With the tanking job by the Mavs last night. How have they not addressed draft odds and anti-tank measures in the CBA?! Rockets, Spurs & Hornets are now punished as have previous teams in the past, because they think this new system has somehow addressed tanking, but it was just another half ass attempt.
How would you address the problem? The reason worse teams get better draft odds is because the league wants a mechanism in place to increase parity. It is not fun to watch a sport where the great teams stay great and the bad teams stay bad. The draft is the only tool that league has to address this issue without forcing player movement. (Fans also don't like their teams to lose their favorite players just because of arbitrary league rules.) I think the NBA suffers uniquely from this problem because it has small teams and small rosters. Individual draft picks, and therefore draft order, are much more important than in the NFL (seven draft rounds) or MLB (twenty draft rounds). In most other team sports, one player does not make or break the franchise to the degree that it does in the NBA. Sometimes in the NBA draft, you see one player, like a LeBron or Wemby, who can, by himself, completely change the fate of an entire organization. That is not to say the league can't do things better. I do have a few ideas about that. --- 1. Ban pick protections in trades. Pick protections are the reason Dallas tanked instead of going for the play-in. Protections add another layer of "here is an arbitrary threshold, lose exactly this many games to avoid it". I don't think this is good for the league. If you wanted to get even more extreme, you could ban trading first round picks or first-round rookies entirely. I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing to force teams to build through the draft and make it harder to constantly shuffle stars around the league. 2. Base the draft order on a random sample of a team's games, not their overall record. For example, choose 20 games at random from each team's season, then base the draft order on those records. Teams would never know whether any individual game would impact their draft position, so there would be much less reason to intentionally rest players at the end of the season when teams are battling for playoff position. 3. Make the draft order be based on recent history, not just one season. The goal of basing the draft order on teams' records is to increase long-term parity. So maybe it would make more sense to help the teams that have been bad lately than teams that have been bad just this season. For example, you could look at a team's last three years and use their overall record during that time to help determine their position in the draft. This would reduce instances of teams that are already good but "not good enough" sitting their players to improve draft position for just one year. This idea would work well in tandem with the "random sample of games" idea above. Maybe you take a random selection of 34 games from this season, 26 games from last season, and 22 games from the season before that (total: 82) and use the resulting record to determine draft order. In this kind of system, the Mavs probably wouldn't have chosen to rest their starters, given that their records the prior two seasons were in the top 5 in the West. --- I don't think stuff like this would solve the problem. Bad teams with meager rosters will still tank because they have no other way to get better, and I don't see any other realistic solution to the problem that doesn't cause other, worse side effects. (Some people have suggested relegation, but I don't see that as realistic, the owners would never go for it). However, you can probably reduce the instances of teams actively manipulating their records on a game-to-game basis by resting starters and intentionally losing specific games, and make "tanking" more of a front office roster-building strategy than something that affects basketball in terms of night-to-night decisionmaking.
Another note... stop punishing teams for making the playoffs. Have it be purely based on W-L record (or a randomly-selected sample of games as I mentioned above). The draft lottery influencing playoff brackets is clearly the thing that fans hate the most.
get rid of the draft, everyone is a free agent. and only 1 max contract allowed per team, with the next biggest contract is mle. other players can earn more monies thru performance incentives
The NBA is extremely competitive on a nightly basis. It’s only really a few NBA teams, Rockets included, that designed their rosters to be inexperienced as part of a plan to get highest odds possible at getting the top pick. So I would argue the league has mostly solved their tanking problem. However, Adam Silver should step in and investigate why teams like the Mavs sit their star players and fine them picks for intentionally trying to lose games. You can’t completely eliminate tanking, but I think the lottery is a good way to discourage teams from going that route since the pick you get becomes a literal crap shoot. Even the top pick could be a bust and in recent years the best players have been taken later in the first round rather than in the top 4.
There will always be teams like the Lakers, Celtics, Miami, Golden States. For every Dallas, Toronto, Detroit, Houston championship the Lakers win another 3. Kudos to Pop and the Spurs in their small market setting. Just like in the world there are whales, 'parity' only exists temporarily. It's a figment of our imagination in these times!
Are you guys referring to this season? Tanking is at an all time low, IMO. The play in has pushed all these teams around the 9/10 place into thinking they have a chance and pushing others to fight hard to get top 6 seeding to avoid the play in. The mavs just started tanking right here at the end of the season. Prior to the play in they would have packed it in far sooner. 10+ years ago we'd be watching have the league fall over themselves for a chance at Wemby. It was top 8 seed or bust. Now, there's really only a few all season tankers with a few more later in the year.
NBA released a statement saying they're going to investigate but what is there to investigate ? All they have to do is listen to Kidd's press conference before the game.
I have suggested your #3 in the past. A 3-year history sounds reasonable. Someone argued that it would encourage more tanking because teams would make sure they didn't "inadvertently" win too many games in one of the three seasons. But I would counter argue that continuously tanking for three straight years is punishment enough for a team to lose intentionally. Also, it is much harder to predict which top prospects would be available three years down the road instead of just one year. And to combine with your #1, banning trading picks within three years may add more teeth.
So then past seasons would impact how much picks are worth in trades right? Somewhat hard to understand that impact in regards to trades. Interesting idea though.
Yeah, the value of picks would be harder to predict. That would minimize the incentive to lose intentionally. But it would still help the truly struggling teams to rebuild. It would also prevent good teams that had one bad season because of injuries to get a high pick (like the '19-'20 Warriors).
How would drafting work then? I thought in europe the soccer team go and recruit/farm system. With relegation, the small team would never b able to recruit talented players. G-league pales in comparison to the farm/club system, where they scout the youngsters and invested heavily into them.
It's fine to talk about relegation but you know the owners would never let that happen. No owner will risk their team getting relegated when they don't have to, and they have all the power. So unless you get Congress to pass a law mandating a new system for the NBA (good luck with that one), we're stuck with the current framework, I think.
We essentially have a relegation system now with top 20 teams in the playoffs and play ins except the ones that don't make it just idling.
