Seniors tour 3 on 3 half court. I've wanted this for a long time. Make games double headers and have the seniors game open.
What sort of order does increase/ decrease go in though? We had a big jump, does that mean we stay after teams like SA and OKC that have smaller jumps?
My thought was that changes to the draft won't really affect tanking. What you need is a financial incentive. If you make a big jump in wins, you are immune from paying the luxury tax. If you have a big increase in losses, you aren't eligible for a pay-out from the fund. The current system just takes money from big spenders and redistributes it to the lowest payroll teams. There may not be a one-to-one relationship between low payroll and tanking - but it is certainly a strong factor. Tanking to grab an increased piece of the revenue sharing pie won't be discouraged by changes to the draft.
Right on, sorry I misinterpreted your post, and thought option b was not related for some reason. Makes sense.
I like the idea that the teams with the worst two or three records aren't in the lottery at all. That would keep things VERY competitive for all 30 teams right up to the last night of the season. And fans of bad teams would have something to root for.
Stealing off of Simmons idea from a while ago, 14 team, single elimination tournament before the playoffs. 4 rounds, give playoff teams 5 days off before start, 3 games in a row, day off, then championship game. Only determines top 4 picks, so final four are the top 4 picks in the Draft, rest based on record. So still some incentive to tank a little, as worst team still guaranteed 5th pick. But perhaps less incentive to field awful rosters, as a team like Phoenix last season could very easily have gotten the top pick.
Yeah I'm down... though I'd also pair that with a true Best-Of-16 playoff so that there's a chance "good" teams in the East can actually get out of their mediocrity hole.
Eliminating East West playoffs you mean? I can get down with that. I'm sure dividing the country up for playoffs made sense a long time ago, but with days off in between, going back and forth from say Portland to Chicago isn't that huge of a deal really
Yep. I also think that, if we're going to have two tournaments, let's make sure the right team is in the right tourney. One is for the best teams, and one is for the rest. Charlotte is much better served being in the rest tourney rather than the best tourney, so they'd want it this way too.
Maybe so, but an owner might not be as in to passing on 2 games of playoff revenue. But I do think it should be open. Not conference split.
I also don't agree that "parity" is great for the league. I love watching the playoffs. Why? Because you generally get great players playing greatly against other great players. If, say, PHI or SAC didn't get a high lotto pick this year (or CLE, ffs), I wouldn't cry too much. I liked it when ORL got Shaq and Webber back to back. (trading for Penny and a few firsts probably helped). I like it when a "mediocre" team gets another piece to make them great, and I like to see it in terms of drafting (and keeping for most of a decade), rather than slung-together "Big Threes". Imagine if some of the non-contending teams (say, #6 seeds to 20th-worst teams) had had a shot at the Durants, Walls, Roses, Loves, etc over the last few years...would UTH have had to give up Deron, or Melo go to the Knicks, if there had been another young star on the team? I'd like to see more of that than dumb teams make dumb picks. (No offense, Rubes, but MIN crapping away multiple lottos in a row makes me not give a rip if they get a lotto ever again).
IMO, parity isn't the ideal, the potential for upward mobility is. It's fine if any given year, some teams have no hope, some teams are amazing and the rest are basically just playoff contenders of varying strength. But you want some amount of churn to the league, where the best teams don't stay the best for too long, the worst don't stay the worst for too long and the league landscape changes significantly over time. The current draft system is better than giving the best picks to the best teams, but it's still not great for achieving my preferred goal because franchise-changing players only exist in a few drafts per decade by and large. A draft situation that pushed the best picks into the middle-class of the NBA would be interesting. It would put the onus on the bad teams to get to decent "on their own," but going from bad to mediocre isn't the hard part by and large, so that seems okay. Once you get there, you get your chances at the franchise-changing player who can take you from decent to contender. That way, every team is striving to get better: bad teams want to reach decent so they can get their top-pick shot and decent teams want to push forward into championship-caliber after collecting their top pick. It's still not perfect...you might get teams that want to sit right in the center of the NBA for a few years to get three top picks, but that's a lot harder to calibrate than just bottoming out, plus at least no one is trying to put a terrible product on the court.
