Race to the Bottom thread

Capt. Factorial said:
The top 16 teams make the playoffs, and the next-best teams win your proposed tournament. Are you capable of thinking through your own suggestions?
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He thinks because he said top 8 your numbers are wrong. Not realizing to draft a Wemby 2/3’ds of the league would tank to get into the tournament so they could draft Wemby. The season would suck but the tournament to draft Wemby would be awesome.
 
Bosnian Diehard said:
That idea will never work. What motivation would players have to win a tournament that could give their team a chance to draft their replacement?
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If you were a really good team one player away you tank like hell to get into the tournament and then you play all your players to win, draft Wemby and win the Championship next year. Every team not with a clear shot to win the Championship would tank.
 
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Everybody's got a favorite method to deter tanking, and it's easy to poke holes in just about every proposal, so my attitude is simply that the NBA needs to enforce the rules it's already crafted, and create harsher penalties for breaking them. There are currently rules against what, say, the Jazz are doing right now, but the fines will never be enough of a disincentive for teams. Start charging teams the very first round pick they're trying to tank into a higher value selection, and tanking will cease in a hurry. The problem is that the league office only gestures in the direction of punishment, but never truly holds the tanking teams accountable. Some teams just aren't talented enough to compete for anything other than the lottery, and some teams genuinely suffer untimely injuries that result in the same competitive difficulties. But it shouldn't be hard to distinguish between a bad team and a tanking team, or a team with serious injuries and one that's holding out guys unnecessarily.
 
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Padrino said:
Everybody's got a favorite method to deter tanking, and it's easy to poke holes in just about every proposal, so my attitude is simply that the NBA needs to enforce the rules it's already crafted, and create harsher penalties for breaking them. There are currently rules against what, say, the Jazz are doing right now, but the fines will never be enough of a disincentive for teams. Start charging teams the very first round pick their trying to tank into a higher value selection, and tanking will cease in a hurry. The problem is that the league office only gestures in the direction of punishment, but never truly holds the tanking teams accountable. Some teams just aren't talented enough to compete for anything other than the lottery, and some teams genuinely suffer untimely injuries that result in the same competitive difficulties. But it shouldn't be hard to distinguish between a bad team and a tanking team, or a team with serious injuries and one that's holding out guys unnecessarily.
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As long as you have a model that provides teams some control over their draft position you will have tanking. Increase the possible reward/downside for the tankers like the league did when they went from top 3 to top 4 and you will increase the tanking.

If you want to eliminate tanking you need to eliminate team control. If you want to reduce it then lessen the reward/downside. Anyone who has created a sales compensation system could have told you the new system would be worse.
 
Padrino said:
Everybody's got a favorite method to deter tanking, and it's easy to poke holes in just about every proposal, so my attitude is simply that the NBA needs to enforce the rules it's already crafted, and create harsher penalties for breaking them. There are currently rules against what, say, the Jazz are doing right now, but the fines will never be enough of a disincentive for teams. Start charging teams the very first round pick they're trying to tank into a higher value selection, and tanking will cease in a hurry. The problem is that the league office only gestures in the direction of punishment, but never truly holds the tanking teams accountable. Some teams just aren't talented enough to compete for anything other than the lottery, and some teams genuinely suffer untimely injuries that result in the same competitive difficulties. But it shouldn't be hard to distinguish between a bad team and a tanking team, or a team with serious injuries and one that's holding out guys unnecessarily.
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I don’t disagree with your assessment, but I would add that. I don’t think the league is particularly motivated to stop high profile teams that are not performing well from getting any extra boost via the draft, no matter how they get there. The uneven enforcement of rules I think largely comes from only disciplining teams. They believe they can get away with pushing around at the end of the day not one owner wants to end the draft or do anything meaningful about teams intentionally performing poorly for draft position. But the league gets a bit embarrassed when you have these games that start to look like two kindergartners and a pillow fight.
 
I’d lock records at the ASB. I know people say that then it’s an unbalanced schedule, but unbalanced schedules already exist in an 82 game format. So just rank the teams 1-30 at the ASB, and let that determine the initial order.

Then - automatically put teams 1-4 in the lottery. Teams 5-8 get put in an end season tourney, and the winner becomes the 5th lottery team. The 5 lottery teams all get a 20% chance at #1, the 4 remaining teams get a 25% chance at #2, and so on, so that all 5 spots are lotteried. Spot 6 goes to the tourney runner up. Then rank everyone else 7-30 based on ASB record.

You cannot be in the top 5 lottery three years in a row, unless at least one of those is by virtue of winning the tourney. And if you win the #1 pick you aren’t eligible for the top 5 lottery the next year, unless you win the tourney. If any team is excluded from the lottery then their spot goes to the next worst team, and they are bumped into the tourney. Eliminate pick protections, or at most allow only top 10 protection.

This eliminates the very worst teams from trying to out worst the others. If you are in the bottom 4 you don’t need to lose the most to ensure the worst record so you don’t slip out of the top 5. It also creates some incentive/competition in the 5-8 range. Locking records at the ASB should ensure more competitive play the last 3rd of the season. Eliminating multiple repeat lottery years prevents the Spurs and Jazz problems, where you just live in the lottery.

Not perfect, but certainly better.
 
Padrino said:
Everybody's got a favorite method to deter tanking, and it's easy to poke holes in just about every proposal, so my attitude is simply that the NBA needs to enforce the rules it's already crafted, and create harsher penalties for breaking them. There are currently rules against what, say, the Jazz are doing right now, but the fines will never be enough of a disincentive for teams. Start charging teams the very first round pick they're trying to tank into a higher value selection, and tanking will cease in a hurry. The problem is that the league office only gestures in the direction of punishment, but never truly holds the tanking teams accountable. Some teams just aren't talented enough to compete for anything other than the lottery, and some teams genuinely suffer untimely injuries that result in the same competitive difficulties. But it shouldn't be hard to distinguish between a bad team and a tanking team, or a team with serious injuries and one that's holding out guys unnecessarily.
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Yep.

$500k fine is literally nothing when you're trying to increase your chances of drafting an AJ or Peterson. If Peterson is the next Kobe, we're not talking millions, you start talking about a billion dollar return.

If Wemby hit UFA right now, with no salary cap and owners could spend whatever they wanted, you'd see the numbers exceeding what Juan Soto and Ohtani got recently in baseball.
 
macadocious said:
You can’t pay a players tax, because it just creates more tax.

Here’s 100

Tax is 20

Here’s 120

Ok now tax is 4 more on that

And so on and so on…
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Well no, if this was a solution that owners would ever consider, it would just be a simple gross up. Basically the team covers the taxes, so your contract value doesn't change, you're just giving them the taxes on the value of the contract to make sure they take home the net amount.
 
Capt. Factorial said:
This is correct. There's no way around it. Which is why if we want to eliminate tanking we have to look to a new paradigm which you and I both see.
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Yep. Why I went with a selection based model. It’s not perfect, as no system is, but as along has you had very clear ranking criteria it would allow seeding for drafts without tanking.
 
Not sure about tanking in general but the NBA did at least make it borderline pointless to be the worst team in the league.

The Kings might have a way to look good if they start winning some games. After playing around on tankathon for a minute, yeah, F being the worst team. It's basically a 50/50 bet to be at 5 which would for sure be the Kings luck. The Kings are in a strange spot to end the season since they did trade for Hunter and surely want to see what Murray and Hunter look like before the end of the year. They definitely don't want to look like total crap to end the season if they play them together. It better be Carter, Nique, Hunter, Keegan, and Max/Dylan to end the season and yes, some wins to go with it. Maybe push up to 2 or 3 and look good in the eyes of the NBA?
 
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