By TheScore.com December 23, 2013
http://www.thescore.com/home/articles/2 ... ft-lottery
One of the largest talking points early in the NBA season has been tanking, the process of teams systematically being bad in order to improve their draft position and thus, hopefully, improve their future outlook.
It's led to several teams with ugly rosters and, most importantly, fans openly rooting against their teams in the hope of more hope (in the form of "ping pong balls," or better lottery odds).
This is obviously something the league should be and is concerned about, because it's terrible for the on-court product and completely abhorrent from a moral perspective.
The proposal would "eliminate the draft lottery entirely and replace it with a system in which each of the 30 teams would pick in a specific first-round draft slot once — and exactly once — every 30 years." That is, a team would select first, second, third...28th, 29th and 30th every 30 years, in a predetermined order.
The order would also shuffle so that teams don't pick high multiple times in a short span (something more like first, then 30th, then 19th, then 18th and so on). And most importantly, "Teams would know with 100 percent certainty in which draft slots they would pick every year," which would, in theory, completely eliminate the incentive to tank.
(It would also make the trading of draft picks incredibly interesting, but that's a very minor point unrelated to the core issue.)
Each team would receive a top-six pick every five years and a top-12 pick every four years, thus eliminating situations of teams picking high year after year.
And again, it also completely eliminates any incentive to be bad, since your draft position is pre-determined. This is the huge benefit and the main selling point; it would kill tanking, period.
benji help.
