Post#756 » by spolgar » Sat Sep 21, 2013 6:07 pm
Essay time:
If we want to stop tanking, what we have to address is how one can reduce competetive parity quickly. This means we have to throw out the textbook of rebuilding through the draft as 'the proper way', and make trades and free agent acquisitions easier.
To do it with draft picks is to a) rewards luck b) rewards tanking and c) reward long term talent evalutaion and d) does NOT reward short and medium term business acumen. I can see why folks have an issue with it. However, the biggest issue here is that we are penalizing people for tanking year after year, when in reality expansion franchises or new ownership generally have no choice but to start anew, and have to rebuild for at least 3 years. They aren't tanking, they just suck and rebuilding means sucking for a while.
It is also not out of the realm of possibility that a young prospect decides not to co-operate, demand to be traded, or heaven forbid, get injured within the first few seasons. Most of the time, there is more than enough blame to go around as the situation worsens, but it's seldom the sole responsibility of the business. Meanwhile, the NBA product as a whole is losing value.
The NBA is a business to make money by entertaining people, and what the audience craves are the usual cadre of winners and likeable up and comers challengers. You can have bad guys win, you can have good guys lose, but in the end, the fans want to smell blood and are spoiling for a good fight. Very few people wants to pay 50 bucks to go see a boxing match and have it be over in 3 rounds, so why would anyone want to watch a regular season game where the game has been decided by the half.
To stop tanking, something like 'The Decision' should happen every other year. As a team, if you win 30 games or less, you get to pitch to which ever free agnet you want and sign them for however much they want to be paid. Furthermore, you should be allowed to go over the cap to do it. However, luxury tax considerations will still hold. The caveat here is that the player gets to stay on that contract for only 1 year and the team loses your bird rights. So the team gets to get their draft picks, the team maintains some respectability, and the star player doesn't want to tank. He'll go hard as hell for some large figure, say 40 million a year. Then the season ends, the player can look around his situation. If they win more than 30 games, he can't resign for over the cap now, so he can opt to stay with the team under the constraints of the salary cap as a free agent signing. Or he can decide to bring his game to another desperate employer. If he can't bring a 15+ game difference and at least take a lottery team from the previous year to the first round again, he's unlikely getting signed for 'over the cap' money ever again.
In the long run, this will stop tanking. You'll see a lot of stupid owners in the interim try and short cut their way to the conference semis and realize that they just paid 80 million for a rental. But you'll also see a lot of smarter free agents and new ownership take a gamble and revitalize a fan base.
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