Drawing up a new lottery for sports
THE NBA’s lottery is Thursday night, so for the 36th straight year there will be much anticipation about ping-pong balls and probability tables, and the ways these things shake out that always leave one team delighted, some teams depressed and a small army of fans who wonder if there’s a better way to do this.
The lottery was hatched with the best intentions in 1985, namely to combat tanking, which was a relatively new concept in the mid-’80s. The Rockets had pulled off a superb tank job in 1983-84, allowing them to back up picking Ralph Sampson with the No. 1 pick in ’83 with Hakeem Olajuwon in ’84. The Penguins had done likewise that same year in the NHL, which allowed them to snag Mario Lemieux.
(Both teams, not coincidentally, would win multiple championships as a result of their monuments to self-sabotage, a key thing to remember.)
So lotteries were born in an effort to fix the loopholes in drafts, which themselves were born in the various leagues to fix problems caused either by geography (the NBA used a territorial draft for many years) or rich bank accounts (it was no accident that the first Yankees dynasty died the same time the baseball draft was introduced, in 1965).
And lotteries have been tinkered with through the years — sometimes to ludicrous extents, which is why you needed a degree in astrophysics to figure out the NHL’s two-tiered lottery this year. There have been different mathematical formulas through the years employed to distribute basketball and hockey players (while the NFL and MLB simply adhere to the old-school worst-picks-first draft).
And it remains an imperfect system. It feels like the worst thing that should happen in sports is that mediocrity is rewarded, yet that happens all the time in the NBA. And look, it will be wonderful for New York City that the Rangers somehow got the 1-1 in the NHL draft, and will almost surely add Alexis Lafreniere to last year’s 1-2, Kaapo Kakko.
But there has to be a different way, a better way. And in a year when there is no forcertain NBA No. 1 franchise centerpiece (as there was last year with Zion Williamson), it seems a good time to wonder what that might be.
So here is my modest proposal, which I offer free and unofficially today, and with great enthusiasm if I am ever appointed the Grand Poobah of American Sports. We do this understanding the four sports will never unite like this, but I invite you to suspend disbelief for the next few paragraphs and have a look at My Plan:
Welcome to a New Way
For those who dislike drafts in general, it is anathema to reward poor play. But the fact is, though some organizations — take a step forward, Knicks — do immerse themselves in decades of mismanagement, not all bad teams are recalcitrant offenders, and their recovery has to start somewhere. That somewhere, always, involves fresh talent. We think of playoffs being a gluttonous endeavor but every year there are more non-qualifiers:
MLB: 20 (for now, pending likely playoff expansion).
NBA: 14 (likely to stay that way for a bit). NFL: 18 (with newly expanded playoffs). NHL: 16 (once Seattle joins next year). In this plan, every non-playoff team is eligible for a lottery system, but with provisions.
PHASE 1: The Super Lottery
In each sport, the No. 1 pick will be determined exclusively by the very worst teams in each league, but in such a way that tanking would guarantee nothing. Determining the participants is easy:
First, the worst three teams, by record (and ties; if the thirdand fourth-worst teams have the same record, let them both in).
In addition, any team not in the bottom three that achieves a predetermined threshold for number of losses to be called calamitous. In MLB that would be 100; in the NFL 14; in the NBA 60; in the NHL fewer than 69 points.
These teams all have equal odds in this phase of the lottery, and each pick is individually determined. If Team A wins, it gets 1-1. The others re-draw; the winner of that gets 1-2. And so on.
The only way this works is to offer automatic lottery protection. If, say, the Knicks had sent their
No. 1 to the Mavericks as part of the Kristaps Porzingis trade, then wind up in the lottery, they retain the lottery pick but then have a choice of one of two punitive measures: either forfeit their next
No. 1 to Dallas, or pay a predetermined monetary amount (large enough that it would sting and not be the automatic choice).
PHASE 2: The Second-Chance Lottery
A prime flaw of lotteries as they stand is, for example, how the Rangers (barely out of the playoff hunt when the pandemic hit) or the Pelicans (bad but not woeful in 2018-19) wind up snatching a priceless asset away from a team that desperately needs rejuvenation. So in this plan:
The remaining non-playoff teams are grouped here.
Each team has equal odds. In the NBA, for example, assuming a four-team superlottery, that leaves 10 teams in this phase, each of whom would have a 10 percent chance to win and therefore get the No. 5 pick.
There is only one drawing, and only the winner moves up. In the NBA example, the other nine teams would then revert to where they previously stood, worst-tobest.
There is no lottery protection for these teams. If you made a bad deal, you pay the piper, and the team you dealt with gets your pick.
PHASE 3: The Playoff Lottery
Maybe it really is fair that the very best teams must always get the very worst draft picks, but the teams I’m fascinated by are the ones at the end of the draft who don’t win a title. It seems there ought to be a carrot for them. So in this plan:
The playoff teams are grouped here. As in the previous phase, each team has equal odds to move up to the front of the line. In this case it would be 16 teams, each with a 6.25 percent chance of moving up for the 15th pick in the draft.
As in Phase 2: one drawing, one winner, no lottery protection.
Is this perfect? Even a Grand Poobah would have to admit nothing is perfect. Is it better than what we have in all four sports? My vote is yes.
Yours?