Yeah I agree having a cut off for odds at some point like 2/3 of the way would help with tanking. Now as long as theres any end point you will always have some but in reality the bad tanking is just the last 10 games of the season or so.Walt_Uoob wrote:I was just refreshing myself on how the bubble affects the draft lottery (see here: https://www.si.com/nba/2020/06/16/nba-draft-2020-schedule-dates) and I realized that it's inadvertently brilliant. The way it works is that draft odds for the 14 teams that don't make the playoffs (post-bubble) are determined by their pre-bubble records. So for us, for example, even if we pass a few teams in our bubble quest to make the playoffs, if we fall short we still get the 10th best odds in the lottery.
So here's the brilliant part: they should mimic this every year. On lottery day, or maybe at some point before that, there's one extra drawing to randomly determine a date in between the trade deadline and the end of the season, and then everyone's draft odds are based on their regular season records through that random date. So tanking at the end of the season is totally disincentivized. The only situation where it would make sense is if you went on a late-season tear like we are doing now, but a) tanking is way less likely when you're making a legit playoff push, and b) there's no guarantee that you'll be rewarded anyway, because the date drawn could end up being one of the last few days of the season.
I guess there could still be some mid-season pre-trade-deadline tanking incentive, but with the flattened odds and the arbitrary date, you'd really have to go full Hinkie and tank all season to have any assurance that it would help much.
Another counterargument would likely come from teams that had really hard late-season schedules, so their records for lottery purposes would be sort of inflated. But as it stands there are those games we've been discussing where playoff teams rest their players at the end of the season, so to some extent it works both ways.
Sometimes people get a little overboard with what they consider tanking, some teams are just young and bad and that's fine you'll always have some of that.
I proposed an idea in the bubble thread that would kind of do this. Basically do away with conferences and you play each team twice (58 games).
After that 58 games the bottom 10 teams are removed and lotto odds locked and they would then play each other twice (18 games) and these games would either just be for development or you could even build in a lotto odd reward for winning.
Then take the top 10 teams and they are locked into the playoffs and just play 18 games for seeding.
The middle 10 play 18 games for the final 6 slots and the 4 who don't make it are the last 4 lotto teams.
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Vassell and Riller would be incredible for us. But IF Vassell is already off the board at 10, How would you feel about Riller and Paul Reed? Or Riller and Jalen Smith. Originally, I wasn't as high on Reed as a switchable elite versatile defender, But recently came across his big time improvement to his shooting mechanics and his ball handling. The two areas I had concerns over. And am now pretty high on him as a big prospect that has the potential to switch and guard positions 2-5! 
