They should do it live like the UEFA Champions League group drawings or the World Cup group drawings.
Did you ever stop to think that it's a little suspect that after Cavaliers lose Lebron, they land #1 (Kyrie Irving) and now after Hornets lose CP3, they get #1 (Anthony Davis)? Not straight out calling a conspiracy theory but you can't help but notice the convenience of it all. People are suspicious around the league. They just can't come out to the media and outright say it. Think about what happened to JVG when he called out the unfair reffing of Yao during the playoffs? The NBA doesn't tolerate anything that will put its reputation in a bad light or as they say "questions the integrity of the game". Exactly. This should have been done a long time ago TBH.
Do you guys believe that the NBA rigged the 2002 lottery for the Rockets, who won the #1 pick with a 8.9% probability of winning?
The executives from the teams get to see the actual process. So is the belief that the executives are all part of the conspiracy against their own interests? If not, showing the current lottery ball process wouldn't help anything. And it's not very compelling TV - it's not like you have lottery balls with the team logo on them and everyone cheers when the pick is made. You pick 4 random numbers which mean nothing until you look at a chart of numbers to see who's pick that is.
Many people believe even those are rigged and that their are tiny marks or something on the balls so that the favourites don't play eachother in the quarters.
I don't play games in Vegas because they don't need to be rigged for you to lose. When expectations are below 1 (and mostly 0.8-0.9) then you're just asking for it to gamble against the house. Its the same thing as the Texas lotto: a tax against the stupid. In the end the NBA is entertainment. David Stern is banking on the fact that people will ignore the legitimacy concerns in favor of the pure entertainment value of watching superstars clash. So far financially he's been right. In the slow grind of the industry though I would argue that his management has been the direct cause of the NBA falling to a clear third in the ranks of big sports leagues in the US. It's not completely about parity, but it also cannot be a sideshow to showcase your shoe company sponsors either.
If you believe the execs are part of it all, then why even bother watching the NBA? If your own team isn't interested in excelling and isn't doing everything to get better, why care at all?
There were a ton of teams that if they won it, everyone would have been screaming conspiracy. Brooklyn - Just awarding it to them cuz they moved to NY and need to keep DWill or trade for Howard. If it was rigged at least give them a top 3 pick so they didnt have to lose it all together. NO- obviously everyone already talking about it Charlotte- doing a favor for MJ cuz he is a legend and that franchise needs help Cleveland - ensuring a quick rebuild following the Lebron debacle At the end of the day, if the lotto was rigged, NY would have won it a lot more times. The league needs them to be good and they have sucked forever. How does the league benefit from sending Yao to Houston, Oden to Portland, Duncan to SA, Shaq to Orlando, or Lebron to Cleveland (hometown story excluded). Those are all smaller TV markets. Yao would have done a lot more for NBA marketing if he was in Chicago, NY, LA, or Golden State. Like someone said before, does Anthony Davis being in NO really mean massive gains for the NBA.
I don't believe it was rigged... though had NJ/Brooklyn gotten the 2 or 3 behind New Orleans, I might have wondered. The problem isn't that the league is actually rigging lotteries, it's that the league's actions and arrogance make it very difficult to think New Orleans could win legitimately. NO WAY the league should have been in ownership control of one of their franchises. NO WAY should the league have the power to approve/reject trades at the league level as owners. NO WAY should the league have the ability to decide where one of the best players in the league is traded to. NO WAY should the league have the power to assign the best draft picks to teams that they own. They created an environment where impropriety and conflict of interest could exist, and there isn't transparency. It doesn't matter if it actually existed or not -- their actions created a ton of mistrust with their fans. Stern needs to go yesterday.
Uhh.. It's makes it more compelling TV than this crap: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EH1eq_l2u30" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Where they just read the "results" in inverse draft order. A live drawing, with the same 14 ping pong balls and the computers we have available today, viewers would instantly be able to see the "teams in the running" and the teams that are "eliminated" as each ball is revealed. They could zoom in on the representatives of 3 or 4 teams as the last 1 or 2 balls are revealed to see their reactions - live. Like I said, that would make for more compelling TV than that crap in the video I embedded. Most importantly, it adds to the transparency of the whole process.
Yes, if it's rigged, it is by conspiracy. Even if they good rig the ping pong balls, they need a conspiracy to do that. If it's rigged, the owners all know and implicitly or explicitly consent. It's possible this one is rigged and the others were not. I tend to think the lottery is not rigged, in general. For all the owners to go along with it they have to sooner or later be the beneficiary. Can you imagine someone like Mark Cuban going along with it if he didn't see the payoff? Even then, he'd probably be making a big stink. So, if you rig it one year to pay off Cleveland, you have to rig it every year. And, some team has to wait 30 years to get the benefit. And, when it's finally his turn, some other sad-sack team will really need it that year because their hometown hero died in a terror plot or something and cuts in line. Not likely owners are going to be cool with that. A recurring rigged lottery is too much to be believed. But just one year. This year every owner owns the Hornets. So, if they negotiated a #1 pick with the Hornets' buyer, it's baked into the sales price. In that scenario, it's like every owner won the lottery this year. It's possible to have a conspiracy where no owner will complain. The mechanics of the process still seem to make it impossible, but the motivation is all there this year.
i don't understand how it contradicts that. some of the comments from executives sounded like they were skeptical of the hornets winning the lottery...one commented that it was ridiculous to have the bensons there when they didn't even own the team yet.
No. The owners might have an interest in giving the #1 pick to NO. The execs would not because it doesn't hit their pocketbooks, and might not even know about the collusion.
