Envelope wrote:All the big accounting firms are crooked. During the Enron scandal they prosecuted ALL of Arthur Anderson, the company as a whole, just so that it would go from Big 5 to Big 4 accounting firms.
Think about it, big companies and the super rich pay minimal taxes, or less. And the Big 4 accounting firms help them do it.
So say I grant you this - that corruption is rampant and I can't put any faith in
any of the parties involved at a personal level. Now I need a suspect, and a means, motive, and opportunity.
- Who is the suspect? The commissioner personally? Is he paying the bribes out of his own personal funds? The Board of Governors? Are all 30 NBA teams in on it? Some collection of people on
this list? Propose to me a specific roster of conspirators that makes sense to you.
- The motive is supposedly "money". Money for whom? The single team that gets the top pick? Or do they crunch the numbers and decide that one particular team getting the top pick this year will help the health of all 30 teams the most overall? Or is the commissioner doing all this to line his own pockets, simply taking the largest bribe offered from a team in a given year? Just saying "money" isn't enough - who is actually benefiting, and what does that benefit profile look like?
Risk/reward also need to be accounted for in "motive". If the risk/reward profile is evidently, ludicrously bad (which it is), "motive" becomes a much harder sell. (See the linked article below, which does a good job making this point - a conspiracy on this level could destroy the NBA, and take down a lot of people, so you'd better be pretty darned positive that giving AD to New Orleans or Lebron to Cleveland is worth it.)
- Means: magnetizing the ping pong balls, or similar. Watch the 2014 lotto
here and 2015
here. I don't find that plausible, but this is probably the easiest bullet point to come up with something for.
- Opportunity: In a small room, just feet in front of reps of the 14 lotto teams, reps from E&Y, and 5 members of the media;
recorded and then
put online for anyone to watch who cares to.
Matt Moore wrote:Let's say for a minute that the NBA decided this was a good idea. How would they go about it? Well, for starters, they wouldn't just do it.
They would commission an internal report outlining the pros and cons of perpetrating a massive conspiracy on the public while also violating several tenets of fair practice in its relationships with the owners of the other 29 teams. Now, they would need for that report to indicate that the benefit of providing a first-round draft pick that could just as easily turn out to be a bust as a Hall of Famer outweighs the potential for public humiliation and rejection of their product, lawsuits from their owners and possibly the violation of federal law.Yeah, that definitely sounds worth it.
So assuming that report comes back with that magical conclusion, which it would not, they'd have to go about putting it into effect. Easy enough. Magnetize the ping pong balls, however you want to do it, getting the balls to pop up is easy. Of course, they don't have complete control over this, the process is overseen by the accounting firm of Ernst and Young, which if brought in on the scam, would also be liable for whatever consequences the reveal of the vast, dark conspiracy would hold. But hey, they're laywers, let's say that works.
Then all they have to do is manage to perpetrate the fraud without alerting the other owners or by bringing them in on it,
and then make sure that the hundred or so people who would have to be involved in this process don't leak it. You know, this from the same league that can't keep its voting, officiating, or front office decisions under wraps.
That sounds likely. Wait, did I say likely? I meant completely and totally implausible in any scenario.
It's easy to make up conspiracy theories for any team that wins it. I just like saying it's rigged because it's the only way I can cope with how unlucky the Celtics have been (I'm looking at you 1997 and 2007 drafts!). I'm also saying that the Lakers will win it to mentally prepare myself in the unfortunate situation that they do (granted, Ben Simmons isn't turning that franchise around). 
