I think flattening the odds ended up only incentivizing teams to tank post all star break.

All it’s done is made it harder for bad teams to become good. You used to just tank for a year or two and get a generational player - now it can be 5+ years of being bad and never getting someone truly franchise changing while better teams than yours jump you in the lottery.

He was totally right, flattening the odds not only encouraged mid teams to tank more, but also makes it possible for bad teams to just stay bad for longer if they don’t get lucky in the lottery

Imo it was mistake, but imo lottery was mistake:

slightly lower incentive to tank to teams that really don’t have much to lose from decision to tank resulted in strong increase in incentive to mediocre teams to tank.

Instead of solving/lowering problem it made it only worse.

tbh hindsight really is ²⁰⁄₂₀ here

the changes haven’t worked - arguably they’ve had even the opposite intended effect - but nothing tells me it wasn’t a genuine effort to fix a system they knew was broken 

This is also a case where self-interest is paramount, these owners don’t have a great incentive to let other markets dominate the lottery especially through a major loophole. Especially owners of teams who often just fall short of real playoff success but then get busted up with draft odds, so they stay stagnant. 

Sam was only one right

It is specifically what has caused the tanking we see today

It behooves every team outside of the 7th seed or higher to tank as odds are more statistically in their favor to land 1-4th pick

Presti takes aging like wine, as per usual.

It was an overreaction to “The Process.” The previous iteration also provided an incentive to tank, but the top-heavy lottery odds provided less incentive to start throwing games at the end of the year for teams that were genuinely trying to compete at season’s start.

Fines alone will not prevent anticompetitive behavior. San Antonio getting Wembyama is probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them over the course of his career with the team; a $100k fine doesn’t even make a ripple in the math.

Even extreme punishments like freezing teams out of the lottery or docking future draft picks may not be enough to dissuade motivated teams. Several of the more well-documented anti-competitive behaviors (Warriors 2008, Mavs 2023, Sixers last year, Jazz this year) were to try and prevent traded draft picks from conveying, and it worked. The Warriors owed a top-8 protected pick, kept pick #7 and got Harrison Barnes. Mavs kept the #10 pick, got an instant contributor in Derrick Lively and went to the Finals. The Sixers turned a disaster year into VJ Edgecomb.

One of the stupidest decisions of all time, let’s make it so the worst team in the league has a 50% chance at getting the #5 pick!! What a great idea

There are so many really good teams in the NBA but this sub has been laser focused on the bad ones. I personally dont give a fuck what Washington and Utah are doing. Watching OKC, Boston, Detroit, Denver, Houston, SA, Lakers, Minny, Cleveland etc is excellent basketball. I enjoy watching it so I stick with that. And no offense to the shit shows in Sac or NO or the trying to lose in Washington or Utah, its bad basketball im not interested in so I dont watch. 

Apparently I’m an island here, but I really don’t care if teams tank. If the owners want to take the gamble of putting out a bad product for long term gain, then they should be able to make that call.

From personal experience, the reason why the Pistons were so bad is because for a decade they refused to tank. It wasn’t until we finally did tank that we were able to get someone like Cade Cunningham to change our franchise around. We even suffered at the hands of the flattened lottery odds and I’m still so happy that they tanked for a few years. It was absolutely worth it. It was much worse watching them try and struggle to win 30 games every year. I am pro-tanking. From many teams, it’s the only way to turn things around.

Dallas would abstain

Is the NFL model really that much worse with no lottery? Or does the amount of games make the NFL just that much more chaotic for year to year bad teams to stay worst?

The issue is the protected picks. That is what needs to go

Stop incentivizing losing. No change will fix tanking in the NBA if losing is rewarded and middle of the pack teams are mocked for not losing more.

Hot take: Give the worst teams the best picks and make tanking as painless and quick as possible please.

Another hot take: the play-ins push teams to be even worse to avoid potentially making the playoffs accidentally lol.

Tanking should be allowed and embraced. 

I rather the shitty teams actually get good players so that their future can be brighter than yesterday.

I will give grace. In no sports league is having a top pick in the draft as impactful as NBA. It’s not close either. They tried to fix a problem without a clear solution and it failed.

The small team size, rookie deals being insanely impactful, and small learning curve all factor in. Basketball close to positionless so teams are always taking BPA. Like ³⁰⁄₃₀ teams are taking Wemby/Flag theres no role blockage. You flat out get 9 years of likely all-star talent.

It’s simply not a problem you can solve. The first pick is so valuable that teams are going to do everything possible to get it.

Whenever analysts and publications submit their player rankings, the team with the worst roster should get the #1 overall pick.

/s

It seems so simple. Bad teams tank because they want the best chances to get a good pick because that is their only way to not be a bad team anymore. The draft is the only motive for tanking. Now the worst teams have a lower chance of getting the top draft picks so they have to take longer to rebuild. Look at the records of the teams who climbed in the lottery since this change was made.

Flattening the odds did not prevent tanking. All it did was make things harder for tanking teams to land a top end talent, thus making the tank race more congested and shameless than previous years.

Why can’t the NBA distribute the national TV revenue by final league position? Right now, it’s distributed equally. Rewarding performance gives mediocre teams some incentive to not collapse at the end of the season. This is how English soccer works, and it prevents mediocre teams from giving up at the end of the season.

I think tanking was heading this direction regardless. Hinkie turned it into an art form that plenty of people were hyping up well before the odds were flattened. Much like how the game of basketball is analyzed and changed on the court tanking was already gaining steam as the “right path” to build a team. I actually dont agree with that personally, but I think it was gaining steam analytically for FOs and Hinkie just took it to a wild extreme, much like how “moar 3s” gained steam analytically and Morey took it to the extreme.

There’s no perfect solution to this, every time someone floats their idea and it gets a bunch of upvotes there’ll be someone pointing out the cons and getting nearly as many upvotes right after.

If we discard the lottery, the worst team gets their #1 guy sooner and starts to compete over a multi-year outlook, but in any single year getting as low as possible in the standings is vitally important for non-competitive teams.

If every non-playoff team has the same odds the bottom feeders have no reason to race to the bottom, but now you have actual competitive teams going “nah, we NEED to be in 9th/10th, not 8th.”

Flattened odds are somewhere in between, bottom feeders have slightly less incentive to tank but mid teams have slightly more. Personally I would rather the competitive teams be fighting for a playoff spot, but the teams that are doing it egregiously enough to get fined (Jazz/Pacers) would be doing it even more egregiously under the old lottery odds.

Then the idea theyre floating about rookies being free agents would have serious competitive balance risks and I think all small market teams would hate it.

Levying steep penalties for tanking might be an option, but its hard to prove and you’re gonna have a whole lot of unhappy fans and organizations going “well what about what THAT team did?!” Still, bump a teams draft position down for deliberate tanking and I’d bet it stops fast

NBA needs to look at how MLB does their draft.

Luxury tax teams should be limited in how many lottery picks they can have in consecutive drafts, and how high they can pick. For example, the best they could pick is 10th. This makes it so if you want to spend all that money, you have to compete or shed salary.

This would mean a team like Dallas last season, who were a luxury tax paying team, would have not gotten Flagg.

You could also limit how many lottery picks in consecutive seasons a revenue-recipient team can have as well.

I believe this would make teams have to be smarter with their money, and would spread out talent more evenly

why dont they invert the odds so that the highest seed non-playoff team has the best odds for a higher pick? honest question, i’d like to learn the nuance behind the lottery

NBA has an overly complex draft and contract system.

Should make the g League an actual minor league for promotion to the NBA.

I think the lottery should be entirely random.

Yeah, it will happen where the reigning champions get a top level prospect. That’s better than teams trying to lose on purpose

Saw it on another thread - but removing protections in draft pock trades hopefully can decrease tanking

The NBA needs to flatten the odds to be as flat as possible and then as Tyrion says “Let the Gods decide”. You can then make Teams who miss out on top picks multiple years in a row get better odds each year goes by until they hit a top pick and it resets.

The solution is simple, move up the qualifying date for playoffs. Then take the top worst 5 or 6 teams and put them in a draft tournament. Team who wins the most, lands the top pick, and the second most and so on. Can even have a “championship draft game” between teams 1 and 2

Sam Presti knows ball, the draft lottery reforms at the time were an atrocious idea, and it’s not surprisingly to see it only caused more tanking

I think the best way to go about it was not to flatten odds throughout the whole lottery, keep the same odds but have a new mechanism that shifts the odds only within the top 5 picks. The conditions would rely on how many consecutive years the team has been in the lottery (consecutive penalty should only end when 2 consecutive years of own pick, so other teams picks don’t count, being outside top 8 picks), and wether the team has gotten a top 3 pick. The odds shifts only with its top 5.

I honestly think you just nuke the lottery and go full predictable

They should institute a win floor. You need to win a certain number of games to keep your draft position. And depending on how many games under the floor you are, your pick will slot down in the draft.

I say this with all trepidation: when Presti wants to retire from being the Thunder GM, the NBA should pay him like $60MM per year to be the commissioner

It was worth a try imo, but it hasn’t worked

Fav option: Spin a wheel. If you hit the first pick once you get taken off the wheel until everyone has gotten it once. It’s clean and simple. And it’s hard to see how it will lead to unforeseen consequences.

Other option: Sam Vecenie’s idea. You take 10% of player wages and revenue income. And divide that up based on how many games each team won, and give what they have earned of the pot at the end of the season. This heavily incentivizes winning for owners, FOs, and players. No FO will be able to tell their owner they are planning on giving up money for a significant amount of time. And no player will ever accept being benched in order to tank.

This feels like a move that would drastically change how the NBA values talent, and ultimately the makeup of the sport itself.

I don’t like that teams can essentially purposefully lose to improve their odds at a better player. I also don’t like that getting rid of the draft would theoretically make it MORE difficult for smaller market teams to compete for high ranking rookies coming into the league.

Places like Toronto, Minnesota, Milwaukee, etc. all have issues signing free agents as it stands, now.

I don’t know how I feel about this idea.

There’s no version of the lottery that is going to avoid the incentive to tank. A single superstar player just makes too much of a difference to an overall basketball team.

Silver is taking the wrong lessons from European sports, removing the draft, etc. He ought to be looking at relegation, making it too hard to tune your tank to avoid an absolute disaster. While relegation is wholly unrealistic in North American sports, you could get similarly punitive by having repeat worst teams get a couple of aprons dropped on them. Now owners would be factoring in a one and three chance of getting a superstar versus 5 years as a franchise in the wilderness.

Way late but here’s the BEST idea to fix things

THE NBA DRAFT CUP

Eliminate the Play In Remaining teams compete in a single elimination game tournament Each victory includes player financial incentives The draft order is the result of the tournament - winner gets #1 seed

I think it’s crazy a team can play in the play-in and get the number one pick. I’m more concerned by that than teams tanking to get in the top 5 of the draft.

You guys aren’t understanding the real point. League has control of the picks now. Lakers headed towards disaster? The biggest team in the league gunna be much less profitable? Fixed. We have Cooper Flagg, we can fix this.

Why would Silver drop that control?

Maybe they should further flatten the odds. Non-playoff teams get the same odds for #1 and playoff teams get to split whatever percentage is leftover. There would be no incentive to tank then, unless all the sudden 14 teams tank at once lol. Gove them each a 5% chance for 1st pick, assign the other 16 playoff teams decreasing chances from 4% to 0.01% for the NBA champion.

Sam the only guy right

I legitimately think Sam Presti should run the league, he understands forecasting of the draft and the way teams operate much better than Adam and his team.

Imo the lottery odds need to be completely flat amongst all teams who don’t make the play in, or they need to be extremely steep (or even just remove the lottery all together and go by record).

If you want the 1st pick you need to be the worst team, that is a lot to ask and a steep price to pay. With the current system you can just be like the 4th worst team or whatever and that’s not nearly as big a price to pay for owners.