Draft Lottery idea?

[Crazysauce]

I hear you but the thing is thats no different than any year in the draft. If theres only three players in the draft pick 4 through rest will get stuck. And because you didnt get a true star in your 6 pick you would likely get an early pick from 7-12 in those same 6 years so you cant classify anything as a death sentence. Hell we have had 8 top ten picks in the past ten or so years and havent sniffed the playoffs. 16 teams make the playoffs. Also teams hit all the time on late round picks. If you dont draft well you dont play well. We have missed on so many picks while teams behind us have picked up stars. And one thing you vastly underrate is the ability to trade picks for actual value. Easier to deal a pick when you know the exact selection of it. Facilitates much more trading.

The absolute truth is your system doesnt fix tanking at all so what would be the purpose of switching to any of these other systems. I dont want to switch for the fact to say we switched. I want it fixed. Is a wheel perfect, no. But I would much rather a wheel with no tanking than some different version of a lottery that will never stop any tanking. Tanking ruins the game and frankly I am sick of watching it.

[Crazysauce]

I think the only way to solve tanking at the bottom is to fully randomize the results, but then you could have a bad team stay bad for years because of bad luck. You limit that by completely randomizing the lottery in different pools of bad teams so nobody can jump too high or too low, but also it takes away the reason to pile on losses at the end of the year for more lottery balls because it wouldn't make a difference in your chances.

That's why I think you still want to rank the pick chances for 1-5 and 6-10. Something like 30% for the worst team in each bracket and 10% for the best. (30, 25, 20, 15, 10).

To combat true tanking they should average 2 years worth of standings (at least for teams who had much better records the previous year) to even out those random extreme outliers tanking seasons.

Any time your record is involved in determining the order of the draft tanking will exist. Thats all there is to it. It is reality.

[khans2k5 [enjin:6608728]]

I hear you but the thing is thats no different than any year in the draft. If theres only three players in the draft pick 4 through rest will get stuck. And because you didnt get a true star in your 6 pick you would likely get an early pick from 7-12 in those same 6 years so you cant classify anything as a death sentence. Hell we have had 8 top ten picks in the past ten or so years and havent sniffed the playoffs. 16 teams make the playoffs. Also teams hit all the time on late round picks. If you dont draft well you dont play well. We have missed on so many picks while teams behind us have picked up stars. And one thing you vastly underrate is the ability to trade picks for actual value. Easier to deal a pick when you know the exact selection of it. Facilitates much more trading.

The absolute truth is your system doesnt fix tanking at all so what would be the purpose of switching to any of these other systems. I dont want to switch for the fact to say we switched. I want it fixed. Is a wheel perfect, no. But I would much rather a wheel with no tanking than some different version of a lottery that will never stop any tanking. Tanking ruins the game and frankly I am sick of watching it.

There aren't stars up and down the draft though. There are rotation guys, but how many stars have been taken out of the top 10? Compare that to the guys in the top 10 and it's not close. The difference is in the current system if a team whiffs they can recover immediately, not every 5th year. The wheel eliminates tanking, but it will result in just as many bad teams only they have less ammunition with the wheel to do anything about it so you are just stuck with flat out bad basketball which is just as bad as tanking. You're joking yourself if you truly believe that it doesn't matter where you draft in the first round because there is always a good enough player available to possibly change your franchise's future for the better. The wheel creates just as many problems as the current lottery tanking is causing.

[TheGrey08]

The wheel doesn't work for 1 gigantic reason. Top teams do not need or deserve high draft picks. Certain teams are almost always near the top of the league and the wheel would give them more top picks than they would otherwise get.

Think about teams who are in the playoffs 10-15 years straight. The Spurs for example have not drafted higher than pick 20 since taking Duncan #1 in 1997. Most of their picks have been 28-30 (they traded some too, but usually finished top 2 of their division. Link below). Would you want to see them getting top 5, 10 or even 15 picks when they are that good already? I sure as hell wouldn't.
http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/SAS/draft.html

While I think tanking exists somewhat, I also think people make it out to be a much bigger problem than it really is. If a team wants to constantly turn their talent into picks like the Sixers then so be it. Bad teams deserve high picks. I just don't want to see good teams having a random tanking year and ending up with a high pick. If you take into account and averaging the record for 2 or 3 years (for the non playoff teams at least) then it makes it MUCH harder to land a top pick unless you really are bad. Especially if you change the lotto to being tiers or only allowing teams to move up or down a few spots.

Look at the standings this year. Who is truly egregiously tanking?
Knicks are bad, but did shut down Melo which is a little questionable.
Lakers are bad, and Kobe is old & had to be shut down.
Sixers are young/bad.
Magic are young/bad.
Wolves are young/bad/heavily injured. If it wasn't for the bad injury history of the 3 main players I'd peg them as the 1 team truly tanking, but their recent records show they've been bad.

[Crazysauce]

But now you just stretched it to top ten. You would get a top 12 pick 2 of every five years. I think of late picks like Vucevic, Leonard, Faried, Bledsoe, Lawson, Holiday, D. Jordan. You can grab quality guys later. Top notch franchise guys? No, usually thats the top pick or two. But how many times have the wolves picked number one overall? Tim Duncans and Anthony Davis are not in every draft. Unfortunately there is no perfect solution.

And the teams that have been at the top have got some of those franchise guys. Lakers got Kobe who is on his last leg and now they are struggling. Spurs tanked and got Duncan. Most teams got there star or franchise guy through the draft. The reason the teams are good and stayed cause they had a transcendant or top notch franchise guy when he came into the league, or they have really good drafts always or if your the spurs you had both. But to get there they had there top overall pick twice. Watching the Knicks and Lakers has to tell you the big market deal isnt that big of deal as you think it is. They get there top pick and get a superstar they will be back in. Maybe Silver can draw a cold Laker envelope this year. Lotteries dont work.

And teams may be bad, but that doesnt mean they dont tank. There are teams that are bad, they shut it down though to make sure they dont win to get the elusive top pick. It really ruins the game and thats the part I just hate. Dont think we will ever see eye to eye but I want to see great basketball. And if that team picks horribly and ends up with a bad team what is the difference from doing it in the wheel or doing it in the draft like we have the last ten years? You draft bad you are going to be bad.

[TheGrey08]

I didn't stretch anything to 10. I gave an example why it simply would not work. It would actually make things worse overall. That example still stands and there hasn't been anything stated that counters that. Instead of this Spurs team drafting 28-30 most of these years they would have had picks much higher than that nearly every year making them even better.

Looking at the wheel draft idea in a vacuum.. sure it would give parity, but Free Agency is a big deal where parity goes out the window. In fact FA hurts parity in the NBA as bad as any other sport b/c it's such a star driven league. Stars gravitate together, to bigger cities, warmer climates, etc (not all, but some). All the wheel system would do is prevent tanking while significantly helping the best teams who are able to stay at the top for several years. The chance of them getting a much much better pick than their record would have given them is very high. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer in that scenario.

The big markets are a big deal these days b/c they are attractive to some of the top stars. It would not surprise me for a second if Love opted out and jumped ship to the Lakers this summer. The Lakers got Kobe via trade and he was drafted 13th. He then attracted Shaq, etc.

I don't think I would call the Spurs a tank job. Robinson went down after 6 games, Elliott played 39 and the rest of that roster wasn't that great. It was a bad year and the Spurs got lucky. It's like this year for the Wolves only our situation is even worse since we had even more players go down.

The fact is going off record works in every other sport. The NBA just needs to tweak their lottery a little so teams can't get extremely lucky. The best picks need to be for the worst teams.

[Crazysauce]

The 10 was referring to khans post first of all. I dont think the big markets are as big a deal as just being able to win. Yes I know Kobe "technically" wasnt drafted by the lakers but the guy played every single game as a laker. The traded the pick not the player. I could care less about any draft day trade. Fact is he was drafted later than a typical franchise guy would go cause it was unknown he would be as good as he is.

Why have the knicks sucked as long as they have. They are a big market? San Antonio isnt exactly a hot spot for athletes to go. Why do they keep winning? It all comes down to smart decisions by the gms and decision makers.

I just want a system that puts tanking to an end completely. Thats why I want the wheel.

[TheGrey08]

To be fair, Kobe was drafted that low b/c he was a High Schooler. A Kobe talent in today's NBA wouldn't slip anywhere near 13.

The Knicks have sucked despite having the big market advantage largely due to the front office, not putting the right guys together, etc. Melo also pushed his way to NYC specifically. Yes, front office decision making is big, but that doesn't mean we should ignore all other factors. The Spurs keep winning b/c they have a legendary coach, great unselfish players, their front office makes more good moves than bad ones and they were also lucky. All of those things are factors. Why would we want to make it even easier on them?

Getting rid of tanking is not worth making the league even more imbalanced by helping out the top teams. What teams legitimately tanked this year?

[Monster]

If you care so much about good basketball tell the NBA to shorten the season to 50-60 games. That will never happen because $$$. The other way to make the game better is have a true minor league system so you can develop you talent so it's more ready when you put it out on the court. When I talk to people about basketball and they say they are not a fan of the NBA I can't blame tem some of the games are just terrible and that's in the first half of the season when tanking really hasn't come into play. I think there are bigger issues for making the league better than the tankig issue which like Grey says I think it's made out to be a lot bigger problem than it really is. The lottery sure hasn't been kind to this franchise so maybe it's working? Lol

[Spfelx [enjin:13218936]]

I agree with crazysauce in that any system that counts your record in determining the draft will promote tanking. That's why I suggested an alternate way of determine how the games are counted for the draft. Let teams tank if they want to but just don't count the tanked games for draft position. If there's no benefit, teams will stop doing it.
One problem with a wheel system however is that you might be six or seven years into it and find out that it just doesn't work either but to be fair, you would be stuck with it for 30 years.