NBA Proposes Draft Lottery Reform

[Infield Infidel]

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/nba-lottery-reform-is-coming/
 

 
The league’s proposal gives at least the four worst teams the same chance at winning the no. 1 pick: approximately an identical 11 percent shot for each club. The odds decline slowly from there, with the team in the next spot holding a 10 percent chance. The lottery team with the best record will have a 2 percent chance of leaping to the no. 1 pick, up from the the minuscule 0.5 percent chance it has under the current system.
The proposal also calls for the drawing of the first six picks via the Ping-Pong ball lottery, sources say. The current lottery system actually involves the drawing of only the top three selections. The rest of the lottery goes in order of record, from worst to best, after the top-three drawing is over.

 
I think this would reduce tanking at the top of the draft, but increase it a little bit at the playoff bubble. It's still be better than today

 

[bowiac]

LeBron could re-declare for the draft, and I don't think any team would tank out of the playoffs for a 2% shot at landing him.
 
I think this is an improvement, but doesn't fit the bigger issue with the lottery, which isn't tanking. The problem with the lottery is regardless of how hard your team is trying, there's an the ever-present inner doubt as to whether you should root for them. It creates a bittersweet feeling with every game. As a Celtics fan, it poisons every game of the season. The ideal result becomes some immediate 30 point deficit, and then you root for your young players (but not Gerald Wallace or Kris Humphries!) to mostly claw their way out. It's awful, and really decreases enjoyment of watching the bad teams. It's not about tanking however.
 
Other than my ideal solution (eliminate the draft and rookie contracts, which solves every issue I can think of), this is a step in the right direction however.

 

[IdiotKicker]

Other than my ideal solution (eliminate the draft and rookie contracts, which solves every issue I can think of), this is a step in the right direction however.

 
What would be your ideal scenario to replace it?  Free agency? Auction? Something I haven't thought of? I think the NBA could do some really cool things if it wasn't bound by using a draft, but I'm not a huge NBA fan so I haven't thought about this as much as people who follow the game more closely.

 

[georgebell11]

The challenge that all of these ideas are getting at is balancing the incentive to play badly to get a high pick. What if your team stinks, but they have to play hard to get a good pick when lined up against other teams? Tier each team that doesn't make the playoffs - bottom 5 teams are Group A, next 5 are group B, next 4 are group C. Their record in head to head games against other teams in that tier determines draft order - the best record gets the highest pick. If you're a bottom 5 team, but you have a relatively good record against the other crappy teams in the league, you will get the first pick. Also has the advantage of the unknown - you won't really know who's in your tier until the end of the season (or, till there are 15-20 games left maybe) so you'd have to try hard against all the middling-poor teams. You'd tank/get beat by the Spurs, but you'd probably have lost to them anyway.
 
I can't take credit for this idea, read a variation of it somewhere online in the past 2 days on a message board or comment thread...but, I think with some tweaks this makes the most sense, and has bad teams playing hard right till the end of the season.

 

[bowiac]

What would be your ideal scenario to replace it?  Free agency? Auction? Something I haven't thought of? I think the NBA could do some really cool things if it wasn't bound by using a draft, but I'm not a huge NBA fan so I haven't thought about this as much as people who follow the game more closely.

There might be some auction scenario that would work too, but I think free agency would actually be fine. A draft makes sense in baseball, which doesn't have a salary cap, as a way of helping bad teams get the next generation's best players. In the NBA, the best teams are mostly at the cap or above it. They wouldn't be able to competitively bid for Wiggins/Parker, etc... Even a team like the Rockets, a decent team with cap room, wouldn't be able to make a big push for Wiggins, simply because they're trying to win now, and paying an unknown rookie big money wouldn't make sense.
 
Getting rid of rookie deals also wouldn't actually cost the teams money, as the players get a set percentage of basketball revenue. You'd need to pay Wiggins more, but that money is going to come out of Channing Frye's pocket, not from the owners.
 
A salary cap largely removes the need for a draft or a rookie scale.

 

[moondog80]

LeBron could re-declare for the draft, and I don't think any team would tank out of the playoffs for a 2% shot at landing him.
 
I think this is an improvement, but doesn't fit the bigger issue with the lottery, which isn't tanking. The problem with the lottery is regardless of how hard your team is trying, there's an the ever-present inner doubt as to whether you should root for them. It creates a bittersweet feeling with every game. As a Celtics fan, it poisons every game of the season. The ideal result becomes some immediate 30 point deficit, and then you root for your young players (but not Gerald Wallace or Kris Humphries!) to mostly claw their way out. It's awful, and really decreases enjoyment of watching the bad teams. It's not about tanking however.
 
Other than my ideal solution (eliminate the draft and rookie contracts, which solves every issue I can think of), this is a step in the right direction however.

 
 
If nothing else, the draft (and lottery) is too much of an event to ever go away.  
 
I agree this an improvement, I just fear that in a few years there's going to be an unseemly outcome (a borderline playoff team with pieces in place getting a mega-hyped #1 pick), there will be more outrage, and a weighted system will again seem fair.  This is what happened when Orlando drafted Shaq and then a year later, won #1 in the Webber draft (the lottery was already weighted, but that made them shift the weights moreso toward the teams with the worse records).

 

[IdiotKicker]

There might be some auction scenario that would work too, but I think free agency would actually be fine. A draft makes sense in baseball, which doesn't have a salary cap, as a way of helping bad teams get the next generation's best players. In the NBA, the best teams are mostly at the cap or above it. They wouldn't be able to competitively bid for Wiggins/Parker, etc... Even a team like the Rockets, a decent team with cap room, wouldn't be able to make a big push for Wiggins, simply because they're trying to win now, and paying an unknown rookie big money wouldn't make sense.
 
Getting rid of rookie deals also wouldn't actually cost the teams money, as the players get a set percentage of basketball revenue. You'd need to pay Wiggins more, but that money is going to come out of Channing Frye's pocket, not from the owners.
 
A salary cap largely removes the need for a draft or a rookie scale.

 
Yeah this makes a lot of sense.  I don't know exactly how the union in basketball views its rookies, since it's obviously a very different system from baseball, but I wonder if there would be pushback from veterans since teams would obviously try to reduce salaries to keep cap space open for rookies in this scenario.

 

[ALiveH]

look, either you believe in free markets or you don't.  It seems like you do & so do I.  But, the NBA clearly doesn't.  I'm pretty sure the union would hate this idea.  The veterans run the union and they feel like they've "paid their dues" and this would just be a massive reallocation of wealth from the veterans to the young bucks.  There will be a certain class of veterans that would lose big - the ones that were underpaid on their rookie deals and now will only be fairly paid (instead of overpaid) on their veteran deals.
 
We could also debate whether it's a healthy dynamic for say Philadelphia or Boston or whoever to give a Wiggins or Embiid a max contract (or close to it) with all the risk for the franchise and even more pressure to perform on the 19-year old rookie.
 
FWIW, I like my earlier idea of having the midseason (or 2/3 of the way through the season) tournament be between the 16 worst teams to play for drafting order.  Eliminates nearly all incentive to tank, no extra wear-and-tear on the teams that will have deep playoff runs so don't need to eliminate any regular season games, the league showcases all the stars on bad-to-mediocre teams that don't get a lot of national TV time, and get playoff like pressure & intensity & fan interest for bad teams.

 

[bowiac]

look, either you believe in free markets or you don't.  It seems like you do & so do I.  But, the NBA clearly doesn't.  I'm pretty sure the union would hate this idea.  The veterans run the union and they feel like they've "paid their dues" and this would just be a massive reallocation of wealth from the veterans to the young bucks.  There will be a certain class of veterans that would lose big - the ones that were underpaid on their rookie deals and now will only be fairly paid (instead of overpaid) on their veteran deals.
 
We could also debate whether it's a healthy dynamic for say Philadelphia or Boston or whoever to give a Wiggins or Embiid a max contract (or close to it) with all the risk for the franchise and even more pressure to perform on the 19-year old rookie.

Yeah, I obviously don't think this is viable or anywhere on the table. I think the existing proposal is still an improvement.

 

[oumbi]

The challenge that all of these ideas are getting at is balancing the incentive to play badly to get a high pick. What if your team stinks, but they have to play hard to get a good pick when lined up against other teams? Tier each team that doesn't make the playoffs - bottom 5 teams are Group A, next 5 are group B, next 4 are group C. Their record in head to head games against other teams in that tier determines draft order - the best record gets the highest pick. If you're a bottom 5 team, but you have a relatively good record against the other crappy teams in the league, you will get the first pick. Also has the advantage of the unknown - you won't really know who's in your tier until the end of the season (or, till there are 15-20 games left maybe) so you'd have to try hard against all the middling-poor teams. You'd tank/get beat by the Spurs, but you'd probably have lost to them anyway.
 
I can't take credit for this idea, read a variation of it somewhere online in the past 2 days on a message board or comment thread...but, I think with some tweaks this makes the most sense, and has bad teams playing hard right till the end of the season.
 
 

Or, as a variation of the above that keeps the lottery somewhat in place and may diminish the tanking incentives a bit, have the above tiers determined by win-loss, but the lottery only allows teams to move up or down WITHIN their tier.
 
That is, if 5 teams are in the bottom, or A, group, there is a lottery for those teams alone. The same for group B and group C. Those teams who finish with the 11th to 14th worst records, say, are in group C. In their lottery tier, the 14th place team could only move up to number 11 at best.
 
This discourages tanking to a greater degree than the current system since just making the lottery means you can only draft at #11, tops. 
 
The odds of advancing within each group would be similar to the weighted system now is place.
 
Not perfect, but better than having Cleveland, Orlando, et al jump into the #1 spot as they did.

 

[Scoops Bolling]

There might be some auction scenario that would work too, but I think free agency would actually be fine. A draft makes sense in baseball, which doesn't have a salary cap, as a way of helping bad teams get the next generation's best players. In the NBA, the best teams are mostly at the cap or above it. They wouldn't be able to competitively bid for Wiggins/Parker, etc... Even a team like the Rockets, a decent team with cap room, wouldn't be able to make a big push for Wiggins, simply because they're trying to win now, and paying an unknown rookie big money wouldn't make sense.
 
Getting rid of rookie deals also wouldn't actually cost the teams money, as the players get a set percentage of basketball revenue. You'd need to pay Wiggins more, but that money is going to come out of Channing Frye's pocket, not from the owners.
 
A salary cap largely removes the need for a draft or a rookie scale.

Paying an unknown rookie big money never makes sense. There's a reason all of the Big 4 leagues have implemented some kind of salary control over rookies over the past two decades. The MLB is really the only league where wildly overpaid rookies were not a problem sometime in the past two decades prior to those controls being put into place. Forcing bad teams to throw money at rookies is just going to damn them to even more perpetual suckdom, because when the bulk of those rookies flop (and most of them will flop), they'll have large chunks of salary space devoted to shitty players who absolutely don't deserve it, and yet they'll have no choice but to keep trying that, because they have no other way to acquire talent. It'd be the NFL's old issues all over again...except with guaranteed contracts.

 

[LondonSox]

Is the reason that the NBA gets this is the scarcity of stars and the smaller number of stars needed to compete?
 
I mean the draft is more beneficial to tanking in other sports and no one really seems to complain.

 

[EddieYost]

That is, if 5 teams are in the bottom, or A, group, their is a lottery for those teams alone. The same for group B and group C. Those teams who finish with the 10th to 14th worst records, say, are in group C. In their lottery tier, the 14th place team could only move up to number 11 at best.
 

 
This would just change which teams would have the most incentive to tank.  If you're sitting at #7 with no shot at the playoffs, you might decide to tank to try to get to #5 and have a shot at the top pick.

 

[lexrageorge]

 
This would just change which teams would have the most incentive to tank.  If you're sitting at #7 with no shot at the playoffs, you might decide to tank to try to get to #5 and have a shot at the top pick.

That doesn't seem like a problem that needs to be solved, IMO.  
 
A league such as the NBA can only exist if there is some level of competitive balance over time.  So allowing the worse teams the chance of getting the best new players is the system that at least attempts to address that.
 
The proposal is indeed better than what we have today, but it's far better than removing the draft altogether.

 

[MainerInExile]

This seems to always come down to whether you think tanking or lack of competitive balance is a bigger problem. For me, tanking is the smaller problem. The Celtics didn't tank - they're legitimately bad.

 

[bowiac]

This seems to always come down to whether you think tanking or lack of competitive balance is a bigger problem. For me, tanking is the smaller problem. The Celtics didn't tank - they're legitimately bad.

Regardlesss of tanking, don't you think it kind of sucks that you're rooting for them to lose?
 
That's why I don't like the lottery. It's not a tanking thing. It's a fandom thing.

 

[MainerInExile]

Regardlesss of tanking, don't you think it kind of sucks that you're rooting for them to lose?
 
That's why I don't like the lottery. It's not a tanking thing. It's a fandom thing.

What sucks is that they're bad. Change the lottery, give other less bad teams the good players, and they'll be bad for longer.

 

[tims4wins]

But part of the reason the Celts are so bad is that they got rid of some useful players in order to intentionally get worse to build for the future, right? That isn't "tanking" per se, but they could have put a much more competitive team on the court had they not traded PP and KG.

 

[Silent Chief]

Is the reason that the NBA gets this is the scarcity of stars and the smaller number of stars needed to compete?
 
I mean the draft is more beneficial to tanking in other sports and no one really seems to complain.

Bingo.  
 
If you think about it, the NBA is arguably the most selective of the American pro sports in terms of body types.  We are talking an incredibly small percentage of the population.  There are also only 5 positions to fill.  The % of people out there that are 6' + and have the ability to sprint up and down a basketball court and then shoot a ball into a hoop?  Pro football may be the most analogous in terms of unique physical specimens, but even then there are so many positions that require such different body types.   I'm always shocked at the physical stature of your average NBA player.  Rondo is 6'1" and looks dwarfed out there.  LeBron looks like something out of mythology.           

 

[TroyOLeary]

Paying an unknown rookie big money never makes sense. There's a reason all of the Big 4 leagues have implemented some kind of salary control over rookies over the past two decades. The MLB is really the only league where wildly overpaid rookies were not a problem sometime in the past two decades prior to those controls being put into place. Forcing bad teams to throw money at rookies is just going to damn them to even more perpetual suckdom, because when the bulk of those rookies flop (and most of them will flop), they'll have large chunks of salary space devoted to shitty players who absolutely don't deserve it, and yet they'll have no choice but to keep trying that, because they have no other way to acquire talent. It'd be the NFL's old issues all over again...except with guaranteed contracts.

 
This is a problem, but I don't see it as an unworkable one, especially if they keep the same rookie contract structure that they do now, and maybe make that non-negotiable.
 
So the amount of the contract is flexible, but the structure would be limited to the 2 year + 2 team option years it is now, which would give teams an out after the 2nd year if it's clear the player is a bust.

 

[Devizier]

Pretty close to what I'd wanted to see. Well done, NBA.

 

[Devizier]

look, either you believe in free markets or you don't.  It seems like you do & so do I.  

 
dude, there's no free market in professional sports.
 
that would require competing leagues, for one.

 

[MainerInExile]

But part of the reason the Celts are so bad is that they got rid of some useful players in order to intentionally get worse to build for the future, right? That isn't "tanking" per se, but they could have put a much more competitive team on the court had they not traded PP and KG.

If the goal is to win championships, and not to be merely decent, I'd argue that the Brooklyn trade was the right move, regardless of these lottery changes.  Put another way, Danny makes the trade even if these had been the lottery rules.

 

[Remagellan]

Just have a straight draft.  Who cares if teams tank for a couple of years.  They have a bigger problem with competitive balance than worrying about teams taking.   The cure for tanking is worse than the disease, because the teams that had the worst seasons don't necessarily get the top talent. 
 
I'm a Sixers fan, and I am all in on the Hinkie bottom out plan, which now looks like it will take at least a couple of more years because he selected two players that will give us nothing next year, in part thanks to Embiid's injury and THE DAMN LOTTERY.  
 
Take away the lottery, and the Bucks would have taken Parker with the first pick and the Sixers would have taken Wiggins with the second pick, and who knows, with MCW and Wiggins already on the team, maybe they take Doug McDermott with the tenth pick instead of doing the deal with Orlando for Saric.  The entire plan for retooling the franchise would have been accelerated by a couple of years just because they were in a position to take a player who could contribute immediately.  Now the team might still not win enough to avoid the lottery again because it is hard to win with that many young guys, but at least they would have been further along. 
 
But please NBA, concern yourself with fear of tanking when only nine franchises have won titles in the past thirty-five years.  I rather they go to a system with a hard cap that eliminates the draft and all multi-year contracts, because at least then they'd have competitive balance.  That is, if I wasn't so against the owners continuing to exploit the players, which such a system would really do.   

 

[MainerInExile]

But please NBA, concern yourself with fear of tanking when only nine franchises have won titles in the past thirty-five years.  I rather they go to a system with a hard cap that eliminates the draft and all multi-year contracts, because at least then they'd have competitive balance.  That is, if I wasn't so against the owners continuing to exploit the players, which such a system would really do.   

I agree.  I think basing the draft order on the last 3 years record could solve both problems.  Sustained badness gets you the number 1 pick (helps competitive balance), but no one would intentionally tank for 3 years.

 

[reggiecleveland]

This year tanking, or appearances of tanking were in the news because of the talent available. I like the current system. You could eliminate round 2 or just let the lottery teams have 2 picks.

 

[LondonSox]

If it's unfair for the worst team to get the best pick why have a draft at all? Just make everyone a free agent and problem solved.

If you want a draft to help equalize the league then shut up.
I find the whole thing ridiculous. The team that has benefitted from the draft the most wasn't even tanking and just signed the top free agent like ever.

Nothing prevent a cavs like run if lottery like, and even makes it more likely. Frankly that annoyed me far more than the worst team getting the best pick.

 

[zenter]

Tanking is not a problem with the draft - the lottery is. If the team with the worst record has a less than 50% chance at the #1 pick, the system is broken.

The lottery and tanking even exist because of the CBA's restrictions on player movement and salary. This marketplace could use less intervention, not more. Apply a nice luxury tax on going over cap, a penalty for spending below the floor, keep/enhance rev-share and you probably solve most competitive balance issues in the game, including perceived tanking.

 

[Arroyo Con Frijoles]

I can't remember whose idea this was, but because my problem with the tankapalooza is the same as bowiac's, I've come around to the idea that post-elimination winning percentage over a certain sample size should determine draft order.  Fans continue to root for their team, and the front office has to think twice about completely gutting a roster mid-season.  A late-season game between the Celtics and Sixers last year had tons of us hoping for a loss, but under that proposal, that type of game potentially has draft implications but on the positive side.  If you want to set up a system in an attempt at competitive balance (I don't necessarily disagree), then at least design a system that attempts to provide an incentive for winning games even if you are a bad team. 

 

[reggiecleveland]

Tanking is not a problem with the draft - the lottery is. If the team with the worst record has a less than 50% chance at the #1 pick, the system is broken.

The lottery and tanking even exist because of the CBA's restrictions on player movement and salary. This marketplace could use less intervention, not more. Apply a nice luxury tax on going over cap, a penalty for spending below the floor, keep/enhance rev-share and you probably solve most competitive balance issues in the game, including perceived tanking.

I tend to agree. You can be shitty for a while and miss out on the sure things and then get number 1 when the there are no clear stars to draft.

 

[Comfortably Lomb]

Tanking is not a problem with the draft - the lottery is. If the team with the worst record has a less than 50% chance at the #1 pick, the system is broken.

The lottery and tanking even exist because of the CBA's restrictions on player movement and salary. This marketplace could use less intervention, not more. Apply a nice luxury tax on going over cap, a penalty for spending below the floor, keep/enhance rev-share and you probably solve most competitive balance issues in the game, including perceived tanking.

 
And get rid of the max salary. If some team wants to offer Lebron $50 million... let it happen.

 

[wade boggs chicken dinner]

i don't understand why people focus on the NBA when tanking occurs in every sport.   i get that there are outsized benefits to tanking in the NBA but from our perspective - the fans' perspective - tanking means the same.  No one batted an eyelash when the Sox traded Puntom- they were effectively tanking, and lots of NFL teams start jockeying for draft position after they are eliminated by "giving the rookies a shot."
 
GMs are smart.  They work hours for the smallest competitive advantages   So if there is a .01% greater chance of getting a generational challenge, they are going to go for it.

 

[LondonSox]

So the idea is to reward a team that can win early in the season but doesn't?

Why should a bad team but good enough to beat another worse team get a better pick?

This theory makes no sense. Yes it has incentives to try to win when you are bad, but if you just suck or get destroyed by injuries shouldn't you get a better pick?

Is there a lot of evidence for teams deliberately being bad? As far as I can tell last year was a major outlier no? And let's remember the team that got the first and second pick didn't go into the season tanking.

These seem to be attempts to fix a minimal problem in a such a way as to offset the entire point of the draft process.
If you reward teams who are a bit bad more than the ones who are really bad why even have a draft??

Edit badly (even worse than normal) written

 

[Mugthis]

What are the goals of a professional sports league, from the perspective of fans?
 
1. You want the smartest and most dedicated organizations to be rewarded. Another way to put it: dumb or uninterested teams shouldn't be rewarded because of their failures.
 
2. Their rewards to should be proportional to their ability and effort. 
 
3. You don't want organizations to be rewarded due to inherent structural advantages over other teams. Consider the Lakers. They have at least the following structural advantages: a) Huge, rich market to get revenue from, allowing them to pay more than nearly every other team in the league. b) a large "location discount" to attract free agents. c) a "legacy discount" that most of their current players and decision makers in the organization had nothing to do with.
 
4. Earned success shouldn't be punished.
 
"Parity" should not be a goal in and of itself. A healthy amount of parity should be an outcome that results from a fair system. 
 
The problem with caps, drafts, and the like is that they impose with impunity restrictions on teams and players in attempts to force parity. By doing so, you inevitably reward and punish those that don't deserve it. Why should the Thunder be forced (or at least, strongly incentivized) to trade away their core talent that they targeted, drafted, and developed? 
 
At the same time, you don't want an absolute free market, since success and failure is not entirely due to ability and effort. Success is part: luck + ability + effort + structural advantages. As previously mentioned, structural advantages would be local revenue potential, local attraction, and legacy.
 
Easiest solution should be to remove all caps, distribute revenue to close all structural advantages of organizations, and then let them spend their money however they want. By doing so, Minnesota would be able to compete just as easily as the Lakers do, since the Lakers would be given away a shit load of money to Minnesota and others. Minnesota could then offer much higher contracts than LAL, while still earning a profit. If they blow their cash on shitty rookies and FAs, that's their problem. 

 

[crystalline]

Is there a lot of evidence for teams deliberately being bad?
 

 
http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/40780/when-tankers-tell-the-truth

The same year, though, the Boston Celtics did indeed tank, according to longtime Celtic M.L. Carr, who coached the team from 1995 to 1997. In 1996-97, the Celtics fell from 33 wins the previous season to 15 wins.

 

[MainerInExile]

Should be believe ML Carr? "I wasn't a bad coach or GM, we were trying to be bad!"

 

[cannonball 1729]

i don't understand why people focus on the NBA when tanking occurs in every sport.   i get that there are outsized benefits to tanking in the NBA but from our perspective - the fans' perspective - tanking means the same.  No one batted an eyelash when the Sox traded Puntom- they were effectively tanking, and lots of NFL teams start jockeying for draft position after they are eliminated by "giving the rookies a shot."
 
GMs are smart.  They work hours for the smallest competitive advantages   So if there is a .01% greater chance of getting a generational challenge, they are going to go for it.

 
I don't think that you're using "tank" in the same way that the NBA is trying to address.  "Tank" means "to put a terrible team on the field/court for the purpose of losing as many games as possible."  It means that you, as a fan, are supposed to root against your own team, and that the front office is supposed to do everything in their power to keep the team from winning games.  It's also kind of a crappy way to watch sports.  I can't think of too many instances in recent years where baseball fans have been openly rooting against their own teams for draft purposes, but it happens a ton in the NBA.  (And the NFL, too, although it's not as noticeable because there are fewer games.)

 

[Jungleland]

I find the "I hate rooting against my own team" argument to be incredibly silly. Your team is going to be bad at some point no matter which sport we're talking. Every alternative to a straight draft (or a lottery with high odds that a straight draft is followed) just increases the chance that your team is going to suck for a long long time, because they pretty much all add to the randomness and chance involved in the rebuild process. Knowing the impact that a single star can have and adding the 'destination cities' factor, pancaking the lottery odds is simply exacerbating a deck already stacked against several of the league's franchises.
 
Additionally, we're talking an 82 game regular season and a huge playoff bracket. The league isn't getting swung on the 76ers trotting out a D-league team all spring, and I say that as someone who finds the "free wins" argument against tanking much more grounded in reason than the "my team team is trying to lose and I don't like it" argument.

 

[Devizier]

The argument against tanking is a moral hazard argument.
 
Realistically, there are probably five or six teams that are longshots (not odds against, longshots) to make the playoffs next season. Let's say those teams are Sacramento, Utah, Philadelphia, Orlando, New Orleans, and Milwaukee. Assuming Love is traded, you can lump Minnesota in that group as well. Because of the draft structure, those franchises have a built-in incentive to not win games. And, because of the revenue sharing structure, they have one fewer incentive to win games. The league as a whole can live with franchises putting forward shit sandwiches like the 76ers last year or the '96 Celtics because most franchises are trying to win games -- as in, they put players on the court who are capable of winning basketball games. But what if all the non-playoff contenders decided to go the ML Carr route? Then you have a real problem on your hands, because more than a handful of games would be unwatchable shitshows. 
 
Now, like all moral hazard arguments, there are flaws here. People are complicated. Who knows how these issues are policed behind the scenes. All I know is that we haven't exactly seen that.. yet. But if things work out great for the 76ers, as they did for Ainge when he pulled the Pierce phantom injury shenanigans, I think more than a few teams will become "inspired".

 

[LondonSox]

The Sixers type plan does require a buy in from ownership though, one that will devalue your (large) investment for the hope of future gains over and above.
How many owners would trade steady average to above average play, and regular playoff contention if limited to zero shot at the title, vs tanking to the bottom?
 
The number of teams to have won a title is a short list. It's hard to build a contender and look at OKC where multiple chips fell for them to build through the draft, they still haven't won anything and if Durant leaves they got nothing.
The likes of the Clippers were terrible for decades but I don't think they were tanking.
 
It's just not an issue. More than any other sport the NBA has been dominated by a small number of elite teams and the complaint is the draft?! It's completely crazy.

 

[Remagellan]

The Sixers took a lot of flak last year because they supposedly intentionally made themselves less competitive by trading away two useful players in Evan Turner and Spencer Hawes for second round picks, which is all they could get for them since both of them were in the last years of their contracts.   But what was the alternative?  Holding onto two players the organization had already decided it would not be re-signing at the end of the season?  How is that a "winning" move?  Even forgetting about them setting themselves up for a few more ping pong balls at the end of the season, the only rational move was to trade those two players for whatever they could get for them.  In each case they tried unsuccessfully to get a first round pick for Turner and/or Hawes, but the rest of the league knew their value as well as the Sixers did.