Kinda like "jerk mode" picking up women then. Not honorable, not anything to be proud about, but its what works If a team is out of the playoff picture after 55 games in they should have an automatic 30% ticket price markdown when its against another team out of the playoffs. Wont happen but it should in principle
I don't see what the big deal is. There's always a few teams that "tank" every year and finally they will end up with a nice lottery pick and hopefully their fortunes change. However, I don't think a lot of teams are purposely tanking though. Some of the teams just really suck that bad. Example: Cleveland a perennial loser before they "tanked" and landed Lebron James. To a lesser extent Orlando Magic with Dwight Howard. You can call it tanking if you want but I consider it "catching up" with other teams in terms of talent because teams like the Miami Heat really are that bad. I bet if the Heat land Derek Rose next year and Beasley goes to the Bucks those two teams if healthy will definitely be competitive in the East and wont be tanking anymore.
JVG's solution will fix this. Team with the best record from all the teams that didn't make the playoffs gets the most ping-pong balls.
Have to disagree. Then it would be a hell of a lot better to get 9th seed then the 8th seed. Why get to the playoff to play a dominant 1 seed when you can have the likes of Lebron James the following year? Besides, that wasn't JVG's solution. JVG suggested all lottery teams get the same amount of balls. That makes sense to me and I actually think that's the best solution. As it is, tanking is a crap shoot in the reward department. 1.) The worst team only has a 25% chance...that's not that much comparing to, say, the fifth worst team. So why bother tanking and alienate the fans if all you get is a 25% chance? Look at Portland and Seattle last year -- they ended up with the first and second pick and they seriously didn't try to tank. 2.) If a team has a crappy GM who can't evaluate talent, it doesn't matter where they pick. Houston got Carl Landry in the second round. Landry is one of the top 5 rookies this year. Would you rather have Landry or Corey Brewer? A team actually tanked for Brewer. The Rockets, meanwhile, went to the postseason, then drafted very well. So who cares if teams tank? In the end, it means nothing. It's an illusion, just like girls going for jerks. I know plenty of nice guys with nice girls.
So that means a team like Portland and Golden State could end up with a Beasley or Rose? Hows that fair to say a Seattle or NY who actually could use a #1 pick.
Why should the system help bad teams? They deserve to go out of business. That's how the real world of competition works.
I think we should here clarify the difference between tanking and sucking. Tanking === This year's Heat Sucking === This year's Knicks, last year's Celtics Now, a few of you expressed opposition to teams that suck---and not teams that tank per se---getting rewarded with draft picks. To me, this argument doesn't make sense because a) All of the teams that don't suck got good with high draft picks awarded to them when they did suck, and b) The vast majority of NBA fans follow teams that are not consistently-good
There was already a system put in place to discourage tanking; it's called the lottery. Football and baseball don't even do that much. I don't see any reason to go beyond that. We already have teams like Portland getting to draft Oden.
Any time you reward suckiness you encourage tanking. The irony is, only the smart teams know how to use tanking. The really sucky teams that really need help don't get better by getting high picks. Having high draft picks does not automatically make you good. Look at the Clippers. Look at the Nets before Kidd. Look at Memphis. Look at the Knicks. Look at the Mavericks before Cuban. Look at the Kings before the Maloofs. Teams that are perennial lottery teams, getting high picks year after year and still suck should be forced to sell the franchise to someone more competent. It's like the welfare system. Some crooks abuse the system and get fat. The really poor people don't get any better by feeding on the system.
Very true. And for this very same reason, I'm against the salary cap. It makes logical sense, but it's unAmerican. What if there was a salary cap in the real world? People would riot. The salary cap is a Communist idea.
If the NBA didn't have a salary cap, some NY or LA clown would buy a local team and turn them into an NBA version of Steinbrenner's Yankees. Hell no to that idea.
I am not against salary cap. I don't care about the American way or the communist way. I care about good basketball competition. I am against owners/managements who have no intention or no competence to build winning basketball yet still make money out of it. The system should not reward sucky teams. If you stop doing that, tanking will go away.
THANK YOU! why can't people grasp this. you always hear people saying Stern or the league needs to do something. well what more? the nfl, nhl, and mlb just give the worst team the top draft choice. in the nba, you've got all of a 1 in 4 chance. virtually every sport agrees bad teams need to get good draft picks, but at least the nba doesn't just hand it out. you can't force teams to play designated stars a designated number of minutes each night. you just have to accept some teams will "rest" players at the end of a meaningless season. the situation when two teams realize they're equally crappy, and yet if one just happens to go 19-63 while the other goes 20-62, they get lebron james and not darko milicic is what leads to tanking. saying the 19-63 team gets a 1/4 chance and the 20-62 team gets a 1/5 chance means there's not much real advantage to tanking, and that's what the NBA has tried to do. sucking more gives you slightly better odds, but they essentially just say all of y'all suck so we'll give all of you some odds at the top picks. it can't really be done much better. what was really funny was when the biggest tankers from last year didn't get the top 2 picks, which is what everyone seems to want, then everyone b****ed that the lottery was broke b/c the teams that really needed the picks weren't getting the 1 and 2 picks. so you want to discourage tanking, but you want to b**** when the worst teams don't just get the best picks, which is exactly what causes tanking. that's true. but in the real world of the nba, having teams go out of business, or hemorrhaging money, or being forever horrible is not good for the league's bottom line. that's why essentially every league tries to create some sort of long-term parity by giving high draft choices to bad teams. maybe it's not "fair" to be rewarded for being bad, but there's probably not a much better solution. trying to force teams to switch hands a lot can't be good.
