NBA Lottery Tournament

[NewlyKnicked]

Here is an article from SI's Andrew Sharp describing an idea of a tournament to decide the pick order in the lottery:

https://www.si.com/nba/2018/02/28/nba-l ... ver-reform

Basically it would be a two-round tournament. A first bracket would regroup the teams ranked 17th to 24th. The winner of this bracket would join a second bracket made of the worst teams of the season. The more you win the better the pick you get. Some details are left out. For example, I guess it would be death matches but the author doesn't say it clearly.

The advantages:
- The two-step organization ensures that the worst teams get a pick in the top 8.
- Tanking is less efficient as it only gets you in bracket #2
- Meaningful games as it gets you a higher pick
- Teams on the correct path but still far from contenders (as the Jazz) get a chance to get talent through draft
- More games, leading to more TV revenue

I like the idea. The precise lay-up could be optimized I think, but the idea is better than anything I've read on draft reform so far (and much better than the so-called "reform" underway).

What do you think?

[spree#8]

The general thought of the worst team having the highest odds to pick the best young player is a good thought and does a lot for the long-term competitive balance, so I would be against a lottery tournament.

[gradyandrew]

The general thought of the worst team having the highest odds to pick the best young player is a good thought and does a lot for the long-term competitive balance, so I would be against a lottery tournament.

Agreed. The biggest problem now is the wide disparity amongst the somewhat negligible differences between wins and losses and chances in the draft. I don't believe that the worst team should have a 25 times, as under the current system, or a 14 times greater chance as under next year's changes, chance of winning the top pick. I also don't like that you are guaranteed anything. If you can get to the worst record, you're still guaranteed at worst a top 4 pick.

My recommendation would be to smooth out the odds and base them off of final win percentage. The odds would change every year and nothing would be guaranteed until the final game. A 20 win team would basically have twice the amount of tickets as a 40 win team and then all the picks would be chosen by lottery. That might give bubble teams some what more of an incentive to back out of the playoffs the last week, but I doubt it. Making the playoffs is generally the best job security for GMs and coaches.

The advantage would be that there would be very little benefit for teams to race for the bottom as there wouldn't be much of an incentive to do so.

The problem with a play in tournament for picks is that we already have a regular season. I don't think many people would be interested in the shittiest teams slugging it out. By the end of the season I want to see the best ball, not the worst.

[gradyandrew]

Any type of bracket system is susceptible to tanking. That's the problem with the current system of playoff and non playoff teams anyway. If you're going to suck then you should suck as much as you can now. If the inter lottery teams also had a separate bracket (for the top 8 picks), teams on the margin would have a big incentive to tank. The question is, how do you reduce the marginal benefit of losing. Any draft reform that doesn't do that will always create incentives to lose.

[NewlyKnicked]

The general thought of the worst team having the highest odds to pick the best young player is a good thought and does a lot for the long-term competitive balance, so I would be against a lottery tournament.

The current draft system is a total ineptitude.

The idea behing it is nice but the balance is forced making the whole league flawed. This system incites bad teams to get as worse as possible. And only fools would think the reform changes that. I'm afraid considering Philly's presumed future success that we're going to see a lot more Processes with teams tanking from the start for multiple years waiting to get a sufficient talent pool. However if tanking becomes endemic more and more teams will aim for the bottom making tanking less efficient and Processes longer. If it takes too long to assemble all the pieces deemed adequate to start winning, good players getting out of their rookie contracts may want to see some results instead of being purposely handicaped by their own FO and they may leave before the Process is done, making the losing permanent. The end results of the actual system could very well be two distinct groups of teams: the top contending for the title and the bottom looking to be as bad as possible. Nothing in between as the middle range is as inefficient in the ranks as it has been revealed to be on the floor. The season would then be a string of blowout wins and total shit shows intersected by a couple of games between good teams where these teams would probably rest their best players actually.

Losing on purpose is just plainly against the philosophy of competitive sport entirely.

The worst part of the draft system is that it punishes teams in the middle fighting for the playoffs, actually trying to win and to find solution to relative lack of talent. Fans should cheer for every comeback wins, every surprise upsets, any improvement in the W-L section. They should never have to wish for their team to lose, benching their best players, feeling somewhat glad if their franchise player gets injured for the rest of the season. That's it. I just can't stand looking at the Knicks results hoping for the worst.

I think the idea of helping bad teams for long-term balance sake is still somewhat present in this tournament system as a bad team will always have a top pick guaranteed. The tanking however would be rendered almost inefficient as it'd be almost impossible throughout the season to lose on purpose while retaining a competitive team. As often said, players want to win and they'll do just that if the team is good enough. I agree the best spot would then be to be the top team in the second bracket (25th spot), but Idt anybody can purposely aim for that place from the start. Maybe the last few games would see some tanking, but nothing close to the shit show we have to witness nowadays with 9 teams cumulating a magnificient W-L record of 17-73 over the last 10 games (yes a brilliant 19% win rate). And this number is sure to get worse as we get closer to the end of the season. The tournament would force the bad teams to improve their level throughout the season as they would need to prepare for the end of the season.

Players are competitors and I'm sure the entire basketball level would benefit from all of them giving a shit for real.