NBA Draft Lottery Reform Will Have Unintended Consequences

http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2014/8/19/6030297/nba-draft-lottery-reform-tanking-competitive-balance



NBA Draft lottery reform will have unintended consequences
By Tom Ziller  @teamziller on Aug 19 2014, 10:09a 118




Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports
Ending tanking comes with a cost to competitive balance. Is the trade-off worth it?



Anyone who followed the 2011 NBA lockout knows the phrase "competitive balance" should come with a trigger warning.

NBA officials, led by then-deputy commish Adam Silver, insisted that competitive balance was the driving force behind a laundry list of reforms to the league's economic system. From a stricter luxury tax to new restrictions on the types of transactions high payroll teams can make, competitive balance was the official rationale. Silver, his then-boss David Stern and owners lamented that so many teams entered a season with little hope of even making the postseason, let alone winning a title. Many of the reforms approved in the new collective bargaining agreement were presented as solutions to that problem.


These days, there's a different reform we talk about in NBA circles: the draft lottery. The league may take action before the season begins and establish new odds for the 2015 NBA Draft, despite the protests of the Philadelphia 76ers. As I've argued, lottery reform is a thing precisely because Sixers GM Sam Hinkie has so effectively and so nakedly played the draft to his advantage. That's not a criticism of Hinkie or his plan -- under the current system, it's a totally valid strategy that's considerably less destructive than some would have you believe.

But the brutal honesty of Hinkie's gambit sparked a whole lot of outrage and a push for immediate reform. Apparently, Silver is on board with a few tweaks to the system to drop the likelihood the very worst teams will guarantee themselves a top pick.

What's interesting to me, as I first wrote about in March, is how these two reform movements play against each other.

There is diversity among the NBA's cadre of horrible teams. Not every ugly club is engaging in institutional tanking. Consider last season. Those Sixers finished with the league's second-worst record after scraping most of the veteran value off of the roster. But the Milwaukee Bucks were even worse ... and not on purpose. Before the season, the Bucks loudly stated their intent to make the playoffs, and were held up as the counterexample of the Sixers and their ilk. Milwaukee was the team that would not tank.


As we covered at length, sometimes the tank comes for you. The Bucks rolled through a carnival of maladies to a 15-67 record. Unlike in Philly, that wasn't the desired outcome. But desires don't really matter when the ping pong balls come calling; the altruistically failed Bucks ended up picking No. 2 and the tactically horrid Sixers picked No. 3. There is no Basketball God. (Ask Portland.)

To be successful in the NBA, you need stars. The easiest way to get a star is to draft him. Half of all NBA stars are drafted within the top five picks. The best way to get a top-five pick is to be among the five worst teams in the NBA. Like it or not, this system is in line with the idea of competitive balance: you strengthen the weak teams in the hopes that they can catch the strong teams. If you alter that system to hurt the chances of the weakest teams to improve and democratize the odds of getting those high-pick stars to some degree, you are working against competitive balance.

Under the proposed reforms, a team like the Suns -- who barely missed the playoffs with a well above .500 record -- would have better chances of landing a top-five pick. Meanwhile, the odds of the worst teams to stay in the top five would decrease. The league would be creating a greater chance of the rich getting richer at the expense of the worst teams.


Lottery reform certainly has some competitive balance benefits. By removing part of the incentive to be awful, more teams could try to be competitive every season. Teams like the Magic, who last year continued their multi-year rebuild by loading up on minutes for project players, could have prioritized winning a bit more knowing that being really bad wouldn't have helped much more than being just bad. The idea is that you'd have fewer teams acting like the Sixers, Magic and Celtics and more teams acting like Hawks, Suns, Cavaliers and Kings. Atlanta made the playoffs in the shallow East. Phoenix was the best lottery team ever. Cleveland tried hard to win. Sacramento attempted to boost its win total to spark an attitude reversal.

But the Cavaliers and Kings still stunk, just like other try-hard squads like Milwaukee, Detroit, New York and New Orleans. And here's the dirty secret about competitive balance: unless you have every single team in the 35- to 47-win range, you're going to have awful teams every season. The best way to get those awful teams back on the horse as soon as possible is to give them the best incoming players via the draft.

Does the benefit of shrinking the incentive to tank outweigh the consequence of hurting the cleanest tool of competitive balance available to the league? This is what the NBA must realize when it comes to draft reform.

And this applies not just to the lottery reform proposal on the table: all ideas need to be filtered through this prism. The NBA pushed a lot of policy changes in the name of competitive balance, policy changes that affect teams and players a great deal.

Is it worth unwinding some of that progress to appease the vocal opponents of the minor scourge of institutional tanking?




bob



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There are three reasons to modify the draft lottery:

1. To minimize incentives for tanking.

2. To eliminate the possibility of one franchise "lucking" its way into the top pick an inordinate number of times (the Cleveland scenario, where they got the number 1 pick three times in four years and four times in 12 years).

3. Promote greater fairness.

This article is all about item 1, but the others are important, too.

Well, at least the Celtics escaped the label of "stunk" (which I submit should have been "stank":  Stink, stank, stunk.  Like sunk: Sink, sank, sunk.  (And think, thank, thunk.  Aren't exceptions wonderful?)

If anyone's still with me, one reason I've always placed the draft lower than trading in terms of ways to improve a team is that improving through the draft is a slower process.  A second reason is that a team gets one shot a year in the first round (unless it makes expenditures to acquire more picks).  A third reason is that eighty-three percent of the teams in a given draft do NOT get top five picks.  And a fourth reason is that success in the college ranks is no guarantee of success in the pros.  And a fifth reason is that, although drafting the best available player instead of for need is a popular refrain, it often takes time—through one device or another—for that drafted player to translate into real help for the team.

A traded player is more likely to be a known quantity.  He is usually acquired because of need.  A team can make multiple trades before and during a season, matching the number ant type of trades to the number and type of needs.

It could be argued that a lot of stars were high draft choices.  Conversely, there's no guarantee that even a number one pick will become a star.  And, if it's a swing and a miss, the team can wait another 365 days for another shot if no one minds sucking for another whole season.

Stars can be acquired by trade.  It was true in Wilt's time, and Kareem's time, and Shaq's time, and KG's time, and Howard's time—just to name a few big men; it's just as true at other positions.

In short, I believe trades have much more direct bearing on expeditious team building or improvement than draft picks do. 

My comments have nothing to do with the topic of lottery reform, the topic of this thread.  But, as I've so frequently stated, I believe that virtually everything in basketball has a context.

The context in discussion on lottery reform is the overall value of the lottery in building or strengthening a team.  I believe the entertainment value of the draft hype may have at least impact on fans as the actual draft results have on teams.  Or perhaps I misunderstand the true utility of the 7,642,995 mock drafts and the lotter-related television events that occur each year.

Sam