League finally attacking tanking
In an attempt to limit tanking, the NBA is proposing a revamp of its draft-lottery system meant to disincentivize the league’s annual race to the bottom.
Among the ideas being floated is a push to worsen the chance of the league’s bottom-feeding teams in getting the top picks in the draft. As it is, the team that finishes 30th in the 30-team NBA has a 25 per cent shot at the first-overall selection. The proposed system would see that percentage decreased. In fact, rather than granting the 30th-place team a considerable advantage the proposed system, first reported by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, would see the teams that finished 28th, 29th and 30th receive identical odds of landing the No. 1 pick.
There are other changes being considered, too. But suffice it to say the league is pushing for a method of determining draft order that, in some cases, makes dumb luck a bigger factor than wins and losses. Such is the state of competitive integrity that the NBA has decided it would rather reward good fortune than devious intentions.
That’s understandable. The Philadelphia 76ers, after all, have picked in the top three of the draft for four straight years — landing the No. 1-overall pick in each of the past two. That the Sixers intentionally ran their franchise into the ground to get those picks is hardly a secret. Their unsightly .229 winning percentage over the span ranks worst in the NBA by some margin. Whether the cadre of young talent born of that futility will ever redeem Philly’s sins against the spirit of the game — well, let’s just say Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid will need to have exceptionally blessed careers to ever come close to restoring the balance.
In the shamelessly capitalist world of sports, drafts are inherently socialist. In the NFL and Major League Baseball, where the team that finishes with the worst record still gets the first-overall pick in the draft, they remain wholly so.
But the NBA is different. There isn’t a team sport in which the insertion of a single star rookie can change the fortunes of a franchise so fundamentally. The Houston Rockets certainly realized this back in 1984, when they dropped 17 of their final 22 games in what turned out to be a successful tank job for the top pick in that year’s draft, a Hall of Famer now known as Hakeem Olajuwon. Olajuwon was the prize in the days when the NBA decided the first-overall pick with a coin flip between the worst team in each of its two conferences.
The Rockets won that coin flip, but their late-season nosedive drew enough of the ire of competing owners that the NBA instituted the draft lottery the following season. In other words, the league invented the lottery to discourage tanking. Now they’re revamping it for the same reason. All of which suggests tanking probably isn’t going anywhere, especially when the young talent on offer is deemed sufficiently worthy.
No matter the sport, desperate teams will do extreme things for the chance at a franchise-changing injection of skill. Witness the Maple Leafs circa 2015-16, trotting out Garret Sparks as the starting goaltender in the ‘Awful-for-Auston’ stretch run. That the Leafs won an NHL draft lottery patterned after the NBA model — and that they did it with a mere 20 per cent chance despite finishing dead last in the league — is one of the big reasons why they’ll enter the coming season as a Stanley Cup contender.
Still, it’s probably not a bad thing for the NBA to go the route of the NHL and inject more randomness into the lottery process — even if there’s a risk that, with too extreme a tweak to the process, a good team could find itself getting exponentially better thanks to the bounce of the ping-pong balls.
No matter the odds structure, the lottery can be a fickle thing. While the Cleveland Cavaliers have reaped plenty of benefits from the tank job that won them LeBron James in the 2003 draft, not every bottom-bent team gets so lucky.
When the Raptors won the lottery in 2006, they were the fifth-worst team in the league and held just an 8.5 per cent chance of landing the top pick. So maybe it made sense a team that had no business winning the lottery ultimately landed a player who had no business being a No. 1 overall pick (that’d be Andrea Bargnani, of course).
Not that a No. 1 is necessary for success. The Golden State Warriors built the core of a championship team through expert drafting, but only Steph Curry was picked in the top 10, at No. 7.
And the Warriors offer an awfully compelling argument that teams are better off diligently developing from within than intentionally losing out. As Michael Jordan said back in 1986, when he accused Chicago Bulls management of holding him out of late-season games to improve Chicago’s draft position: “Losing games on purpose reflects what type of person you really are. No one should ever try to lose to get something better. You should always try to make the best with what you have.”
That ought to be the idea. And that’s clearly an old-fashioned mindset that commissioner Adam Silver and the NBA are hoping to foster by tweaking the lottery system.
Still, should a next-generation Jordan be eligible for the draft in days to come, it’s hard to imagine any tweak that will keep ambitious bottom feeders from doing what’s necessary to maximize their odds.