NBA about to implement anti-tanking measure?

[Brickowski]

Sure, but you're still moving the goalposts. You're judging Sam Hinkie as sucking when he came in after they blew up the team.

 

No, he completed the process that his predecessors had begun (by trading away Iguodala) by:
1. Trading away Holiday and other assets for the pick that became Noel
2. Trading away Turner, Hawes and Lavoy Allen for what amounted to a boatload of second round picks
 
Along with drafting MCW and Embiid (who any GM would have taken), those are his signature moves, right?
 
So far the boy with the Stanford MBA has produced two unwatchable teams (last year and this year).  I wonder how season ticket sales are going.

 

[Grin&MartyBarret]

No, he completed the process that his predecessors had begun (by trading away Iguodala) by:
1. Trading away Holiday and other assets for the pick that became Noel
2. Trading away Turner, Hawes and Lavoy Allen for what amounted to a boatload of second round picks
 
Along with drafting MCW and Embiid (who any GM would have taken), those are his signature moves, right?
 
So far the boy with the Stanford MBA has produced two unwatchable teams (last year and this year).  I wonder how season ticket sales are going.

 
During the course of the last two pages you've criticized Hinkie for taking Noel then conceded that there wasn't really a much better pick on the board outside of a project that lasted until pick 14, and you've praised his Embiid pick in a backhanded manner, insisting that every GM in the world would have done the same thing. Essentially, you're acknowledging that Hinkie hasn't had the opportunity to do much better than he has, and then screaming "But what has he done?!"
 
Further, Hinkie turned a guy who this week was ranked the league's 18th best PG (yes, yes I know how subjective such rankings are) and turned him into a top 6 pick. The "other asset" you're referring to was a single 2nd round pick. Think about that. On this very board there are probably 3 dozen posts, written by you, about how there is no market for Rondo because the PG position is very deep. Hinkie got a top 6 pick for a worse point guard than Rondo

 

[Brickowski]

I don't recall commenting much on Rondo's tradeability. And the discussion of the Greek kid had to do with MCW, not Noel.
 
Hinkie traded his best player (along with some other minor assets) for a prospect with a torn ACL.  Let's see how it turns out.

 

[TroyOLeary]

You realize that he also got another first round pick in addition to Noel right?
 
Which became the 10th pick in 2014, which he then traded to Orlando for the 12th pick (Dario Saric) and a 2015 second rounder.

 

[zenter]

So far the boy with the Stanford MBA has produced two unwatchable teams (last year and this year).  I wonder how season ticket sales are going.

 
1) Who cares what his academic pedigree is? That is the basest of Fox News style "blue collar elitism". Just... Stop it.
 
2) You are judging a bad team's GM by its on-court product? It's like judging an architect by the naked rebar. Wait at least until the concrete has set, man.
 
3) Are you saying Noel + Saric is worse than Holiday? Based on what? Seems like you're begging the question in your assessment of things (ie, you're saying something along the lines of "Jrue Holiday has had a better NBA career than these two guys.") Realistically, the 76ers get a total of 8 cost-controlled years of a couple high-ceiling players for a mid-tier (~15/3/8) PG. Not a bad return.
 
If Hinkie's looking at 2016 (which he's all but said), who cares if the on-court product in 2014 is a mess?
 
4) You're asking the 76ers to predict that Giannis Antetokounmpo (note: dude's a human being. Google his name, copy/paste) is going to be better than the people drafted ahead of him? Why? Putting aside that international (cough cough Drako Mlicic) players are a crapshoot, do you expect GMs see into the future? That's like asking people to know that 2006 dregs Kyle Lowry and Rajon Rondo would be better than top picks Randy Foye and Andrea Bargnani.
 
In sum, you're criticizing Hinkie for not being superhuman and then judging him poorly against the absurdest of expectations of fielding a better product now while drafting better and fielding a better team in the future, too.

 

[TroyOLeary]

Yeah it's complete hindsight to say the Sixers' should have taken Giannis.
 
Here's a collection of 2013 mocks: http://www.nba.com/news/2013-consensus-mock-draft/
 
Out of the 12 mock drafts referenced, exactly 1 had him going top 14, and that was HoopsWorld listing him at 10.

 

[mauf]

Sure, but you're still moving the goalposts. You're judging Sam Hinkie as sucking when he came in after they blew up the team.

Sam has a legitimate claim at being the dude in basketball best able to synthesize metrics and general basketball knowledge to build a team. (If he's not, he's top three.) You are not. Neither am I, but I'm deferring to the dude who I know is.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I'm curious why you hold Philly's FO in such high regard.

 

[Brickowski]

 
1) Who cares what his academic pedigree is? That is the basest of Fox News style "blue collar elitism". Just... Stop it.
 
2) You are judging a bad team's GM by its on-court product? It's like judging an architect by the naked rebar. Wait at least until the concrete has set, man.
 
3) Are you saying Noel + Saric is worse than Holiday? Based on what? Seems like you're begging the question in your assessment of things (ie, you're saying something along the lines of "Jrue Holiday has had a better NBA career than these two guys.") Realistically, the 76ers get a total of 8 cost-controlled years of a couple high-ceiling players for a mid-tier (~15/3/8) PG. Not a bad return.
 
If Hinkie's looking at 2016 (which he's all but said), who cares if the on-court product in 2014 is a mess?
 
4) You're asking the 76ers to predict that Giannis Antetokounmpo (note: dude's a human being. Google his name, copy/paste) is going to be better than the people drafted ahead of him? Why? Putting aside that international (cough cough Drako Mlicic) players are a crapshoot, do you expect GMs see into the future? That's like asking people to know that 2006 dregs Kyle Lowry and Rajon Rondo would be better than top picks Randy Foye and Andrea Bargnani.
 
In sum, you're criticizing Hinkie for not being superhuman and then judging him poorly against the absurdest of expectations of fielding a better product now while drafting better and fielding a better team in the future, too.

ok, I'll bite.
 
1.  I was reacting to the comment that he's some sort of statistical wonderkind. Hence the reference to his MBA, which (as you point out) is irrelevant.  
2. Yes, I am judging him by his bad on court product.  He was was the demolition man, not the architect. Right now he has a vacant lot.  The building hasn't gone up yet.
3. Who knows if Noel and Saric is a good return? Neither has played a single minute in the NBA, while Holiday was a productive player.  I will say that I'm not impressed with what I've seen of Noel.
4. I say "Greek kid" because I've seen his name spelled about five different ways. I bet R.C. Buford wouldn't have passed on him.
5. Well, the issue of complete teardown vs building by accretion has been hotly debated here and on many NBA websites (e.g. RealGM).  We'll see if this strategy succeeds.  My view is that it makes sense to tank for a shot at a transformational player (e.g. Duncan).  It makes much less sense to tank for a series of prospects who may or may not pan out, because you have to stay too bad for too long.

 

[Stitch01]

Sixers previous core had a 0% chance of ever winning a title, so this is clearly a better strategy if that 2% number were actually correct.
 
Also was curious why your view has changed and stars and transformational players are needed to win NBA titles?

 

[Brickowski]

Sixers previous core had a 0% chance of ever winning a title, so this is clearly a better strategy if that 2% number were actually correct.
 
Also was curious why your view has changed and stars and transformational players are needed to win NBA titles?

1.  True, their core as constituted in 2012 had zero chance.  But they could have added to it via trades, free agent signings, future draft picks etc.  Instead, they just blew it up.
2.  I said the opportunity to draft a  transformational player justifies tanking.  It is not necessary to have a LeBron James or Tim Duncan to win titles, although it certainly helps.
 
I wonder what Boston fan reaction would have been if Ainge had traded the pre-injury Rondo to NO for the package Philly received from the Pelicans. 

 

[moly99]

1.  True, their core as constituted in 2012 had zero chance.  But they could have added to it via trades, free agent signings, future draft picks etc. 

 
Here's the problem everybody else has with you. They really didn't have the opportunity to build a title contending team through trades and free agent signings.
 
After the flaming hydrogen balloon disaster that was the Bynum trade, the Sixers didn't have enough assets to build through trades. And while they technically can sign free agents, they would have to overpay to get anyone decent to sign there given the fact that the rest of the roster was garbage after they made the Bynum trade.
 
I'm not sure why a Celtics fan should need to hear to this. Because this is close to the same situation we are in. Nobody will trade us a superstar player for Rondo, Green and filler. And we have never been able to bring in all star talent in free agency.
 
So the draft is the only option to find top tier talent to build a team around. I certainly wish that wasn't true. But right now it is.

 

[Brickowski]

The Bynum trade was indeed a disaster.  Maybe everyone else is convinced that a complete blow up was he only way to recover from it, but I'm not.  Certainly it was the cheapest way, but maybe not the only way.

 

[Grin&MartyBarret]

1.  True, their core as constituted in 2012 had zero chance.  But they could have added to it via trades, free agent signings, future draft picks etc.  Instead, they just blew it up.
2.  I said the opportunity to draft a  transformational player justifies tanking.  It is not necessary to have a LeBron James or Tim Duncan to win titles, although it certainly helps.
 
I wonder what Boston fan reaction would have been if Ainge had traded the pre-injury Rondo to NO for the package Philly received from the Pelicans. 

Is there a single person here who wouldn't have taken two top 10 picks for Rondo?

Regardless, Hinkie didnt trade Rondo for two top 10 picks--he traded Jrue Holiday for two top 10 picks. And you think it was a terrible move. Jrue Holiday. Two top ten picks. What did OKC get for Harden? What did NO get for Paul? Now compare that to what Hinkie got for a point guard who may never be a top ten player at his position.

 

[DeJesus Built My Hotrod]

Is there a single person here who wouldn't have taken two top 10 picks for Rondo?

Regardless, Hinkie didnt trade Rondo for two top 10 picks--he traded Jrue Holiday for two top 10 picks. And you think it was a terrible move. Jrue Holiday. Two top ten picks. What did OKC get for Harden? What did NO get for Paul? Now compare that to what Hinkie got for a point guard who may never be a top ten player at his position.

 
 
I feel dirty just reading that.  Bernie Madoff has nothing on Hinkie.

 

[Devizier]

FiveThirtyEight polled readers for suggestions about this.
 
This was my favorite suggestion (made in many, many iterations).
 
It will not happen, but still the best in my opinion:
 

 
 
It's so simple. Just get rid of the slotted contracts for 1st round picks and make teams negotiate with their picks to sign them. This was the system until a few years ago in the NFL and it actually became a curse to have the top pick as the cost to sign a top 5 pick was typically much more than the player was likely to be worth. 

While you're at it, eliminate max caps on all contracts. By subjecting all NBA contracts to the forces of the market while still maintaining a salary cap, you'll both eliminate tanking and restore competitive balance to the league, while not changing the overall split of revenue that players receive. Max contract caps, RFAs, etc. are all idiotic when you have a salary cap in place. They just distort the market and lead to things like tanking, players having outsized control of franchises, superteams and competitive imbalance. 

Downsides? Maybe some holdouts and players sitting out a year, etc. But that's really not a big deal. Problem solved. You're welcome.

 

 

[LondonSox]

This is the only solution to me. You can't make a draft not reward the worst teams without completely changing the goal.

If the goal isn't to help bad teams get better players then just open it up to all. A team can dump all its players and sign rookies to expensive contracts. That's free markets. No problem.

People complaining about a bad team getting the best player are complaining about the concept of a draft.

 

[Nick Kaufman]

You re missing a crucial distinction. You want to help the worse team get a good player. You don't want to give an incentive for a team to play worse than it is.

 

[LondonSox]

You re missing a crucial distinction. You want to help the worse team get a good player. You don't want to give an incentive for a team to play worse than it is.

 
I see so we think we have a better way to judge teams than performance?
How many examples of problematic tanking have we really seen? There is already a lottery making tanking harder in basketball than any other sport. 

 

[swingin val]

 
I see so we think we have a better way to judge teams than performance?
How many examples of problematic tanking have we really seen? There is already a lottery making tanking harder in basketball than any other sport. 

Tim Duncan and Lebron James

 

[Devizier]

Greg Oden
Kevin Durant
Ming Yao

Pretty much any draft with one or two elite prospects will have its fair share of tankers. Obviously we've seen the Celtics do it twice in the last twenty years.

 

[Devizier]

Tanking is "harder" in basketball than in the NFL but financial reasons discourage tanking in the NFL.

 

[The Social Chair]

One draft pick in the NFL won't dramatically alter your franchise like in the NBA unless it's a once in a generation QB like Andrew Luck (and NFL teams did tank that year).

 

[bowiac]

Sixers previous core had a 0% chance of ever winning a title, so this is clearly a better strategy if that 2% number were actually correct.

I really disagree with this.
 
Taking a team from a 0% chance of winning to a 2% chance may not be worth it if the cost is 5 years of unwatchable basketball. There is value in putting an okay product on the court. There really is. You can apply your own wins vs. rings discount factor, but a value of 0/100 can't be right.

 

[LondonSox]

None of this changes the fact that the draft exists to help bad teams improve.
 
If you want to change the rules to give better alternatives then fine. But a league where the best players are worth more than they can be paid, and the team that he plays for has an advantage to retain them and where contracts are fully guaranteed, making rookies far more more valuable and less risky than any other players is designed to make you build via the draft.
 
To then screw over the teams that are bad seems to be completely missing the point. 
 
The Cavs won last year, and this helped them transform their franchise. They had no business getting the top pick and then being able to sign the best player in basketball while being a mediocre team. The result is they are huge favourites to go to the finals.
This is better for you than actually bad teams getting that chance? 
 
If so why?
 
You make it clear the best way to get a star is the draft, and then complain that smart teams risk bottoming out for this chance. The issues with most stupid proposals is that they don't' change the equation. They just make it harder for teams to do it, with the added bonus of potentially creating silly teams. What if OKC won the lottery and gets to add a top player to their guys. That's better than the Wolves Knicks or Sixers getting it because....??
 
The proposal to allow open bidding on rookies etc is fine because then there are other ways to approach things.

 

[Devizier]

None of this changes the fact that the draft exists to help bad teams improve.

 
And they can still improve if the draft is structured like the MLB and NFL draft (less so now). Exclusive rights for the current contract period. Salary determined by negotiation.

 

[moly99]

Tanking is "harder" in basketball than in the NFL but financial reasons discourage tanking in the NFL.

 
Basketball teams have to sell tickets too, and the NBA isn't nearly as profitable as the NFL. A 4-12 NFL team can still easily make a profit. What the Sixers are doing is about maximizing their chances of a title, not making money.
 

And they can still improve if the draft is structured like the MLB and NFL draft (less so now). Exclusive rights for the current contract period. Salary determined by negotiation.

 
Do you mean what the NFL draft used to be, with no set rookie salaries? History says teams will overpay for those top rookies, so while one team may hit a metaphorical home run with a Mike Trout level player, the average losing team actually loses from that system.
 
The real problem the NBA has is that there is so little incentive for marginal improvement. Seven NFL wild card teams have won the Super Bowl. Five MLB wild cards have won the World Series. No 7 or 8 seed in the NBA has ever won the title. Making the playoffs likely hurts your chances of winning a title in the next three years compared to the very low chance of winning the lottery if you miss the playoffs.
 
The focus should be on improving things for the middle of the pack, not punishing the bottom feeders.

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

I submitted an anti-tanking suggestion to FiveThirtyEight I haven't seen before and which could actually be feasible within the league's current structure: mandatory pick swaps. At the All-Star Break, the team with the worst record would choose another team with whom they want to swap first-round picks in the next draft, then the remaining team with the next worst record which hasn't yet been paired off would do likewise, and so on until every team has swapped picks with one another. (If teams have previously traded picks, the team currently owning the pick gets to select who to swap with.) This keeps an element of competitive balance - bad teams will choose other bad teams to swap with, leaving good teams to swap with other good teams - but once your draft status is no longer directly tied to your record, in theory there shouldn't be any reason to tank for the rest of the season. Indeed, the only thing you can then do to improve your draft status slightly is to make sure you finish with a better record than the team with whom you've swapped; there certainly wouldn't any reason to try and miss the playoffs in a situation like Boston's this season.
 
As a Hawks fan who has greatly enjoyed rooting against the Nets (with whom we swapped this year's first-round picks, of course) this season - and watched the Nets push for the playoffs in a situation where they otherwise might have been tempted to blow everything up - I've seen how this might work in practice this season. I suppose you couldn't stop a team like the 76ers continue wanting to suck and make sure they have the first choice of swap partners for several seasons, but at the very least the integrity of the league during the stretch run should be much less compromised. Am I missing anything?

 

[In my lifetime]

I submitted an anti-tanking suggestion to FiveThirtyEight I haven't seen before and which could actually be feasible within the league's current structure: mandatory pick swaps. At the All-Star Break, the team with the worst record would choose another team with whom they want to swap first-round picks in the next draft, then the remaining team with the next worst record which hasn't yet been paired off would do likewise, and so on until every team has swapped picks with one another. (If teams have previously traded picks, the team currently owning the pick gets to select who to swap with.) This keeps an element of competitive balance - bad teams will choose other bad teams to swap with, leaving good teams to swap with other good teams - but once your draft status is no longer directly tied to your record, in theory there shouldn't be any reason to tank for the rest of the season. Indeed, the only thing you can then do to improve your draft status slightly is to make sure you finish with a better record than the team with whom you've swapped; there certainly wouldn't any reason to try and miss the playoffs in a situation like Boston's this season.
 
As a Hawks fan who has greatly enjoyed rooting against the Nets (with whom we swapped this year's first-round picks, of course) this season - and watched the Nets push for the playoffs in a situation where they otherwise might have been tempted to blow everything up - I've seen how this might work in practice this season. I suppose you couldn't stop a team like the 76ers continue wanting to suck and make sure they have the first choice of swap partners for several seasons, but at the very least the integrity of the league during the stretch run should be much less compromised. Am I missing anything?

 
That's a great and simple idea.  

 

[Devizier]

Do you mean what the NFL draft used to be, with no set rookie salaries? History says teams will overpay for those top rookies, so while one team may hit a metaphorical home run with a Mike Trout level player, the average losing team actually loses from that system.

 
That system rewards good management. Not every team paid out crazy bills to Sam Bradford. In that same draft, Detroit did just fine with Suh, one pick later.
 
I will say that the real issue to making a competitive league is scarcity. Elite talent in the NBA is impactful in ways that single players aren't in other leagues, and there are fewer players that qualify as elite. But that's a different problem than teams intentionally trying to lose. 
 
Discouraging tanking would be very easy by eliminating the current rookie scale. It would be straightforward, unlike most of the convoluted proposals that I've seen proposed. You might see some players pricing themselves out of their draft slot, a la MLB, but that's fine from my perspective.

 

[moly99]

I submitted an anti-tanking suggestion to FiveThirtyEight I haven't seen before and which could actually be feasible within the league's current structure: mandatory pick swaps. At the All-Star Break, the team with the worst record would choose another team with whom they want to swap first-round picks in the next draft, then the remaining team with the next worst record which hasn't yet been paired off would do likewise, and so on until every team has swapped picks with one another. (If teams have previously traded picks, the team currently owning the pick gets to select who to swap with.) This keeps an element of competitive balance - bad teams will choose other bad teams to swap with, leaving good teams to swap with other good teams - but once your draft status is no longer directly tied to your record, in theory there shouldn't be any reason to tank for the rest of the season. Indeed, the only thing you can then do to improve your draft status slightly is to make sure you finish with a better record than the team with whom you've swapped; there certainly wouldn't any reason to try and miss the playoffs in a situation like Boston's this season.

 
This even further incentivizes tanking in the first half of the season.
 

That system rewards good management. Not every team paid out crazy bills to Sam Bradford. In that same draft, Detroit did just fine with Suh, one pick later.

 
The average top five pick under the old system underperformed compared to their contract. That's why the NFL felt they had to make a change. They haven't really saved money: the money the rookies would have gotten has instead gone to veterans.
 

Discouraging tanking would be very easy by eliminating the current rookie scale.

 
The problem is that even if the average top 5 pick were not worth the money, teams would still view it as a positive because it's the only realistic shot of teams in small and cold markets building a title contender.
 
There is no incentive to being in the middle of the pack in the NBA. So a even 5% chance of success through the draft is preferable to 1% chance of success as a fringe playoff team. It's the 1% the NBA needs to address, not the 5%.

 

[crystalline]

 
The real problem the NBA has is that there is so little incentive for marginal improvement. Seven NFL wild card teams have won the Super Bowl. Five MLB wild cards have won the World Series. No 7 or 8 seed in the NBA has ever won the title. Making the playoffs likely hurts your chances of winning a title in the next three years compared to the very low chance of winning the lottery if you miss the playoffs.
 
The focus should be on improving things for the middle of the pack, not punishing the bottom feeders.

 
 
Very well said.
 
This is the problem - the worst teams can't pursue a strategy of getting incrementally better every year, because once you hit the middle of the pack, you have reduced hope of getting better.  The return to adding talent in the NBA is not monotonic.
 
And I think you've got the reason right too - 7th and 8th seeds don't have a chance to win a title because there is less randomness in the NBA than in other sports.  Wild-card teams can get lucky in baseball and win the World Series.  In the NBA playoffs, talent wins out.  And the superstar foul favoritism actually makes this worse - that policy makes superstars even MORE valuable and the superstar teams more likely to win. 
 
So how do you fix the lack of randomness / lack of parity?  It's hard to know.  Some brainstorming ideas: reduce the number of games in a series (adds randomness).  Reduce the number of fouls allowed per player and expand rosters to make teams go deeper into their benches, or limit minutes per game per player (reduces impact of top talent) -- this will never happen because the NBA wants their superstars to be prominent for marketing purposes.  Shorten games, make shot clock longer, make the hoop smaller (adds randomness, but also has downsides of reducing scoring).    
Make each shot be worth a random number of points from 1-5 based on a computer program on refs' iWatches. 
 
(I didn't say any of these were GOOD ideas.)

 

[Nick Kaufman]

As has been said many times, removing max contracts and instituting a hard salary will help competitive balance. Plus, the current system is pretty convoluted as it is. I am amazed people can follow arcane stuff like Bird rights, mid-level exception, hard cap, soft cap, personally I hardly understand what they mean.
 
Beyond that, I love the 538 idea. It's an old solution. When two opponents want to lose to each other, the solution is always to fight with each other's colors, so it's the same principle here.

 

[Eddie Jurak]

 
And they can still improve if the draft is structured like the MLB and NFL draft (less so now). Exclusive rights for the current contract period. Salary determined by negotiation.

Given that the NBA is a salary cap league, why not just do away with the draft altogether?  Players who declare for the draft sign with the highest bidder.  But teams that are over the cap are restricted to offering part of their MLE.

 

[Conigliaro's Potential]

FWIW, in my proposal to FiveThirtyEight I did suggest that the pick-swapping could also take place at the start of a season using the previous year's records to determine the order, rather than at the All-Star Break using the current year's records. That would even more drastically remove your incentive to tank throughout the season, although it would also increase the randomness of the pairings and possibly lead to surprisingly good teams getting surprisingly high draft picks (and vice versa) - e.g., take a look at Mark Stein's preseason NBA Power Rankings and imagine how some of the swap pairings might have been chosen based upon what we knew back then:
 
http://espn.go.com/nba/powerrankings/_/week/0
 
But maybe this wouldn't be a bad thing?

 

[Eddie Jurak]

My favorite suggestion is this one:
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/upshot/how-to-make-the-nfl-draft-more-entertaining-and-more-fair.html
 

It turns out many fantasy football leagues are way ahead of the N.F.L. in adapting this insight. Instead of randomly assigning a draft order, many fantasy leagues use auction systems in which the person who gets a given player is the participant who offers the most (fake) money for him.
 
​And if you think it’s entertaining to watch the N.F.L. draft as it currently exists, imagine if instead it worked this way: Commissioner Roger Goodell names a player, and then a public bidding war commences for that player’s services, with the team willing to pay him the most winning the day. The league would still maintain competitive balance, because N.F.L. teams operate under a salary cap, and so a team that overpaid for one player would by necessity have less money to spend on the rest of its roster. This approach wouldn’t do much for giving the players more control over their destiny, but it would at least allow them to be paid their full market value.
 

 

[Devizier]

My favorite suggestion is this one:
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/upshot/how-to-make-the-nfl-draft-more-entertaining-and-more-fair.html
 

 
No need for a formal auction. That's just free agency, as mentioned by several others above.
 
Seems like a lot of people are in that boat. I'm really only in a modified version of that boat.

 

[Eddie Jurak]

 
No need for a formal auction. That's just free agency, as mentioned by several others above.
 
Seems like a lot of people are in that boat. I'm really only in a modified version of that boat.

It would be different than free agency, though, in that players don't choose their teams.

 

[Devizier]

It would be different than free agency, though, in that players don't choose their teams.

 
True. It's more similar to the draft rights proposal, then. Seems like a lot of folks converge somewhere in this area.

 

[Apisith]

I would like to see a full free agency for all rookies except that the maximum salary is fixed and linked to something like a percentage of available cap space a team has. The players wouldn't agree to a full free agency because all the money would go to the young guys like it did in the NFL, so there needs to be a restriction. Maybe each team bids for the draft position instead? The salary for the players is still slotted but a team bids for the draft position and that amount is amortised off their available cap space for the duration of the rookie contract.

Something like this would be far more interesting than seeing shit teams tank and exploit the rules.

 

[Devizier]

Wouldn't teams still gut their rosters (which would in many cases lead to a terrible season) in hopes of having enough cap space to bid on the top rookies available?

 
For one season, sure. But it wouldn't be sustainable.

 

[moly99]

For one season, sure. But it wouldn't be sustainable.

 
The problem is that there is no way to build a title contender in the NBA without taking substantial risk. (IE leaving cap space open and hoping a free agent picks you or getting lucky in the draft.)  In part because of the maximum cap on contract size and also because basketball as a sport is dominated by stars in a way that other sports are not, you can't realistically compete without two top 30 players. That means some teams will adopt theoretically sub-optimal/unsustainable/tanking strategies in order to get star players.
 
If the NBA really cares about tanking it needs to work on that issue. Remove the maximum contract size and make the Cavs pay full market value for Lebron and suddenly the playing field is even enough that teams don't need to tank to compete.

 

[Nick Kaufman]

As was said before. Remove the max contracts and the stars getting their true value makes it far more difficult to build dominant teams.

 

[swingin val]

As was said before. Remove the max contracts and the stars getting their true value makes it far more difficult to build dominant teams.

Didn't all three of Wade, LeBron, Bosh take less than max deals to play together

 

[radsoxfan]

Didn't all three of Wade, LeBron, Bosh take less than max deals to play together

 
I think they took a little bit less than the max.  But thats kind of the point… they didn't take much less because their max compensation was already artificially lower than it should have been.
 
For example, if Lebron could make 40M a season, he isn't taking 16M.  But he might take 16M if he can only make 18M anyway. 

 

[swingin val]

I dont know. If there are no salary slots, and just a hard cap, I wouldnt be surprised to see 3 or 4 guys take a one year hit on their salary and team up for a run at a ring

 

[johnmd20]

I dont know. If there are no salary slots, and just a hard cap, I wouldnt be surprised to see 3 or 4 guys take a one year hit on their salary and team up for a run at a ring

 
That would be a very rare occurrence if there were no max contracts. None of those superstars would turn down an extra 10-15 million for a run at a ring.

 

[Devizier]

If the NBA really cares about tanking it needs to work on that issue. Remove the maximum contract size and make the Cavs pay full market value for Lebron and suddenly the playing field is even enough that teams don't need to tank to compete.

 
I totally agree with that. I'd like to see removing the max contract and the rookie scale (or at least loosening it significantly). I also acknowledge that it will never happen, thanks to a multitude of factors.

 

[moly99]

I dont know. If there are no salary slots, and just a hard cap, I wouldnt be surprised to see 3 or 4 guys take a one year hit on their salary and team up for a run at a ring

 
They can do that already if they want to, and take less of a salary hit than they would with no max contract size.

 

[Hagios]

Interesting idea from Slate. Instead of drafting players, you draft other teams. Then you pick based on how that team does in the upcoming season. Since your draft pick is no longer tied to how you finish in the standings, there is less incentive to tank. I like the idea but wonder about the possibility of collusion.
 
 
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/05/nba_draft_lottery_2015_how_to_fix_the_broken_nba_draft_system_and_prevent.html

 

[moondog80]

Interesting idea from Slate. Instead of drafting players, you draft other teams. Then you pick based on how that team does in the upcoming season. Since your draft pick is no longer tied to how you finish in the standings, there is less incentive to tank. I like the idea but wonder about the possibility of collusion.
 
 
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/05/nba_draft_lottery_2015_how_to_fix_the_broken_nba_draft_system_and_prevent.html

 
 
Coincidentally (or not), 538 just had a feature where they asked readers for ideas to fix tanking, and this was the idea they liked the best.