Bizarro Wide World of Sports Lin Championship

Status
Not open for further replies.
At this point I'm just hoping Porter's injury knocks him to 6th or something and we pick him there. I still want Ayton and Doncic over him but I'm starting to feel that's the best case scenario.
 
The NBA should impose a penalty for tanking.

Every game should be reviewed to see if the team is putting their best foot forward in an attempt to have a legitimate, competitive game.

If a team is not putting forth an honest effort and sitting their best players every night, playing undrafted free agents the entire 4th quarter (cough, cough Dallas), missing end of games shots on purpose, then the NBA would impose a hefty lottery ping pong decrease penalty.

For example, for every blatant tank job game, remove 5 ping pong balls for that team lotto chances. If there are 10 blatant tank games, that team has 50 ping pong balls removed from their lotto chances.

Non-competitive games would go away very quickly.
No way in hell you could prove one way or the other that the team is doing it? I would argue that playing ZBo increases our chances of losing but others see it as if we are tanking if we are not playing him.

Impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt and there really is no criteria that you can apply as a template.
 
I've mentioned this before, but in such a system, the judge should be other NBA front offices. It doesn't so much have to be about "punishing tanking" as it is about giving the best draft picks to the actual worst teams. Every team has in interest in not making any other team into a superteam. If you were to ask NBA front offices, "If you could assign the #1 pick to the Kings, the Knicks, or the Hawks, who would you give it to?" I'm sure most front offices would have an opinion, and they wouldn't be looking heavily at win-loss record to make that decision. And if win-loss record is not a factor, then there's no reason for a team to try to be uncompetitive in games. Which is the result we all seem to want.
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.

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.
 
I want to know what the tank crowd wants the Kings to do to lose? The young players were far and away the driving force behind the win last night. Other than Koufos the vets who did play both had a negative +/- so they aren't helping us win. Koufos played all of 26 minutes meaning we played without a center for nearly half the game. The two guys who shot the most also shot the worst so it's not like we just rode the hot hand. Did you want Skal to miss on purpose? Do you want Coach Joerger to ice the young guys? The difference in lasts night's win was the Kings 3pt and FT percentage. Maybe they should be coached to miss a few more of those?
Right now the only way to "tank" without screwing up anyone's development would be to play Fox, Jackson, Mason and Bruno big minutes since they are our worst players. Bring up Cooley as well and let him battle it out down low.

I'm as big a Lin fan as there is around here and of course I don't want any of our players to "tank" via their on court performances. Tanking is done by the coach and the GM, not by the players. There are a couple things the Kings can be doing to tank a little harder but there's only so much they can do when they are going against a bunch of no names every other game.
 

gunks

Hall of Famer
Right now the only way to "tank" without screwing up anyone's development would be to play Fox, Jackson, Mason and Bruno big minutes since they are our worst players. Bring up Cooley as well and let him battle it out down low.

I'm as big a Lin fan as there is around here and of course I don't want any of our players to "tank" via their on court performances. Tanking is done by the coach and the GM, not by the players. There are a couple things the Kings can be doing to tank a little harder but there's only so much they can do when they are going against a bunch of no names every other game.
It's gross, but I'm down with it. Don't hate the player, hate the game and all that. We really gotta get that top 5 pick!

We need to see what Cooley and Sampson can do with 30 minutes a game! ;)
 

Capt. Factorial

trifolium contra tempestatem subrigere certum est
Staff member
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.
 
No way in hell you could prove one way or the other that the team is doing it? I would argue that playing ZBo increases our chances of losing but others see it as if we are tanking if we are not playing him.

Impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt and there really is no criteria that you can apply as a template.
Sure they could set a standard. You can look at average difference in margin of victory for scores across the league.

Let's say the average margin of victory for all games played that season was 5 points. We would take one standard deviation from the average, i.e. say +/- 4 points.

So, any team in the lottery that losses by more than one standard deviation from the average margin of victory, so in this example, if a team lose by more than 9 points in a game, they will lose lottery balls for each such loss.

This could be irregardless of if the team tanked or not. Therefore teams would make every effort to put the best team on the court as possible.

Teams that intentionally field poor teams, i.e. Philly the previous 5 years, would be punished for not even trying to put a competitive team on the floor.

These purposely poorly constructed teams would loose ping pong balls in the lotto.

I would also make the lottery for the top 5 picks, instead of the top 3 picks. So a team that intentionally tanks for the worst record could wind up at #6 after the lottery and after their diminished ping pong ball count because they are not even trying to be competitive. Furthermore, if a team wins the lottery for a top 5 pick, they would be excluded from the lottery the following year.
 
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.



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.
I like the general idea of having FOs pick, but yeah it gets tricky when it comes to trading picks, especially ones that are conveyed far in the future. You also run into some issues around uncertainty of FAs, how good a player would be after injury etc.
 
Someone had the idea of all teams out of playoffs get 1 pping pong ball. For each year playoffs missed you get 1 extra pong pong ball. Once you pick in the top 3, or win lotto, you loose your extra ping pong balls.
A simple system that would reward the teams that cant get in the playoffs while leaving no incentive to tank for the bottom.. best idea ive heard
 
Yeah, I've been trying not to be nervous about the Orlando game.

Things we have to look forward to that aren't Kings games:
In an hour: Memphis/Chicago
Mar 10, Memphis/Dallas
M 11, Chicago/ATL
M 13, Dallas/NY
M 15, Chicago/Memphis
M 17, Dallas/Brooklyn
M 19, Memphis/Brooklyn, Chicago/NY
M 24, PHX/Orlando
M 28, Brooklyn/Orlando
M 30, Chicago/Orlando
A 1, Orlando/ATL
A 3, Orlando/NY
A 4, Dallas/Orlando
A 7, Brooklyn/Chicago
A 9, Chicago/Brooklyn
A 10, PHX/Dallas

I don't think Orlando, Dallas or Brooklyn have a chance at linning through that schedule, but Memphis, Phoenix and Atlanta are worrisome.
 
Yeah, I've been trying not to be nervous about the Orlando game.

Things we have to look forward to that aren't Kings games:
In an hour: Memphis/Chicago
Mar 10, Memphis/Dallas
M 11, Chicago/ATL
M 13, Dallas/NY
M 15, Chicago/Memphis
M 17, Dallas/Brooklyn
M 19, Memphis/Brooklyn, Chicago/NY
M 24, PHX/Orlando
M 28, Brooklyn/Orlando
M 30, Chicago/Orlando
A 1, Orlando/ATL
A 3, Orlando/NY
A 4, Dallas/Orlando
A 7, Brooklyn/Chicago
A 9, Chicago/Brooklyn
A 10, PHX/Dallas

I don't think Orlando, Dallas or Brooklyn have a chance at linning through that schedule, but Memphis, Phoenix and Atlanta are worrisome.
Memphis and Atlanta a putting out D league rosters there’s no catching them
 
Memphis and Atlanta a putting out D league rosters there’s no catching them
So we just need to outlin Orlando, Brooklyn, Dallas and Phoenix...I am good with that!

It sucks being the only team that isn’t shamelessly tanking. We are the best of the worst. Not a good draft for that...sigh
 
What? A call favoring that particular team on their home turf? I am shocked - shocked and stunned beyond belief.
Yeah, well, you don’t typically see a foul whistled on the games final shot unless it’s egregious. They usually allow a lot of contact.

But who cares. The real ridiculousness was the rule enforcement on Orlando’s subsequent shot with :00.6 remaining. The clock operator started the clock before the ball was touched on the inbound. So the buzzer sounded before anyone could make a play. Instead of allowing them to replay it, the ‘rule’ calls for a jump ball at half court. WHAT?!

So memo to ALL home teams: next time you’re involved in a one possession game with the slim lead and very little time remaIning, just make sure your operator ‘inadvertently’ starts the clock early and runs it out. You’ll ensure yourself a W.
 
Yeah, well, you don’t typically see a foul whistled on the games final shot unless it’s egregious. They usually allow a lot of contact.

But who cares. The real ridiculousness was the rule enforcement on Orlando’s subsequent shot with :00.6 remaining. The clock operator started the clock before the ball was touched on the inbound. So the buzzer sounded before anyone could make a play. Instead of allowing them to replay it, the ‘rule’ calls for a jump ball at half court. WHAT?!

So memo to ALL home teams: next time you’re involved in a one possession game with the slim lead and very little time remaIning, just make sure your operator ‘inadvertently’ starts the clock early and runs it out. You’ll ensure yourself a W.
Even better!!

 
Status
Not open for further replies.