Help me explain to my 7 year old Kid why NBA rewards Losing with Draft Picks

[KembaWalker]

theres a lot of stuff wrong with competitiveness in the league right now
bad teams sometimes getting good draft picks is definitely not one of them

[NyKnicks1714]

He tells me this is against the value of rewarding good performance and punishing bad performance. I told him it for the parity of the league but he argued that there is no such thing as parity in the classroom. Those students that gets a E grade should not be receiving extra bonus merits just to pass the semester.

Continuing the analogy, let's say the teacher provides extra help for students after class. They adopt a system whereby the best students receive the most amount of time to ask questions, and more advanced concepts are covered. The students doing poorly are only given very limited time to ask questions and the more basic concepts barely get covered. I'd say that's a bad system.

[Clemenza]

I believe the league used to reward the best teams. The Lakers drafted James Worthy with the #1 pick in the draft right after they won the championship back in 1982



-And giving bad teams top draft picks is more of a business model to increasing revenue as opposed to a moral standard principle

[shotsquatch]

Wonder when the red scare will be over for you poor Americans.

As soon as corporate interests are separated from the mechanisms of popular media and government.

So, never.

[mg]

Tell your kid it's a participation award... or like No Kid Left Behind.

The truth of the matter there are only a handful of cities where multi millionaire NBA guys want to play. If there wasn't a draft some of these mid tier teams would never escape the basement. Most of the stars drafted will eventually end up in one of those desired markets at the end of their 2nd contracts though.

[shotsquatch]

He tells me this is against the value of rewarding good performance and punishing bad performance.

That's not a value. It's a medieval conception of justice founded on cruelty and indifference.

It is not a moral good to reflexively punish bad performance. The humane course of action is to identify the root causes behind bad performance, determine which ones are fixable, and allocate the resources necessary to rectify them.

But that's beside the point. NBA parity is not a moral issue, it's a business decision. Awarding losing teams with lottery picks is a mechanism for increasing profit potential in failing franchises. The league is more popular when there are 30 competitive teams instead of one or two dominant powerhouses.

Sounds like your kid has a lot of garbage ideas about right and wrong floating around in his head.

[hyper316]

Ya, like many here said, draft pick is not the reward, it's a resource

However, I feel like intentionally tanking is like a child purposefully perform poorly on test in order to gain extra help (i.e., extra time to write a test - parallel to the college admission scandal)

There's more similarities in this discussion of NBA vs. kids in classroom. Some kids have privileges (family makeup, skin colour, race, social economic class, etc.). NBA also have privileges (market size, location, weather climate, tax laws, etc)

I think even at a young age, it is good to bring up talks about privelege, not to condemn but appreciate and recognize to use those priveleges to help others. NBA does it with some shared revenue with larger market teams with smaller market teams. How do kids help one another without being labeled as "pity"? That's a tough question I don't have answer at this moment.

[ItsDanger]

League wide revenues > local revenues.

[KyRo23]

Could you make the title of this any more dramatic?

[nomansland]

The NBA is a business and entertainment is the product.

In order to keep as many people as possible engaged, it needs to create interest among fans of the lower-performing teams. One of the ways it does that is by giving them hope that the next generation of great players will be drafted by and play for their teams. If the bad teams were always getting more and more bad players, the fans would go away and the league would eventually consist of 10 or so teams.

It's not rewarding bad teams - rewarding is the wrong word. It's trying to balance out the talent so that more people are interested and remain interested, and in theory over time it makes for a much more competitive and interesting product. Because, again, the NBA is a business and the games they put on the floor are the product.

[DeBlazerRiddem]

Because the NBA is about making money and teams that lose too much don't make money. And even if they do it's bad for the NBA brand.

[Lalouie]

He tells me this is against the value of rewarding good performance and punishing bad performance. I told him it for the parity of the league but he argued that there is no such thing as parity in the classroom. Those students that gets a E grade should not be receiving extra bonus merits just to pass the semester.

he is right.

and in sports,,,parity is a myth. parity does not mean everyone is good. it means everyone is "bad" or average because if you look at a bell curve there is no way in the universe that the bulk of that curve becomes "good". parity is lack of good/great, but i digress. i have never been a fan of the lottery because there's no incentive to be good, rather, teams are comfortable being mediocre. but i digress again.

just tell your kid that as a money making entity, the nba feels it's better for the league as a whole to ensure competition and it is impossible for EVERYONE to become good on their own. ask your kid if he likes watching bad teams. tell him all teams share revenue so they're all sitting on a pile of cash anyway just point to the bell curve and point out that it is not possible for that big part of the curve to all become that small part to the right, so they need help in the only way sports knows how,,,,and it is the easiest thing for sports to do rather than hope the FO will get better

[Stribor]

Teams that lose are typically low in talent. The draft distributes talent to the teams that need it most.

But this is different from the values we teach our students

Then you teach them wrong. The value of NBA is money. More parity creates more interesting matches which creates more money. For the win you get rings and contracts, but the player distribution over the clubs is a compromise between interest of the league, of the franchise owners of the players and of the laws.

[Bergmaniac]

I believe the league used to reward the best teams. The Lakers drafted James Worthy with the #1 pick in the draft right after they won the championship back in 1982

James Worthy was drafted with the Cavs 1st round pick (they were the worst team in the league in the previous season) which got traded to the Lakers a few years earliar in one of the many deals which made Ted Stepien infamous for being the most clueless NBA owner ever.

[Hornet Mania]

Higher draft picks are not a reward. They are a tool the league uses to ensure that eventually bottom-rung squads can someday rise and top-tier teams eventually have to spend a bit of time near the bottom when they rebuild after a long run of success.

It's not only not a reward, it's not meant to be fair either. It's strictly meant to make bad teams valuable (via star prospects) so fans of bad teams have a reason to not permanently walk away from the league.

[Capn'O]

Your kid would like "The Wheel."

[Neutral 123]

because giving all the top prospects to the winning teams every year ensures that the teams on the bottom have no recourse to get better?

it's a flawed system but much better than the alternative, sry.

The arguable alternative would be to eliminate the draft and allow players and teams to negotiate their own deals.

So that way the league doesn't have to reward anyone for anything.

Then the Knicks just become good because they have more money than everyone else.

That doesn't really sound that much more competitive from an athletic point of view.

Any system has its trade offs. Despite lots of money, free agents don't want to sign there. Simply having the most money still necessitates a budget, a good GM and players that want to play there.

[SF_Warriors]

Used to work a ton with first and second graders for years (6-7 year olds) and NEVER have they brought up social issues like parity in the classroom, especially in a direct comparison with something else. Hell, if I were to ask, most of them would probably say yes we should help the kids that are struggling because it is the right thing to do. They usually do not have a great understanding regarding constraints of resource allocation or opportunity cost btw, so of course they would say we should help the other kids not realizing how taxing it would be for the teacher or school. You can sit them down and try to explain stuff like this to them, and its good to get them thinking about certain aspects of life, but even then they just dont simply care nor have the ability to discuss those kind of things in depth.

So either OP is full of it, or complains so much to his kid about the nba lottery process that now the child has a fundamentally flawed way of thinking about it.

[dc]

I believe the league used to reward the best teams. The Lakers drafted James Worthy with the #1 pick in the draft right after they won the championship back in 1982

James Worthy was drafted with the Cavs 1st round pick (they were the worst team in the league in the previous season) which got traded to the Lakers a few years earliar in one of the many deals which made Ted Stepien infamous for being the most clueless NBA owner ever.

Yeah, as someone mentioned before, the Superteams of yesteryear were created when guys like West and Red were just that much smarter than the rest of the league (i.e. the Stepiens of the world).

The Celts got the pick they used for Len Bias (#2 overall) in a similar deal with the Sonics. Imagine if Bias went on to have an actual pro career...

[ForeverTFC]

Ban teams from having a top 5 pick in back to back years. Run the lottery as you normally would, if a team lands in the top 5 for a second year in a row, move them to 6th and move everyone up.

Discourages The Process but still allows teams to up talent level. A one year tank is not an issue.