drsd wrote:UCFJayBird wrote:What if the odds were a composition of the team's record/performance at various checkpoints throughout the season? For example maybe half your odds were determined during the first third of the season. Then another quarter of those odds were determined during the second third, and then the last quarter were determined by the last quarter of the season? also maybe the lottery is more restricted in terms of potential movement. You can only move up 3 spots. So the top 4 have a chance at #1, and the worst team can't slip past 4, and 4th worst has a shot at 1, but can't slip further than 7th.
That would promote a 1994-95 Houston Rockets roster. That is, injured players for the first third of the season leading to aged vets to miss lots of the season and then get healthy as a 6-seed to win a title.
The players would 100% get behind this and I do think the fans would like to see such rosters (as the Nets is a popular example this year).
,..
But what about a young team that simply sucks for half a season, and then "gets it" late season, should they be punushed for playing better ball?
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It is an interesting idea, but I am not sure how it would effect competition itself.
Regarding the Rockets scenario - if you make the playoffs, you're not in the lottery. But even if they just barely miss the playoffs, i'm envisioning a system where a) that late surge pushes you up far enough in the lottery that you can't get a top 5 pick, and b) there'd be some kind of adjustment made to your odds/positioning that factors in key injuries. For example if you've got an all-star that misses a large portion of the season because of injury your score gets bumped higher, because when he's healthy your team is significantly better than the record dictates. Unless it's a career ending surgery or something to that effect, because then you're punishing a team more that just lost a potential franchise player. Maybe there's nuance to how the adjustment is made. Did he miss the whole season or only part of it? did he miss the first half of the season or second half? Was it one injury or several? etc.
Or maybe, random thought as i'm writing, maybe your draft position should be more of an average over the last few years. Lottery odds are predicated on your performance over the last 3 seasons, not just this last year. This would prevent a team like Golden State having their best players out a single year and landing a top 5 pick because of it. edit: maybe with the average you wouldn't even need the lottery, just go in order by worst record over the last few seasons. A team would have to commit to tanking for several years to get into the top picks.
That would be easier to implement and teams would have to tank for longer, making it less advantangeous.
BCS wrote:Interesting take, so, wait, you want more tanking?
Of course not. i think this type of system would discourage it, because most teams don't actively try to tank the entire season. There's a few who are just bad, but you don't really see true tanking until at least the midway point. So maybe this causes teams to tank the whole year, but I think fans wouldn't put up with that and we'd see drop in ticket sales, etc quite quickly, so teams wouldn't be able to sustain it. It's one thing to tank half the season, it's another to tank from the jump. So I think teams would still be trying the first half of the season, then because their draft position isn't as significant (odds aren't as heavily impacted by late season and injuries, plus if they're at 10th, even if they tank to 7th they wouldn't be able to get higher than the 4th pick, and that's if they got lucky). A lot of variables though, and certainly could be ineffective.
Just trying to think outside the box, lol.
