The player newsNBA presented its Board of Governors with three anti-tanking conceptsearlier this week as part of the league meeting held on Wednesday in New York, according to sources that spoke to ESPN's Shams Charania. Each proposal will likely be modified before a formal vote that is scheduled for May.
In the first proposal, the NBA Draft Lottery would expand to 18 teams. The participants would include the bottom ten teams in the league, as well as the eight franchises that qualified for the NBA Play-In Tournament. The ten worst teams in the league will each have an 8% chance of moving up in the draft, while the remaining 20% will be divided amongst the Play-In teams in descending order from 11th to 18th.
The second proposal will expand the Draft Lottery to include 22 teams: the bottom ten teams in the league, the eight Play-In teams, and the four teams that lose in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. Lottery odds will be determined by teams' records over the two most recent seasons. Under this system, every team would be required to hit a minimum win total each season. For example, if the minimum win total for a season were 20 wins, then a 14-68 team would be seen as a 20-62 team for lottery purposes. Conversely, a team that wins 40 games one season and 20 games the next would be seen as a 30-52 team in the Draft Lottery.
The last proposal would utilize a "five-by-five" method. Under this system, the same 18 squads from the first proposal (the bottom ten and eight Play-In teams) would be entered into the NBA Draft Lottery. From there, the organizations with the five worst records would all have the same lottery odds, with the odds descending from there. After that, there would be a lottery drawing for the top five picks in the draft. Then, there will be a separate lottery drawing for the next 13 picks.
"I do think ultimately this is a decision that needs to be made at the ownership level," said league commissioner Adam Silver on Wednesday. "It has business implications, has basketball implications, has integrity, integrity, implications for the league. So it's one that we take very seriously, and we are going to fix it. Full stop."
Are these really good solutions?
Call me crazy, but I’m not sold on any of these proposals. All three of these concepts don't punish tanking. Rather, they reward teams for failing in the playoffs and the Play-In Tournament. Playoff losers and Play-In teams can move up in the Draft Lottery under all of these concepts. These ideas will not stop tanking.
Proposal one suggests that each of the bottom ten teams in the NBA has an 8% chance of moving up in the Draft Lottery. How does that persuade franchises NOT to tank? Teams are still going to want to ensure they have a good position in the NBA Draft. So when they face Play-In teams and playoff qualifiers, those bottom ten squads are not going to try to win those games.
Proposal two is slightly better, but still flawed. Let's go by the example cited earlier, where the minimum floor for a season is 20 wins. Let's say a team hits the 20-win mark with 16 games remaining on the schedule. What's to stop that squad from tanking those games purposefully for the rest of the season? Plus, the top four picks would be chosen through a lottery system, which is how the NBA Draft operates currently. The bottom-four teams will still be inclined to tank in that case.
Under the third proposal, the five worst teams in the league would all have equal Draft Lottery odds. Therefore, teams will be trying to lose as many games as possible to ensure they have a bottom-five record in the league. Let's look at this season. The sixth-worst team in the NBA is the Dallas Mavericks (23-50), while the Utah Jazz have the fifth-worst record (21-52). Why would the Mavs be motivated to win games when they can keep losing and potentially take the Jazz's spot in the lottery for a top-five pick?
These proposals are okay. They will likely lead to less tanking amongst the league's mediocre and middle-of-the-road teams. But for the absolute worst franchises in the NBA, these concepts will not actually discourage them from losing games on purpose. Granted, these are the first ideas that the league has proposed, but none of these feel like solutions to the issue of tanking.
NewsNBANBA Board of Governors Presented with Three Anti-Tanking MeasuresAbout
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