NBA could flatten out its draft lottery
For years, people in the media and in NBA front offices have lobbied for draft lottery reform.
This year, change might occur. Despite many competing ideas over the years as to the best fix, a slight tweak could solve the league’s quandary: Even the odds among potential lottery teams.
Under a new proposal, the highest odds of the No. 1 pick (25 per cent) would no longer be given to the worst team, followed by the next two poorest records (at 19.9 and 15.6 per cent).
Instead, those three teams would have the same chances of landing the No. 1 pick, while teams behind them would have a greater chance of leaping up in the lottery.
Getting one of those top picks is not a guarantee of success. The Warriors, for example, drafted only one of their core players, Stephen Curry, in the top 10 — and he was taken at No. 7, back in the 2009 draft.
Under the current system, it makes sense for teams to deliberately tank. With the difference between the odds of winning the top pick varying from 25 per cent to the 4.3 per cent for the seventhworst record, teams have incentive to increase their odds as much as possible.
The proposal being examined by the competition committee is also a creative implementation of what has long seemed like the most obvious way to fix this problem — going back to the flat lottery system, when all 14 teams that missed the playoffs had the same chance to jump into the top three — without making teams think they might be better to avoid making the playoffs to have a chance to jump to the top of the heap and get a stud in the draft instead.
But the solution on the table now could be implemented as soon as the 2019, and it makes a lot of sense, as it removes the incentives to lose at the top of the lottery without creating them at the bottom.