player again. Might as well pack it up if that were to happen.

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Hiring the best coach would make a hell of a difference.

Natebishop3 said:

This is..... a silly question.

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Why silly?

MarAzul said:

Why silly?

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Because you can count on one hand the number of professions that require a specific degree.

MarAzul said:

Why silly?

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Because

A) College is a joke for most professions

B) Are you going to be the one to tell Kobe or Kevin Garnett or Moses Malone that they needed a college degree?

I will, selfishly, object to this idea, because I absolutely love watching the NBA Draft on a Thursday in late June.

Natebishop3 said:

Because

A) College is a joke for most professions

B) Are you going to be the one to tell Kobe or Kevin Garnett or Moses Malone that they needed a college degree?

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What makes them special? Why the different standard?

MarAzul said:

What makes them special? Why the different standard?

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Because most professions don't have leagues where you can go and prove your worth. An engineer needs a piece of paper to show he knows his shit because there's no other way to prove to employers that he's a worthy candidate. A pro athlete can join a league, whether it's high school or college or a minor league, and show that they're better than anyone else on the court. They can show in workouts. They can show in combines. There's also way more professional engineers than there are professional basketball players. A piece of paper wouldn't tell an NBA team anything.

You were in the military, did you have a college degree?

You served with officers that had college degrees, did that degree automatically make them good at their job?

Oden would have got like 30 million a year.

Ummm, nah.

3RA1N1AC said:

Oden would have got like 30 million a year.

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From the Bulls or Pacers.

Major league baseball has an interesting system to International Fee Agency that might work. Every team gets a slotted amount based on previous years record. There is no draft for the players outside North America and Puerto Rico so they can sign with any team within the slotted amount. The rules are that you can only trade for a certain amount over your limit and if you try to sign players being that cap you lose your entire pool next year. It was just instituted this signing period but I have heard of no major issues.

ripcityboy said:

Major league baseball has an interesting system to International Fee Agency that might work. Every team gets a slotted amount based on previous years record. There is no draft for the players outside North America and Puerto Rico so they can sign with any team within the slotted amount. The rules are that you can only trade for a certain amount over your limit and if you try to sign players being that cap you lose your entire pool next year. It was just instituted this signing period but I have heard of no major issues.

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Wait until the Ohtani post coming up in about 2 months...

BrianFromWA said:

Wait until the Ohtani post coming up in about 2 months...

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Damnit! Lay off Mariner's fans. He's ours! No seriously though, hes the best Japanese player since Ichiro. His highlights are incredible. Two way pitching/hitting talent is once in a generation. Oh well, back to basketball.

The new MLB system is a hard cap. Teams can't go over it.

The old system was a soft cap with penalties, if you exceeded it, you weren't able to sign players for more than 300k. The Red Sox got in trouble for circumventing it by signing multiple players with the same agent and funneling top players more money through them.

ripcityboy said:

Damnit! Lay off Mariner's fans. He's ours! No seriously though, hes the best Japanese player since Ichiro. His highlights are incredible. Two way pitching/hitting talent is once in a generation. Oh well, back to basketball.

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It's funny you say that....normally I'd totally agree with you, except that two of the top 4 picks in this year's draft and a couple of minor leaguers are all pitched (no pun intended) as being potential 2-way players. But the difference is that Otani's done that.

BrianFromWA said:

It's funny you say that....normally I'd totally agree with you, except that two of the top 4 picks in this year's draft and a couple of minor leaguers are all pitched (no pun intended) as being potential 2-way players. But the difference is that Otani's done that.

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There a difference between Otani and Hunter Greene. Otani hasn't been forced to pick one and had continued that development at a high level. I think Greene will be up there with Madison Bumgarner with hitting ability for a pitcher, but I don't see his upside as high as Otani. There was another good two way player the Braves signed but I can't remember the name.

Natebishop3 said:

A piece of paper wouldn't tell an NBA team anything.

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umm, it can't be worse than what the Blazers have been using for the past 40 years.

But you know this has nothing to do with it. They quit making players stick for four years because it would be discriminating against the poor boys.

MarAzul said:

If you need an engineering degree to qualify as an Engineer today, Why isn't a basketball degree require to qualify as a professional Basketball player?

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Not to take this all OT but you want our basketball players to have degrees but not our police?

MarAzul said:

umm, it can't be worse than what the Blazers have been using for the past 40 years.

But you know this has nothing to do with it. They quit making players stick for four years because it would be discriminating against the poor boys.

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Personally, I don't understand the one-year-in-after HS class rule. There was an article (I think 538, but maybe ESPN--I'll find it) that guessed about the time LeBron would've been the #1 pick. IIRC a case could have been made for when he was 15 or 16.

If you could play golf or tennis or act at 12, I don't know why you couldn't play ball at 12, if you could play. Not a lot of 12y/o's would, I'd imagine.

EDIT: It was from a Pelton mailbag:

...
I wouldn't actually put too much stock in these but it seems plausible that as a sophomore in high school, James could have played replacement-level basketball as a little-used reserve. Anyway, we can use these estimates to show how many WARP James had in his first seven seasons as compared to the best available player in each draft before 2003. (Remember, we've got perfect hindsight here so Pau Gasol is going ahead of Kwame Brown in 2001, for example.)
You could probably still make a case for taking James over Elton Brand in 1999, given you would have gotten two years of top-five play from James before he left, but he would have basically been just taking up a roster spot the first two or three years.

By the 2000 draft, after James' freshman year, that's down to a year or two on the bench and you're getting three years of elite play from James. In an average draft, that's probably enough to take him No. 1. As compared to the abomination that was the 2000 draft, that's a no-brainer. So I would conclude James should have been the No. 1 pick of any of the three drafts before he was actually eligible.

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The point of the draft is to try to make the league more even, talent-wise. Bad teams get good picks and get better.

I think it better to leave it the way it is and get rid of the cap.

I haven't done the analysis yet, but an interesting question would be "where is the knee in the revenue sharing curve between parity productivity and ROI depreciation?"

For instance, LAL may not mind kicking in luxury tax, even at a 3x rate, if they can get LeBron, Russ and PG13 next year. They may not even mind kicking in $10M of their TV rights money to, say, MIL to keep things even. But at some point, they're going to say "whyTF should I keep subsidizing some small market team that's just stealing a good player or two every once in a while instead of making the big money if we had 20-24 really good teams in the league?"

Colleges should pay their players, too. There's no advantage that I can see to being anal about amateur status. The players bring in the fans who pay for tickets and make the university money. TV contracts, too.

If they paid well enough, the kids might even stay in college and finish with a degree.