Race to the Bottom thread

Capt. Factorial said:
One team's vote only counts for 1/30th, so Sterling can't "send a #1 pick to the Lakers". Let's assume the other 29 owners in the league think the Lakers should be picking 25th based on their future outlook. Sterling's rankings can be set for the Lakers to pick #1, but this would basically move the Lakers from the 25th pick to the 24th pick.
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That's a pedantic point, I thought it was obvious that I meant "Even if Sterling isn't 100% cynical, and wouldn't express his will by voting to send a #1 pick to the Lakers" I could be better at proof-reading my posts before publishing. Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm perfect.

You aren't addressing the substantive point. Your system assumes the participants are perfect competitors, but they plainly aren't. They're partners in a franchised business. It's already been demonstrated that there's significant apathy for non-competitive behavior through the Sterling example.
 
Insomniacal Fan said:
That's a pedantic point, I thought it was obvious that I meant "Even if Sterling isn't 100% cynical, and wouldn't express his will by voting to send a #1 pick to the Lakers"
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It was not obvious. Nor is it pedantic because it's actually a very salient point. One rogue owner doesn't move the needle much. That's an important point. You're acting like one rogue owner can ruin things completely, when in fact one rogue owner barely changes things.
Insomniacal Fan said:
You aren't addressing the substantive point. Your system assumes the participants are perfect competitors, but they plainly aren't. They're partners in a franchised business. It's already been demonstrated that there's significant apathy for non-competitive behavior through the Sterling example.
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I feel like I've been addressing the point the whole time. My system doesn't require the participants to be perfect competitors. It just needs most of them to be pretty good competitors (that's a good bet) and needs to prevent large coordinated conspiracies (I don't think that's hard, because they will be obvious).
 
Capt. Factorial said:
It was not obvious. Nor is it pedantic because it's actually a very salient point. One rogue owner doesn't move the needle much. That's an important point. You're acting like one rogue owner can ruin things completely, when in fact one rogue owner barely changes things.

I feel like I've been addressing the point the whole time. My system doesn't require the participants to be perfect competitors. It just needs most of them to be pretty good competitors (that's a good bet) and needs to prevent large coordinated conspiracies (I don't think that's hard, because they will be obvious).
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Heck, you could even have an outside arbiter (from an accounting firm, or whatever) tally the votes and look for obvious signs of malfeasance to bring another vote if something looks wonky. You can put in checks.
 
I mean I'm all for tanking at this point, but let's not set the record for the longest losing streak in NBA history. The longest is 28 consecutive losses by the Pistons/Sixers and we're getting closer by the day.
 
Capt. Factorial said:
It was not obvious. Nor is it pedantic because it's actually a very salient point. One rogue owner doesn't move the needle much. That's an important point. You're acting like one rogue owner can ruin things completely, when in fact one rogue owner barely changes things.
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My point of bringing up Sterling was to make an assertion about how the owners in general behave. A majority of owners were publicly indifferent to Sterling for decades. I'm using tolerance of his behavior to question the actual competitiveness of the average NBA owner. I never intended to make the point that a single rogue owner could mess things up. That's one thing voting has in its favor, so gold star for that🌟.

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What would you do about simple, uncoordinated conspiracies, like every owner's implicit understanding that basketball being popular in large markets is good for revenue? It seems plausible to me that 100% of the owners end up sending 50% of top 10 picks to worthy losers, and the other 50% to big market cash cows. Maybe the more competitive owners send more picks to worthy losers, maybe some cynical private equity guys send all their votes to big markets. Nobody's pure, and there's no actual conspiracy, just a shared financial reality.

I don't think this would lead to a desirable outcome from a small market fan perspective. Bad teams in large markets would be the highest priority. Good teams in small markets would get squeezed.
 
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Warhawk said:
Heck, you could even have an outside arbiter (from an accounting firm, or whatever) tally the votes and look for obvious signs of malfeasance to bring another vote if something looks wonky. You can put in checks.
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I think this devolves into 3 options:

1. The outside arbiter has broad discretion to intervene. This is basically the Czar mentioned earlier in the discussion. Now all you need to do is figure out how to get a "good czar" Good luck seems necessary here.

2. The arbiter has very little discretion to intervene in a vote. This is just a ceremonial blessing over the owners voting for what they want

3. The arbiter can intervene only on the basis of a pre-written code or algorithm. Well in this case why do you need the arbiter or voting at all? This is more or less merely reinventing a system like the lottery or inverse order or something else based on gameable rules.
 
KF8 said:
I mean I'm all for tanking at this point, but let's not set the record for the longest losing streak in NBA history. The longest is 28 consecutive losses by the Pistons/Sixers and we're getting closer by the day.
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Why not? Losing seems to make everyone else here happy. I've stopped watching so I don't really care one way or another at this point.
 
Insomniacal Fan said:
I think this devolves into 3 options:

1. The outside arbiter has broad discretion to intervene. This is basically the Czar mentioned earlier in the discussion. Now all you need to do is figure out how to get a "good czar" Good luck seems necessary here.

2. The arbiter has very little discretion to intervene in a vote. This is just a ceremonial blessing over the owners voting for what they want

3. The arbiter can intervene only on the basis of a pre-written code or algorithm. Well in this case why do you need the arbiter or voting at all? This is more or less merely reinventing a system like the lottery or inverse order or something else based on gameable rules.
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Or, like I said, you get someone trained to look for abnormal results in a vote. If everything seems to be on the up-and-up, fine. If results are wonky, raise a flag. It's not that difficult.
 
Warhawk said:
Or, like I said, you get someone trained to look for abnormal results in a vote. If everything seems to be on the up-and-up, fine. If results are wonky, raise a flag. It's not that difficult.
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Let me explain how my point relates to yours:

Does the "trained person" have a robust way of determining what a "normal" vote is? If so, then why not just use the normalization algorithm without the person (or maybe without the vote) (Scenario 3)

Or is the "trained person" empowered to make judgement calls? What happens if their judgement is controversial? Who decides whether an arbiter is neutral? What does "voting" even mean if somebody else can just declare your ballot invalid arbitrarily? (Scenario 1)

Maybe the "trained person" can be overruled and replaced if they make judgements that are too controversial, in which case the expert that is found is just doing a ritual dance to legitimize the existing vote. (Scenario 2)
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These include a lot of hard problems, if you have an easy way of solving them, you could probably get published in a political science academic journal.
 
Insomniacal Fan said:
Let me explain how my point relates to yours:

Does the "trained person" have a robust way of determining what a "normal" vote is? If so, then why not just use the normalization algorithm without the person (or maybe without the vote) (Scenario 3)

Or is the "trained person" empowered to make judgement calls? What happens if their judgement is controversial? Who decides whether an arbiter is neutral? What does "voting" even mean if somebody else can just declare your ballot invalid arbitrarily? (Scenario 1)

Maybe the "trained person" can be overruled and replaced if they make judgements that are too controversial, in which case the expert that is found is just doing a ritual dance to legitimize the existing vote. (Scenario 2)
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These include a lot of hard problems, if you have an easy way of solving them, you could probably get published in a political science academic journal.
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Nice, but, again, I think you are really digging deep on minutiae. There are specialists on voting and voting irregularities that can independently opine on whether something looks legit or not. Perhaps we let them sort it out. Going down this rabbit hole is a bit premature.

CalTech has an election irregularity project, for just one example, that draws upon numerous published works on election security and integrity. There are non-partisan election watchdog groups. I'm sure that one or more of these experts could be convinced to independently oversee something as simple as 30 votes - that would be an easy "side" project for them. It's really not that difficult to set up something that could be independently overseen for something this basic. They already do something similar for the lottery balls with an independent accounting firm.
 
Warhawk said:
Nice, but, again, I think you are really digging deep on minutiae. There are specialists on voting and voting irregularities that can independently opine on whether something looks legit or not. Perhaps we let them sort it out. Going down this rabbit hole is a bit premature.

CalTech has an election irregularity project, for just one example, that draws upon numerous published works on election security and integrity. There are non-partisan election watchdog groups. I'm sure that one or more of these experts could be convinced to independently oversee something as simple as 30 votes - that would be an easy "side" project for them. It's really not that difficult to set up something that could be independently overseen for something this basic. They already do something similar for the lottery balls with an independent accounting firm.
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You're missing the point. If you're going to hire an expert, you need to figure out what their job actually is. That's what the three scenarios are about.
 
Insomniacal Fan said:
You're missing the point. If you're going to hire an expert, you need to figure out what their job actually is. That's what the three scenarios are about.
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It's not missing the point. It's saying that "fine tuning" who would be chosen, at this point, is like discussing what color the flag will be that the first person landing on Mars will plant at the landing site. We've got a LONG way to go to get to that decision. There's a lot of reasonable options. I've listed a few considerations. It isn't that big of a deal at this point.
 
QWERTYLICIOUS said:
I don't understand this whole "Kings need to secure a top 2 or 3 pick this year" mentality, simply because that outcome is not something that we can directly control. Indirectly? Yes. And we are well on our way to indirectly controlling that outcome. Because I don't see anyone "passing us by" for the worst record in the league...

I am very cautious when it comes to claiming that the Kings need to secure a certain pick in the draft for this reason. It's not in my hands. It's not in your hands. Nor is it in the Kings' hands.

It's in the ping pong balls' hands. And the machine's hands.

I would like the Kings to secure a top 3 pick. Heck, I would like them to secure THE top pick in the draft. I will even settle with a top 5 pick considering how deep the very top tier of the upcoming draft class runs.
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Obviously the Kings have done all they can. The lottery needs to go in our favor. You can't understand that?

We are the worst team in the league
We are one of the oldest teams in the league
We have basically no trade assets as the vets are all on bad unwanted contracts.
We have probably the worst crop of "young guys" who arguably don't even qualify as young because they are all 23-25 years old.
We have by far the worst owner in the league.

Now the league is talking about flattening odds even further, and potentially blocking two top 4 picks back to back. So yes.. The Kings need some luck to help secure a top 2 pick, or this rebuild could go another 15-20 years like the last one did. Getting a decent player in this draft isn't going to really change the long term outlook of this team. They need to add a franchise star.

I thought my "Kings need to HOPEFULLY secure a top 2 pick" would make it clear that at this point its up to the ping pong balls.
 
The Athletic has a story on a league conference call from Thursday (some of this is probably filtering through social media already)


A few salient points:

“I would just say, Sean,” Silver said, “you should assume for next season your only incentive will be to win games.”
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Nothing changing this year, but Silver wants to completely upend things for next year. The only incentive being to win games *sounds* like the league is favoring getting away from giving the best picks to the worst teams. This would be a disaster for us. Small market franchises with no real free agency draw are going to end up dead in the water if they can't refresh with high draft talent. Anybody remember 2007-2022?

One GM of a team that had undergone a tank and came out the other side of it as one of the strongest teams in the league said the executives on the call needed to “support Adam on this.”
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Yeah, thanks Spurs or Pistons! I guess that's "Tank for me, but not for thee!"

Otherwise, the league is fielding ideas from all 30 teams for how to set up a better system that does not incentivize losing. (Marks, one executive said, asked on the call to see all those ideas.) Numerous ideas and input were shared on the call by more than half of the general managers in the league.
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We need to get the Front Office Vote proposal in front of people, quick, or they're going to ruin things.
 
I’m sure all the prospective expansion team owners are thrilled by the prospect of starting off their franchises with a mid- to late-first round pick because Silver decides to make the draft a true lottery for some dumb reason.
 
The simple fact that one of the most fair and unbiased draft processes out there is about to undergo a massive haul to, well, make it a "more fair" process is simply wild! And speaks more to the type of commissioner Adam Silver has been, and will continue to be, than it does to the actual process itself.
 
Tetsujin said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/2025369583927033957

Aim for 30 losses and we’ll be the best team in the league in two years.
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Yes, Crazy how the Spurs got "Lucky" three years in a row with the #1 (Wemby), then #4 and #2 picks all in a row.

If the Kings had that type of "Luck" from the NBA, I'm sure we would be pretty good right now too. Instead, the NBA gifts us the number 1 when Pervis Ellison is the BPA. :mad:
 
ockingsfan said:
Yes, Crazy how the Spurs got "Lucky" three years in a row with the #1 (Wemby), then #4 and #2 picks all in a row.

If the Kings had that type of "Luck" from the NBA, I'm sure we would be pretty good right now too. Instead, the NBA gifts us the number 1 when Pervis Ellison is the BPA. :mad:
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We did get gifted Luka that one year, but botched it. I think we were slotted to pick around 8th or so that year?
 
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