What if some front offices don’t jave a good relationship with others. If you asked PDA about Sacramento’s roster he wouldn’t give us a top 10 pick.
Well, let's imagine that the system is for each front office to rank the other teams from #1-29 (best to worst), and each team get the number of points for their slot. On average, the distance between each draft pick would most likely be a bit less than 29 points in that case [proof omitted]. Let's imagine that the Kings merit being, say #24. But PDA, in a spiteful move, decides to go as bold as he can without looking super petty (because hey, why not just make these rankings public?) and rank the Kings at #14. The Kings lose 10 points from what they deserve, which is about a third of a draft slot.
So, in that case, maybe a supposed grudge costs a team a draft slot, maybe it doesn't. And perhaps every team has a grudge against somebody - but it probably wouldn't always be the same somebody. So that kind of thing is likely to even out unless 1) your front office has burned bridges with half the league, in which case you really need to replace them anyways, or 2) a team is being discriminated against because they are either actually good or they have the resources (e.g. cap space, desirable market - think Lakers) to get healthy without a good draft pick and could become a superteam with one. In scenario 2) I think that's kind of what I would be going for anyway.
And, of course, there's no reason why you couldn't do something like drop the top and bottom two scores for each team as outliers, which would mean that you'd have to have a coalition of three teams all gunning against you deliberately in order to have it really start to affect you. Couple that with a public reveal of the rankings and I think front offices would probably shy away from doing something too extreme.
There is so much of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine!” Type of thing going on in the NBA that it would be really difficult to police that kind of thing. Then if you are owed a pick from a team that is in the lottery it can be manipulated to get it at a certain number or not get it if it’s a weak draft and year after that is better.
Again, it would be hard to manipulate a pick in your own favor if there are 29 other teams that have the same amount of input as you.
You do bring up a good point. Perhaps one issue here is that a traded pick could cause manipulation. Brooklyn owes their pick to the Cavs this year. The Cavs are relatively good...though if they lose LeBron...but let's pretend they are strong for sake of the argument. So the Cavs are good and they are a team that we don't want to see get a high draft pick. But Brooklyn stinks, and deserves, let's say, the #5 pick. Since everybody knows that the Brooklyn pick is actually going to the Cavs, do teams vote for that pick to be assigned based on Brooklyn's value, or based on Cleveland's value? In the current world, this would based on Brooklyn's record, of course, and that's how trades are currently evaluated. Under my proposal, it would be relatively hard to police the system to prevent this sort of manipulation. But let's imagine that we don't try to prevent that sort of manipulation. Let's imagine that instead we embrace it, and we say that if you trade for a first-round pick, then the value of that pick is determined by how good
you are, not how good the team that you got it from is.
This would have some very interesting consequences. For a bad team who has for some reason (thanks, Vlade!) already traded away their first round pick, even a lousy first-round pick is very valuable. Should the Kings trade for the Warriors' pick in 2019? Heck, yes! And it's not worth all that much to the Warriors, but it's worth a ton to the Kings. At the same time, a bad team getting multiple picks might actually work against them, because other front offices certainly wouldn't want to give the worst team in the league picks 1, 2, and 3!! And you probably don't want teams to have multiple back-to-back picks, so maybe if you have multiple picks they get spaced out by 2 or 3 or something following your top slot (e.g. you have three picks, and your ranking is 5th, you get the 5th pick, the next teams behind you slot in at 6 and 7, you get the 8th pick, two more teams slot in and you get the 11th pick). There would, at the very least be some new and interesting trade dynamics. Bad teams with multiple picks might actually look to deal one in the hopes of not hurting their chances at #1. It might actually be easier to pry a pick away from a team that expects to be bad, because they could hope to somewhat cheaply acquire an equivalent replacement. The idea's not fully baked here, but maybe it wouldn't be a disaster for picks to actually follow their new team.
tl;dr: This isn't happening anyway, you didn't miss anything.