11 Teams hold 75% of tradable draft picks

[Rainwater]

Is this good or bad for the league?

Can a league survive with 2/3 of the teams unable to rebuild through the draft properly?

Is it time for a revised Stepien Rule to protect Front Offices from themselves?

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Not a bad thing. Typically most of the teams who have draft capital are those who are trying to rebuild and need talent. And those teams giving up their capital are trying to compete right now and don’t really need them. I think these things balance themselves over time. And there are always other ways to attain talent, there are always going to be trades and free agency.

The truth is that only 5-6 teams are really on the verge of 'contending'. Not 19

True but there are whole lot of teams who are not rebuilding or contending but “trying to compete”. This is pretty much half the league and includes teams like the Knicks, Cavs, Heat, Min, Sac, etc.

[Anticon]

Sounds awesome until you end up drafting Romeo Langford.

Accumulating picks is increasingly a strategy for GMs to cover up a lack of team building prowess. OKC being an exception.

[Cavsfansince84]

Compare this now to back when teams near the bottom instead of trying to use picks to become good were trading them away for cash. It's this way now because some teams recognize its much better to rebuild with lots of picks while others are making win now moves. It's the way it should be or else just make it so teams can't trade picks at all but then they'd just draft the player and have to trade him afterward.

[VanWest82]

For some reason this thread made me think of Joseph Fiennes speech in Enemy at the Gates.

We tried so hard to create a society that was equal where there'd be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there's always something to envy. A draft pick, a free agent signing. Somthing you don't have and want to appropriate. In this world, even an NBA one, there will always be rich and poor. Rich is picks. Poor in picks. Rich in talent. Poor in talent. Your picks aren't coming back.

[louc1970]

OKC - 15
Utah - 13
San Antonio - 12
New York - 11
Brooklyn - 9
New Orleans - 9
Toronto - 9
Portland - 9
Orlando - 8
Houston - 7
Memphis - 7

Was curious how many picks these teams actually have. These 11 teams own 52% of all first round picks in the next 7 drafts (minus swaps). I find that more interesting than the 75% of all tradable picks. Basically 1/3 of the league have half of all first round picks.

I think OKC had 21 future firsts at one point. That’s 10% of all possible firsts.

And all 1 of those teams could be classified as a destination team - NY. Free agents will not flock to those other teams unless the money is overpaid.

[louc1970]

.[/quote]
But that is true of any and every team. You can look around the league and have fans of particular teams that are unwilling to trade a player currently getting single digit minutes because of what the player could be.

[Anticon]

For some reason this thread made me think of Joseph Fiennes speech in Enemy at the Gates.

We tried so hard to create a society that was equal where there'd be nothing to envy your neighbour. But there's always something to envy. A draft pick, a free agent signing. Somthing you don't have and want to appropriate. In this world, even an NBA one, there will always be rich and poor. Rich is picks. Poor in picks. Rich in talent. Poor in talent. Your picks aren't coming back.

Amazing lol

[Dan Z]

Sounds awesome until you end up drafting Romeo Langford.

Accumulating picks is increasingly a strategy for GMs to cover up a lack of team building prowess. OKC being an exception.

Not every pick works out and the Celtics did trade one of the Nets picks to get Kyrie (nobody could predict he'd turn out like he did).

Also, the Celtics used other Nets picks to get Tatum and Brown, who are the leaders of their current team.

[louc1970]

Every cycle still requires GMs to hit on their picks. Several years back fans were fretting over GSW having a dynasty and picking Wiseman. Sometimes the pick just does not materialize.
For OKC this coming draft, they need to make one of two moves. 1 move existing youth for the missing piece. Or 2 move picks for the missing piece. That is the only way it makes sense.

[Anticon]

Sounds awesome until you end up drafting Romeo Langford.

Accumulating picks is increasingly a strategy for GMs to cover up a lack of team building prowess. OKC being an exception.

Not every pick works out and the Celtics did trade one of the Nets picks to get Kyrie (nobody could predict he'd turn out like he did).

Also, the Celtics used other Nets picks to get Tatum and Brown, who are the leaders of their current team.

For sure, I more so mean the mass collection of picks that on the margins don't lead to much, compared to getting the high value picks you mention.

A lot of the picks out there are from top teams and are limited value as assets.

[wegotthabeet]

OKC - 15
Utah - 13
San Antonio - 12
New York - 11
Brooklyn - 9
New Orleans - 9
Toronto - 9
Portland - 9
Orlando - 8
Houston - 7
Memphis - 7

Was curious how many picks these teams actually have. These 11 teams own 52% of all first round picks in the next 7 drafts (minus swaps). I find that more interesting than the 75% of all tradable picks. Basically 1/3 of the league have half of all first round picks.

I think OKC had 21 future firsts at one point. That’s 10% of all possible firsts.

And all 1 of those teams could be classified as a destination team - NY. Free agents will not flock to those other teams unless the money is overpaid.

Brooklyn is too obviously.

[HotelVitale]

Is this good or bad for the league? Can a league survive with 2/3 of the teams unable to rebuild through the draft properly? Is it time for a revised Stepien Rule to protect Front Offices from themselves?

i think "tradeable" makes this sound more extreme than it is. It doesn't mean that 11 teams own 75% of picks. Teams can't trade consecutive picks, so even if they traded the max picks they can, they still have a pick in every other draft. A lot of those "untradeable" picks are also the result of swaps. You can't trade the pick if you already swapped it (and I don't think that trading swap rights is counted as a "tradable pick here). More are untradeable due to protection on certain picks. If you owe a top 3 protected 2025 pick that becomes unprotected afterwards, then you can't trade your 2024 pick (as that would violate the no first round picks in consecutive years Stepien rule if the 2025 pick conveys then) you can't trade your 2025 pick (as it would potentially be going out anyway as you already traded it), you can't trade your 2026 pick (as it might be going out then if it doesn't convey in 2025 and if it does, trading the 26 pick would violate the Stepien rule) and you can't trade your 2027 pick as if it conveys in 2026 rather than 2025, trading the 27 pick violates the Stepien rule. So basically a team has three picks in four years to use in the draft, but because of a trade with fairly normal protections, none of those three are counted as "tradeable" picks. Teams can still rebuild through the draft in this situation. They just can't rebuilt by trading their draft picks.

Yup, exactly what I though when I saw the headline. If you boil it down it's more or less the equivalent of saying a third of the teams in the league have like 1 extra draft picks in 3 of the next 6 drafts. Which is kind of a lot, sure, but it's pretty small/marginal thing in the grand scheme of the NBA.

Even OKC, which has a record-shattering stash of extra picks, has just 7 extra over the next 7 years. It's an impractical amount and they won't be able to use all of them, but it's not like they actually completely control huge swaths of the draft for years to come. And conversely teams that have traded away all their trade-able picks for the next 6 years still have at least 3 picks over that time, meaning they should all have at least a couple 1st rounders on rook deals on the roster at any given time (unless they trade them as young players). Add in another 2nd rounder and maybe a two-way guy who's playing well enough to stick, and that's a pretty reasonable amount of young guys to have around.

[HotelVitale]

I never said it should be fair, or that it isn’t functional. I said it is bad for the young guys coming in. While it is true that they will make more in a year than some make in 10 or 20 doing real jobs, it is also true that the league has less than 550 guys at any given time. This is not something that just anyone can do. Some guys who might have had a real career will be hurt by the crunch. .

^See above--'crunch' is very unlikely to be a thing for more than a few teams, having a few extra first rounders spread out over 4-5 years really doesn't effect things very much. And that's assuming those teams with the largest amount of extra picks don't trade a bunch of them, and at least some of them will.

This is also definitely not a new thing at all--just looked at a couple random drafts and in 2010 25 of the top 45 picks were traded, and in 2014 it was 22. The last half of the 1st round and top part of the 2nd had a majority of traded picks both years, PO teams have always been shipping picks off for win-now help. Doesn't seem like there's any historical norm in which each team has roughly the same amount of young players draftd in the 1st round at any given time.

I do think more teams are trading away like 3-4 1st rounders than used to happen, even if it's only a few teams and even if many of them end up recouping some 1sts down the line. True that a few guys might end up having shaky development environments because of that, but that also has always happened quite a bit for various reasons. Seems like more than half the prospects in the league feel like they weren't given the proper space and opportunity etc to develop.

[Jamaaliver]

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[JonFromVA]

I wouldn't mind swaps having the same Stepien limitation as picks, but even the Nets recovered in short order from the Pierce/KG trade debacle and while a drafting a great player is invaluable, 19 year old one & done players often require years of development and millions invested for a payoff that may not come until the player is well in to his next contract.

[John Murdoch]

Presti needs to cash in for Markanenn

[NoDopeOnSundays]

Looks like one of those good problems to me

[Jamaaliver]

I think one of the issues that most bothers me is that some teams (looking at you OKC) literally don't have the roster spots to even house all the draft picks they own.

A ton of young guys will become NBA vagabonds as a result.



Let's call it "The Pokusevski Paradigm".

RIP Poku


Gone but not forgotten.

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[Jamaaliver]

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[Special_Puppy]

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Pelicans+Knicks+Thunder seem to be in a good spot!