When it comes to incentives, the NBA has it backwards. The fact that the league encourages teams to under-perform every single season in hopes that they will get a franchise player who is “the next big thing” in their starting 5 is absurd. And what’s even more absurd is that teams actually stoop so low as to throw their season in the tank and fail to compete in every game, every single season.
The NBA draft lottery is the primary contributor to this shameful strategy.
Some view it as a problem that needs to be addressed and others see it as simply part of the game. But with increased support of its elimination, a team official has submitted a new proposal that suggests the lottery system be replaced with a draft wheel.
The proposal has sparked some interest among some high-level NBA officials and it may be officially offered up to owners in 2014.
The breakdown of the proposal, according to Grantland’s Zach Lowe is as follows:
“Grantland obtained a copy of the proposal, which would eliminate the draft lottery and replace it with a system in which each of the 30 teams would pick in a specific first-round draft slot once — and exactly once — every 30 years. Each team would simply cycle through the 30 draft slots, year by year, in a predetermined order designed so that teams pick in different areas of the draft each year. Teams would know with 100 percent certainty in which draft slots they would pick every year, up to 30 years out from the start of every 30-year cycle. The practice of protecting picks would disappear; there would never be a Harrison Barnes–Golden State situation again, and it wouldn’t require a law degree to track ownership of every traded pick leaguewide.”
This would obviously have a major impact on trade negotiations and strategy in picking up players.
Lowe offers a graphic that better illustrates what the draft would look like for teams, pictured below.
https://twitter.com/NBAPICTURES1/status/415193895849299968
As the wheel shows, each team cycles through the draft slots so that a team who picked first one year would then pick 30th, 19th, 18th, seventh and sixth over the next five years in that order. This way every team is guaranteed one top-six pick every five seasons, and at least one top-12 pick every four seasons.
This would eliminate the incentive to under-perform and throw away the rest of season because every team follows the same pattern and has a roughly equal six-year cycle. That alone would improve the competitiveness of every team in every game, season after season. There is no reason to be bad anymore.
The NBA needs to cut the thread that ties being very bad and getting a high draft pick together. The wheel system that this new proposal suggests will eliminate the shameful act of tanking, which will boost the overall competitiveness of the NBA and business, as fans accept a spirited game with open arms. Now there would be room to build around young talent and the hopelessness that swallows many teams would quickly turn into eager anticipation and belief. Plus, the NBA might no longer be the most predictable of the four major U.S. sports leagues, in terms of single-game outcomes.
The only drawback is that it is unfair that top teams could get top pick, but the way the system make its roughly equal over a six-year cycle makes up for that in the long-run.
The draft wheel is one of the most well thought out systems that covers all aspects of the changes it would create. And this proposal shows that the NBA is taking tanking seriously and it is definitely worth considering if league officials want to make a change.
It’s exciting that there is potential for incentives to rise around something other than being as bad as possible in the NBA.