Lottery changes ... or spinning the wheel

[VF21]

Excellent article from Grantland.com about the need for changes to the current draft lottery system:

http://grantland.com/features/wheel...tional Newsletter&utm_campaign=GMIB 3/19/2014

 

[Bricklayer]

No no and no.

Something will be done, but that lottery wheel idea is just death for little teams like the Kings. Might as well just start buying your purple and gold jerseys now. Yeah, wait 30 years between #1 picks. Half this board will be dead by then. Then your #1 comes along, and oops, sorry, best guy this year is Anthony Bennet! Sorry. Then next year whoever has the #1 gets Embid or Parker or whoever. Only now you can never get another shot at it. Whole generations of players come and go. Half a fan's lifetime is spent waiting for that one chance. And meanwhile the big markets shrug off an Anthony Bennet disaster. Instead they come along and steal that one guy you were allowed to draft 6 years ago as a free agent. They'll be fine. But you won't. Your next shot at a Top 5 pick isn't for another 5 years. If its in a crap draft your next chance at a superstar as a small market might be in 10 years, or 15. Its takes the league's inequality and just makes it even more permanent, closing off the one route small market teams stuck at the bottom have to acquire elite players.

 

[Capt. Factorial]

No no and no.

Something will be done, but that lottery wheel idea is just death for little teams like the Kings. Might as well just start buying your purple and gold jerseys now. Yeah, wait 30 years between #1 picks. Half this board will be dead by then. Then your #1 comes along, and oops, sorry, best guy this year is Anthony Bennet! Sorry. Then next year whoever has the #1 gets Embid or Parker or whoever. Only now you can never get another shot at it. Whole generations of players come and go. Half a fan's lifetime is spent waiting for that one chance. And meanwhile the big markets shrug off an Anthony Bennet disaster. Instead they come along and steal that one guy you were allowed to draft 6 years ago as a free agent. They'll be fine. But you won't. Your next shot at a Top 5 pick isn't for another 5 years. If its in a poopoo draft your next chance at a superstar as a small market might be in 10 years, or 15. Its takes the league's inequality and just makes it even more permanent, closing off the one route small market teams stuck at the bottom have to acquire elite players.

Agreed completely. The Wheel Proposal is terrible for exactly the reasons that you've mentioned here, and I have two other serious objections:

1) The entire point of giving top draft picks to bad teams is to improve competitive balance in the league. With the Wheel, that goes away. No more competitive balance tweaking, and small market franchises will see their chances of making a LeBron-style change in fortune, even for a few years, be severely reduced.

2) Everybody talks about tanking as if it's rampant and it's the worst thing that possibly happen. As if it's a given that it must be fixed. I remain unconvinced on these points.

You know, the unweighted lottery (the envelopes) lasted five years. The lightly-weighted lottery system lasted four. The heavily-weighted system we are using now is at 20 years and counting. I think there might be a reason that it has stuck around so long - I suspect it does a pretty decent job of doing what it is intended to do, which is improve competitive balance. The Wheel is asking us to go back to the days before the unweighted lottery - and to do it on a thirty-year trial run! Right? You can't stop it partway through before everybody has cycled through their #1.

If we really insist that "everybody knows" that teams are tanking, and "everybody knows" that we've got to do something about it, then the best way to "fix" it, in my opinion, is to use "everybody's knowledge" to determine the draft order. Not kidding. If we're going to radically overhaul the system, we could devise a system where every NBA front office gives a list of where the other 29 teams should draft, and we collate the results. There's tons of variables you could tweak, but the point is that the people out there who "know there's tanking" will be able to look at a tanking team and say "that team deserves the #10 pick and not the #1 pick, because they're better than their record." If the other owners are voting to determine who gets the #1 overall, you can be pretty sure they'll send it to the team they see as being the worst one with the worst future. They won't send it to a good team, or a team that's got the capability to turn things around quick. And that sounds like a great way to help competitive balance. Of course, this would pretty much mean that the Lakers would never get a #1 overall pick even when they're bad, but it would help small market teams, it would remove the Lotto Ball Conspiracy Theorists (it's not that your team didn't get the #1 overall because there was a conspiracy against you - there was an open vote against you!), and it would render "tanking" largely useless. Why not?

 

[chief bromden]

This wheel idea came out months ago. I applaud ideas being thrown out to improve the current lottery system because it isn't perfect. It might be suspect that teams tank for the number one pick because it isn't a certain outcome ... however, it is reasonable to believe that teams are sensitive to traded picks that have position protection (ie., the Kings 2014 draft pick is top-10 protected). The Kings can most definitely ensure they keep that pick by recording at least the 7th worst record in the league. I think this is a bigger issue than tanking for the worst record. I would like to see the next CBA eliminate protecting picks in trades.

 

[LPKingsFan]

The bigger problem is that, for many teams, the draft is the only way to rebuild. A few factors seem to exacerbate this: First, in basketball, almost uniquely among the top sports, having the best player or two means you're the best team, and because the playoffs are so long, the best teams almost always win. Second, the top players rarely move in free agency. So, if you're bad, you're looking at a considerable uphill climb, and the draft lotto seems to be the only way to get there.

I've said this before, but I think the first experiment should have nothing to do with the draft or the lottery but with the salary cap: eliminate max player salaries while maintaining a semi-hard overall cap. The top superstars mean relatively more to a team's success, they should be paid accordingly. And if every team has the ability to pay one player way more than the others (unless some team really thinks it can get away with paying two guys $30 million and almost nothing to the rest), I think you'd start to see a little more parity because at some point the pay cuts to form superteams is going to be cost prohibitive for the stars.

Of course, the mid-level players get squeezed in that scenario, so it would be tough to get the players association on board. Maybe you also lessen the length of rookie deals so players can get that first extension or new deal sooner, but that might make the draft too little of a factor in team building. I don't know.

I'm also in favor of going back to a five-game first round, to add some more randomness to the playoffs. Let's say you un-weight the lottery somewhat to reduce the incentive to lose. But now you're worried that teams would rather be in the lottery than almost assuredly lose in the first round as a low seed. If you switch to a five game series, those low seeds have a slightly better chance of winning, so that might make a low seed more compelling than tanking out of the playoffs.

I also agree that tanking isn't really that big of a problem.

Anyways, a few thoughts. Not a fan of the wheel here.

 

[Bricklayer]

The problem with the no max salary/semi-hard cap idea is this: if your $30mil payer gets hurt in yr 2 of his 5 year deal and goes into Arenas like decline, you are really and truly ****ed for the entire reminder. No hope at all to field a competitive team at half the price. No chance at all to sign a star because the money is wrapped up. You might be able to design a complex system incorporating something I am a big advocate of -- a franchise player tag. Allowing only the one player on the roster tagged as a franchise player to be paid infinite money, everybody else has to stay within normal cap numbers. Now normally my focus is on the franchise player being hard slotted into a huge salary, and as a consequence not being allowed to leave as a free agent. But in your scenario an addition could be that you would be able to amnesty a franchise player -- still have to pay his salary, but the franchise player slot would free up under your cap. That way if your ownership had money (of course introducing inequality) and Arenas goes down, the next year you could amnesty him and go sign Kyrie Irving or somebody as the replacement franchise guy.

 

[LPKingsFan]

The problem with the no max salary/semi-hard cap idea is this: if your $30mil payer gets hurt in yr 2 of his 5 year deal and goes into Arenas like decline, you are really and truly ****ed for the entire reminder. No hope at all to field a competitive team at half the price. No chance at all to sign a star because the money is wrapped up. You might be able to design a complex system incorporating something I am a big advocate of -- a franchise player tag. Allowing only the one player on the roster tagged as a franchise player to be paid infinite money, everybody else has to stay within normal cap numbers. Now normally my focus is on the franchise player being hard slotted into a huge salary, and as a consequence not being allowed to leave as a free agent. But in your scenario an addition could be that you would be able to amnesty a franchise player -- still have to pay his salary, but the franchise player slot would free up under your cap. That way if your ownership had money (of course introducing inequality) and Arenas goes down, the next year you could amnesty him and go sign Kyrie Irving or somebody as the replacement franchise guy.

That's a good point. I thought about also suggesting making contracts ungaranteed beyond, say, two years, but I imagine even the weak players union would find a way to stonewall such a proposal. But a permanent amnesty provision could work, since the players get the promised money anyway.

Tom Ziller also has a smaller, but very compelling proposal on SBNation today (link here): expand the number of picks subject to the ping pong balls beyond the top three.

Right now, the team with the worst record will pick no lower than No. 4. So even if the lottery goes poorly, it's a good decision to be horrible. There are more than four elite prospects in this draft, and the Bucks and Sixers are trying to guarantee they nab one. If you instead let the lottery decide the top 10 picks, the worst team is only guaranteed no worse than the No. 11 pick. If you like the hopper determine the top 14, the worst team is only guaranteed the No. 15 pick or better. Just by expanding the role of the hopper, you slash that incentive to bethe worst, which is what a lot of anti-tankers have a problem with.

 

[Bricklayer]

Tom Ziller also has a smaller, but very compelling proposal on SBNation today (link here): expand the number of picks subject to the ping pong balls beyond the top three.

All those type proposals are just rearranging chairs.

People forget that the NBA lottery system has gone through stages:

1) it was instituted precisely to prevent tanking. Some people get very confused and somehow think its a system that creates tanking. to the contrary its the only major North American sport with a system in place to try to discourage it

2) when it was first instituted it was just 7 envelopes in a hopper. Each lottery team had an equal chance, so that was already tried. But predictably the really bad teams were upset because you had effectively made it harder for them to recover.

3) so the lottery went to a weighted system heavily favoring the really bad teams -- i.e. trended back toward almost no lottery at all. predictably the complaint sthen were that tanking was back, and that the results were too predictable/there wasn't much point in having a lottery in at all

4) so then they jiggered the numbers again to lessen the weighting, and move it back over not quite to the 1 envelope for everybody stage, btu away from the heavy weighting no lottery at all phase. We are already on the discouraging tanking side of things.

All Ziller's and similar suggestions do is just slightly shift things again back toward 1 envelope for 1 team. In essence its just another shift on the same scale the lottery has moved back and forth on for 30 years now. There are no perfect solutions on that scale. Just a bunch of flawed ones with consequences. Discourage tanking = also damaging bad teams ability to recover. Allow bad teams to recover = encouraging tanking. No way out of it. Just tweaks for whatever the climate is at the moment. Which actually is generally fine by me because I think basketball talking heads whine entirely too much on the topic and value bad teams being able to recover >>>> over some esoterical concern over tanking. Ziller's suggestion is that its ok to **** Philly fans for years rather than allow tanking. I don't accept that set of priorities.


I do see the amusement value in something like the postseason losers tournament though. 1 game series to add a heavy random element to it and give bad teams a chance to beat better teams. Play for that #1 pick. Get losing team fans 1 spot of excitement heading into their offseasons. Do wonder though how you truly inspire your starting center to play big in the #1 title game if the #1 pick in the draft is a center who's going to take his spot.

 

[Bosnian Diehard]

Don't forget that another problem with this idea is that top prospects know what team is picking first that year. So even if there's a hot prospect in 2020, for example, and we have the number one pick that year, they'll just hold out until 2021 when Miami, LA, New York, etc. is picking first.

 

[Bricklayer]

I do see the amusement value in something like the postseason losers tournament though. 1 game series to add a heavy random element to it and give bad teams a chance to beat better teams. Play for that #1 pick. Get losing team fans 1 spot of excitement heading into their offseasons. Do wonder though how you truly inspire your starting center to play big in the #1 title game if the #1 pick in the draft is a center who's going to take his spot.

I thought of something else: reverse homecourt advantage. Since they are 1 game series whoever has homecourt is going to have a big advantage. So have homecourt advantage fall to whichever team is WORSE, not better. Make for a balanced fun little sendoff for the bad teams.

 

[LPKingsFan]

Turns out our own Vivek has a plan to tackle "tanking," appropriately titled the V plan. As described to TrueHoop:

There’s two parts to it. Part I is that you freeze the draft order at the time of the All-Star break. Then, everything [pertaining to the current lottery system] remains the same, but it’s frozen based on the standings at the All-Star break. Then there’s no gain in not playing at the highest level for the remainder of the season. That’s Part I.

Part II is that at the end of the season, the top seven teams from the Eastern Conference and the top seven teams from the Western Conference make the playoffs. Then for the eighth playoff spot, the remaining eight teams have a sudden-death, college-style playoff in a neutral venue, like Vegas in the West and Kansas or Louisville in the East.

 

[Warhawk]

Turns out our own Vivek has a plan to tackle "tanking," appropriately titled the V plan. As described to TrueHoop:

I saw that as well. I think there may be some good stuff in there.

Edit - I noticed a comment from the link that seems to overthink the "locking drafting position in at the ASB" idea. Obviously, if you have, say, the current West standings (because it works for illustration easily and I only have to type half the teams out instead of the entire league):

1. SA
2. OKC
3. LAC
4. Hou
5. Por
6. GS
7. Mem
8. Phx - last team in the PO
9. Dal - team with worst lottery chance
10. Min
11. Den
12. NO
13. Sac
14. LAL
15. Utah - team with best lottery chance

and the drafting order is locked in at the ASB, they are wondering about what happens if a team goes on a tear and makes it into the PO.

Well, the lottery drafting order is locked, but NOT the PO list. For instance, if the order essentially stays the same except Minny goes on a run and makes it to the 6th seed and NO drops a few spots (tanks!) after the ASB, the lottery rankings would look like this (not counting the possibility of a play-in game for the last PO spot):

1. SA
2. OKC
3. LAC
4. Hou
5. Por
6. Min - moved up from lottery, does not get in lottery drawing
7. GS
8. Mem - last team in the PO
9. Phx - team with worst lottery chance - fell out of PO and into lottery
10. Dal
11. Den
12. NO - lost games to drop behind Sac, etc. by the end of the year (tanked), but does NOT move down in lottery pick position - locked at ASB.
13. Sac
14. LAL
15. Utah - team with best lottery chance

Hopefully this makes sense to everyone and I am interpreting the concept correctly!

 

[VF21]

I'm closing this thread in favor of the new thread in the Kings Rap forum about the interview with Vivek.