Minnesota Sports Forum

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/nba-lottery-reform-is-coming/

I actually sorta like that idea. Keeps teams from having too much incentive to tank, while still giving them more favorable odds.

Screw the lottery completely. It's the worst idea IMO. I think they should scrap the lotto and go off an accumulative record from the past 3+ seasons. If you are terrible 3 years in a row you deserve a high pick. Then teams like the Heat who lose their Superstar for the whole season basically tanking it, don't end up with a super high pick either.

I'm sure the small print goes something like this:

The team from Minnesota's pick will be calculated by the following formula ( Number of quality players available + 1).

Just in time for the Wolves "most recent" rebuilding effort.

Perfect!



[Note: Then again, a more favorable system has NEVER panned out. So, maybe the dart-throwing approach will work better?]

As a Wolves fan from the beginning I hate the lottery maybe it has merit but I still hate it. You would think the NBA could monitor (more so in this day and age) for tanking instead of implimenting a system that ends up screwing some of the bad teams that the top draft picks are supposed to help. Yeah I'm a little bitter rightly so when the Cavs have 2 more #1 overall picks in the past few months than the Wolves have in 25 years. Wolves have screwed up things on their own but they have often had to hope and get lucky and have someone fall to them because they aren't up there for the top guys. We got lucky with KG at #5 or who knows what would have happened with this franchise. Anyway whatever hopefully we can move past needing top 10 picks in the near future. (Crosses fingers)

monsterpile wrote:As a Wolves fan from the beginning I hate the lottery maybe it has merit but I still hate it. You would think the NBA could monitor (more so in this day and age) for tanking instead of implimenting a system that ends up screwing some of the bad teams that the top draft picks are supposed to help. Yeah I'm a little bitter rightly so when the Cavs have 2 more #1 overall picks in the past few months than the Wolves have in 25 years. Wolves have screwed up things on their own but they have often had to hope and get lucky and have someone fall to them because they aren't up there for the top guys. We got lucky with KG at #5 or who knows what would have happened with this franchise. Anyway whatever hopefully we can move past needing top 10 picks in the near future. (Crosses fingers)

Agreed. That's why I think the draft order should be based on combined record from multiple years. It helps counter the 1-2 year tanking.

I think it should straight up be the worse the record that year, the better the pick. You want teams to stop tanking? They never will so long as they get more Ping-Pong balls or get a better chance at a higher pick by losing. The only true way to get rid of that is to pre-determine the draft which would end up making the rich even richer in some instances (could you imagine if the pre-determined system would give a conference finalist a top 3 pick?). The goal should be to give them the players they need to no longer want to tank anymore. I say you just have to cap the number of years they can get a top 5 pick to 3. Then add enough years after the 3rd top 5 pick to make it a decade before you can be eligible again to be in the top 5. Then kick them to the back of the lottery for every year after the 3rd top five pick up to a decade. If you tank for 3 straight years, you then get 7 straight years of picking at the end of the lottery at best. The cap would be set at every decade so the max you could get is 3 top 5 picks in 10 years and it would be a rolling 10 years. The Cavs would not have even been eligible to win the top pick the last 2 years because they didn't have the worst record in the league in any of those years and they automatically would have been kicked to the back of the lottery after the Thompson pick for the next decade starting with the Bennett draft.

Tanking is done in every sport. It's just much more noticeable in a star driven league. To lessen the years a team is in tanking mode I think they just need to set up the lottery in tiers. The top 5 worst records in the league should have one "bowl" of lottery balls, so those 5 teams would be guaranteed to pick no lower than the fifth pick. 6-10 worst records have a separate bowl for the 6-10 picks, and 11-14 for those picks. 15-30 simply go by record. I think that would work just fine. You'd no longer have someone with the 3rd worst record picking 7th, 9th, and 6th in 3 years straight. That's the problem with the lottery. The gutter teams cannot get out of the gutter.

mrhockey89 wrote:http://grantland.com/the-triangle/nba-lottery-reform-is-coming/

I actually sorta like that idea. Keeps teams from having too much incentive to tank, while still giving them more favorable odds.

I do not like this idea one bit. This enables people to perceive the lottery as even more rigged, and it potentially makes the better teams better. Tanking is a last ditch effort for those teams that cannot attract big name free agents to get better. Why not just cut the league in half and continue having the big markets dominate.

khans2k5 wrote:I think it should straight up be the worse the record that year, the better the pick. You want teams to stop tanking? They never will so long as they get more Ping-Pong balls or get a better chance at a higher pick by losing. The only true way to get rid of that is to pre-determine the draft which would end up making the rich even richer in some instances (could you imagine if the pre-determined system would give a conference finalist a top 3 pick?). The goal should be to give them the players they need to no longer want to tank anymore. I say you just have to cap the number of years they can get a top 5 pick to 3. Then add enough years after the 3rd top 5 pick to make it a decade before you can be eligible again to be in the top 5. Then kick them to the back of the lottery for every year after the 3rd top five pick up to a decade. If you tank for 3 straight years, you then get 7 straight years of picking at the end of the lottery at best. The cap would be set at every decade so the max you could get is 3 top 5 picks in 10 years and it would be a rolling 10 years. The Cavs would not have even been eligible to win the top pick the last 2 years because they didn't have the worst record in the league in any of those years and they automatically would have been kicked to the back of the lottery after the Thompson pick for the next decade starting with the Bennett draft.

I see no reason to over complicate things. If you want to make it less beneficial to tank then the most logical way IMO is to take into account that years record as well as the previous 2. So the draft order for non playoff teams is determined by 3 years worth of W/L records. This way it's harder for playoff teams to fall apart/tank and end up with a top pick.

EX: Lets say the best team in the league had 2 aging stars who retired this summer. They decide to trade away a couple other solid vets to start a youth movement. Next year they end up being the worst team, but they won't get the top pick. They'd be more likely to end up with a pick closer to #20. This makes it nearly impossible for teams to quickly tank for a top pick. They'd have to tank for a couple years to have a shot at the #1 pick.