NBA Considering Draft Wheel System To Eliminate Lottery

[76ciology]

I was expecting more like "the wheel of fortune" type lottery system where each GM would spin the wheel and see where their pick will land.

[truthiness]

This type of thinking is exactly why the NBA will never live up to other professional sports. So basically you want the same teams playing year in and year out for the championship rather than have a level playing field with more parody? The NBA would thrive a lot more in more markets if smaller market teams were able to compete just like in the NFL. You talk about talent going to clubs that are in the dregs of the league, but what happened to the days when players wanted to stand alone and lead a team on their back? Now we have a bunch of cry babies dictating where they go to play and having 2 or 3 super teams. That is just boring. Nobody wants to see the same **** every year.

I love parody.
I want more parody.
I think you contribute a lot to the parody on these forums, so thank you.

[truthiness]

You can never have the parity in the NBA that you have in the NFL, NHL, or MLB(well not so much because of spending there) because one superstar has more impact in basketball than any of those other sports. Maybe with the exception of if you had a goalie on the level of Dominik Hasek in his prime in the NHL, but even then the offense has to score some goals.

Adrian Peterson since he came into the league has been either the best or 2nd best RB in the entire league every single season. Where has that got Minnesota? You have to be smart with building your entire team.

In the NBA you need your 1 mega-star and then usually a 1-B and then you're a contender. But there's not very many of those guys out there and those guys when they become FAs often bolt to one of the lucrative major markets. Barring something like lifetime contracts and allowing 1 MAX contract per team with the next highest paid player at half the salary of your MAX contract you can never have anything approaching parity in the NBA. You are always going to see haves and have nots. Removing the lottery basically makes it even harder for a have not to luck out and get a star for 3 or 4 years until they bolt to another team.

I would argue the opposite.
In the NBA is way harder to build a champion.
Even incompetent GMs can stumble on a (semi)contender if they have a legit superstar (Otis Smith with the Magic, or Danny Ferry with the Cavs), but taking the step from contender to champion is much harder.

One and done playoffs allow for chance to play a bigger role, allowing weaker teams to beat teams to whom they'd lose in a 7 game series. In the NBA it means that the Cavs, Magic, Pacers and every other team that played the conference finals might have been a champion now.

But as it stands now, you have to build a REAL champion.
And there are very few GMs able to do that, that's why there is a limited number of teams that won titles over the last 20-30 years.

[JazzMatt13]

Seriously, they should just go back to the territorial draft, where teams can have the players, at least for 1 round, from their surrounding area.

If they did that for NFL....Utah would have the best team in the league....

[PDXKnight]

This system would clearly favor the perennial contenders and conceivably could give teams like SA and LA and endless ability to be the number 1 team for the forseeable future. I just don't see the logic in making the rich richer and the poor poorer. While some teams are perennial losers, other teams (such as cleveland with lebron) lose their stars to big market teams and I can't see this move not pushing teams down that are legitimately trying but can't attract a good FA because of location and market.

[GANGSTERDOG]

Seriously, they should just go back to the territorial draft, where teams can have the players, at least for 1 round, from their surrounding area.

If they did that for NFL....Utah would have the best team in the league....

dont you mean Bama and Florida....

[BigLos2010]

The system I've been coming up with goes like this:

-The lottery is held in front of everyone, and only for the first three picks.
-Every team that averages less than 45 wins a season for the last three seasons gets a ping pong ball.
-There are still guaranteed draft slots based on record (The worst team can't draft lower than 4th, the second worst team can't draft lower than 5th, etc.)

This eliminates teams tanking for one season, it potentially helps boost those perennial 5th-8th seeds into the top tier, and it still guarantees that the bad teams will have a shot at top level talent even if they don't win a top three pick.

[Dolphin Lips]

Just go with the NFL system with the worst team with the worst record get the #1 pick and if theres a tie with a team with worst record coin flip.

This promotes tanking even more than the current system.

THEMECCAMSG CHNAGE YOUR FCKING AVATAR NOW

[br7knicks]

I was expecting more like "the wheel of fortune" type lottery system where each GM would spin the wheel and see where their pick will land.

me too. i might tune it to see it take place had it been like this.

[sanity]

lol. yessss... the wheel of misfortune!

they should do it all live so the camera can pan in on the face of the GMs as they land on 'bankrupt'

[sanity]

This system would clearly favor the perennial contenders and conceivably could give teams like SA and LA and endless ability to be the number 1 team for the forseeable future. I just don't see the logic in making the rich richer and the poor poorer. While some teams are perennial losers, other teams (such as cleveland with lebron) lose their stars to big market teams and I can't see this move not pushing teams down that are legitimately trying but can't attract a good FA because of location and market.

Its clearly just an attempt to discourage teams from not being competitive... I think playoffs seeding is a problem and the incentives for actually making the playoffs as a low seed (and often getting bounced in 4 games), as opposed to finishing within the lotto, is really out of whack. The bubble teams are the problem with the league... since they fail to get better or finish worse off enough to get a franchise-altering player, and probably suffer financially as a result

[Woody Allen]

I think a potentially better system would be rank teams according to revenues/arena attendance. That way you make sure that small market teams that the veteran stars shun at least get their young stars through lottery and thus increase fan interest to their team, sell more tickets and are eventually able to spend more to become competitive.

The team wins, the NBA wins, the economy is stimulated.

[ponder719]

I think a potentially better system would be rank teams according to revenues/arena attendance. That way you make sure that small market teams that the veteran stars shun at least get their young stars through lottery and thus increase fan interest to their team, sell more tickets and are eventually able to spend more to become competitive.

The team wins, the NBA wins, the economy is stimulated.

That one would get shot down pretty quickly by the league, which almost certainly wouldn't want to reward fan bases' decision to stay home in droves. They're not in the business of intentionally granting their best incoming assets to places that aren't supporting the team financially.

They might go for a system where teams are ranked based on arena revenue per win, where they divide the arena revenue by the team's number of wins, and the team that has the best fan support per win gets the top pick (though that ends up rewarding a good team that tanks a year, if the fans aren't fair-weather), but there's no way on earth that the league would go for a system where fans have an incentive to stop giving the league money.

-------------

Edit: I think I had a better idea, though I suspect it's been proposed before. Fans ostensibly like basketball. The NBA ostensibly wants to reward teams that try. The NBA definitely likes more money. Why not have a series of mini-tournaments to determine the former lottery slots?

The worst 4 teams in the league play. Worst plays 4th worst, middle two play. Winners of those two games play to determine which team gets #1 and which gets #2. The losers of the first two games play to determine #3 and #4.

Repeat the process for #5-8 and #9-12. The two teams in the 13th and 14th slots play one game to see which gets 13 and which gets 14.

The teams are incentivized to win, because that improves their chances for next year. The NBA gets 13 more games with actual consequences, in places that don't get to see a lot of consequences usually. There's more basketball, more revenue, people don't automatically improve their odds by being terrible, the only issue is scheduling this. Do you do it before the playoffs, during, or after? Frankly, it might make sense to start it immediately, and play the 13-14 game and 9-12 tournament during the first round, the 5-8 tourney during the second round, and the 1-4 tournament concurrent with the first games of the third round (have the 1-4 games as the early games, and put the conference finals games later in the evenings), so it's all over and the "lottery" is set just as you're getting to meaningful games in the conference finals, with the NBA Finals standing alone and untouched.

[PDXKnight]

This system would clearly favor the perennial contenders and conceivably could give teams like SA and LA and endless ability to be the number 1 team for the forseeable future. I just don't see the logic in making the rich richer and the poor poorer. While some teams are perennial losers, other teams (such as cleveland with lebron) lose their stars to big market teams and I can't see this move not pushing teams down that are legitimately trying but can't attract a good FA because of location and market.

Its clearly just an attempt to discourage teams from not being competitive... I think playoffs seeding is a problem and the incentives for actually making the playoffs as a low seed (and often getting bounced in 4 games), as opposed to finishing within the lotto, is really out of whack. The bubble teams are the problem with the league... since they fail to get better or finish worse off enough to get a franchise-altering player, and probably suffer financially as a result

Bubble teams sort of put themselves in that position in many cases. Usually with a bubble team there's an owner who's not willing to make a risky move that may cost money but will result in wins and he's also unwilling to give up ticket revenue to tank. Basically mediocrity sells enough tickets to make money but its not gonna win you a title and cheaper owners are willing to trade away key pieces and sacrifice a run merely to break even as a result of not shoveling out big contracts. Granted I think in some circumstances not paying a player is in a team's best interest but as we all know, some owners take cheap to another level and in the end it costs their franchise dearly when it comes to winning a title. Plus there's the fact that a lot of owners don't bring in good enough scouts and ultimately if you're gonna run an organization the cheap way you need good scouting to keep things running proactively along with an owner's willingness to at least retain his main 2 or 3 guys.