"You're The Worst!" Lottery fix

[urinesane]

Saw this article posted over on RubeChat and thought people would enjoy it here.

I think it's an awesome idea and is probably the best solution to the current lottery's issues.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/05/nba_draft_lottery_2015_how_to_fix_the_broken_nba_draft_system_and_prevent.html

[Klomp]

That's pretty dumb.

[urinesane]

That's pretty dumb.

Why?

[Foye]

Actually to come up with the idea is kinda cool but all GM's would go on riot.

Also, what are they going to do if someone picks the team that was on the clock at first as next worse team? Then there would be a major uproar who is allowed to select next.

Not even going to mention how it makes those already risky trades involving 1st round picks even more risky.

[MaxMN]

The Rubes seem to like it, except Adam Silver.

[LordBaldric]

I had a very similar idea to this years ago. It would probably even drive up TV ratings because now each fanbase has a team to root against.

[mondry]

I guess I don't see how this really fixes anything and just makes it extremely awkward in a lot of ways. You can still tank to have first shot to select the 76ers or knicks or whoever you think the worst team will be.

Any solution would have to have some kind of reward for winning games so my idea would be to give every team a set amount of points based on their record for the season so the worst team would get something like 200, 2nd worst 195, 3rd worst 190, and so on while a middle team would get around 150, and all playoff teams get 100. Then for each win on the season your team gets +1 point so the GSW's would have 167 points. (100 for making the playoffs and 67 for having 67 wins) (although maybe playoff teams shouldn't get the bonus point for winning, would need to study this more, it does give them incentive to keep playing hard even if they lock up the playoff spot with games to go.)

Then, instead of having a draft order, prospects eligible for the NBA draft are "auctioned off" where any team can blindly bid points on that prospect to draft him for their team. So if KAT is auctioned off first and hes the guy you want, you can bid all your points on him but if not, you can bid nothing on him and hold off. This is extremely cool because you don't have to find a trade partner to trade up or down, you can simply manage your points however you see fit. Because it's a blind bid, you don't know if you have the winning bid or not, so the best players will still eat up a vast majority if not all of a teams points, it'd be really risky to try and low ball.

Keep in mind their are no second round points, the points you start with can be used anywhere throughout the draft. Theoretically that means you could have the most points in the draft but come away with like a WCS that falls and say 2 more late first round players if you so wanted to do that or you could have the 3rd most points in the draft but blow them all on Okafor and maybe steal him away. If you lose a bid you retain your points.

So looking at it, let's say the worst team had 15 wins, they'd get 200 + 15 = 215. Now the 2nd worst team had 21 wins 195 + 21 = 216 and thus they'd have the most points in the draft. 3rd worst team has 24 wins so they get 190 + 24 = 214. As you can see the points end up being very close and it does a good job of giving the worst teams a lot of points for a top tier player but limits the benefit of flat out tanking significantly.

This also gives trading an interesting new spin, every team would have the 100 points to spend (you can't get less than that, even if you make the playoffs) so you could trade say 40 points for a player or 40 points + lavine, or whatever, much easier to work out trades pre or mid season involving points rather than draft picks.

Obviously I created this system in like 20 minutes so consider it a very rough draft but it looks fun. Do you blow all your points on a top tier prospect or do you manage them well to go after a few good but not great players? Do you look for straight up value? etc.