2 things that makes no sense...

[exodus]

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Rants on the blog go into warp drive and all rational is left behind.

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Rational is never a word that can be used to describe Diesel.

[Diesel]

Yeah...

I heard Jhonny Bravo and exodus was going to figure out just how stiff Olowakhandi is...

It's a messageboard Belk!

What did you expect Katie Couric?

[shug94]

I like the draft lottery. And it doesn't stop teams from tanking, but acts as a detterrent. You could also introduce fines for teams that are tanking, but I am pretty sure that removing the lottery would lead to more tanking.

Plus it adds an extra added layer of interest to the draft. It is part of the reason why the NBA draft is the most interesing one in all of sports.

[BusBoyIsBack]

All the lottery does is allow those in power to control the draft. It was rigged from the first day it started when the Knicks got Patrick Ewing.

They hate the Hawks and we always get screwed in the lottery.

Without question we will have the 6th or 7th pick in this draft and we'll miss out on all three big men in Tyrus Thomas, Bargnani, and Aldridge.

[DJlaysitup]

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...Plus it adds an extra added layer of interest to the draft. It is part of the reason why the NBA draft is the most interesing one in all of sports.

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Shug, yep...another reason the NBA draft is the most interesting (most years)...is that one player can make a huge difference in basketball. Unlike the NFL, one guy and some regular dudes can make the playoffs (example: LeeeBron)

[Lascar78]

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Shug, yep...another reason the NBA draft is the most interesting (most years)...is that one player can make a huge difference in basketball. Unlike the NFL, one guy and some regular dudes can make the playoffs (example: LeeeBron)

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Definitely. That's a large part of why a lottery is necessary in sports like basketball and hockey (to a lesser extent), but not quite as much in football when there are 60 players on the roster. Personally I have a draft party every year and it's one of my favorite nights of the year. The lottery on the other hand is usually alot less fun with more nervousness and a worse outcome

[Final_quest]

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They hate the Hawks and we always get screwed in the lottery.

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Not true. We are sitting at par. The lottery caused us to move down one spot, two separate years, and up two spots one other year.

Throughout the history of the lottery we have broken even. This is our year to be +3 spots.

Question. Even though we are at the 4 spot, we have essentially equal chances of moving up with the 3 spot, due to our tie with Charlotte. Am I right about that, and if so, does that change the figures that Mr. H came up with?

[AHF]

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Question. Even though we are at the 4 spot, we have essentially equal chances of moving up with the 3 spot, due to our tie with Charlotte. Am I right about that, and if so, does that change the figures that Mr. H came up with?

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No. They take that into account:

Charlotte's odds are similar to ours:

1st .138

2nd .142

3rd .145

4th .238

5th .290

6th .045

[Diesel]

I propose an antitank commission.. made up of:

Independent council agreed on by the Players Union and the League with no gain from collecting evidence of tanking.

Follow that up with a Secret board of sworn press members who will hear the evidence against a team and will vote on weather they are guilty of tanking or not.

If a team is found guilty of tanking.. then they lose their draft position and they go to the end of the draft..

So a team that tanks to the #2 position is sent to #30.

Just like Children...

You deter them by taking away what they value the most.

Just imagine. They can televise the hearings (without knowledge of the identity of the secret press memebers) on NBA TV.

[mrhonline]

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the figures that Mr. H came up with?

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Thanks for the compliment, but I just provided the link...

[Weez]

yeah, that seems simple...

[Diesel]

It's better than a system that consistently screws the worse teams.

[Weez]

and if said system 'awarded' us the top pick this year...? what would your stance then be?

[Diesel]

If said system awarded us the top pick every year, my response would be that BK needs to be fired.

I have felt that this system of draft lottery was a problem back when we were a 50 win team with no hope of being in the lottery. Back when it was Chicago constently being screwed by the system.

It just seems unfair that some team like San Antonio who obviously tanked their system by sitting their best players was rewarded with Tim Duncan. Especially in the time when they needed to appeal to the people of San Antonio to get a new arena.

[Weez]

I'd say it worked out for them in the long run (getting duncan).

so now you think that it's unfair that a team can tank and that this is the reason taht you don't like the lottery? that's certainly an expansion from where you started this anti-lottery thread...but even still...anything that you come up with would have to go through the players union...and I honestly don't think that they're going to approve such a proposal that requires a decent amount of time...

honestly diesel, your attempts to find 'other' alternatives are somewhat maddening...this is a relatively simple solution to a problem that would exist regardless of your attempts to 'prevent tanking'.

[Diesel]

No.

I don't like the lottery because it fails at it's purpose. I'm not talking about moderate failure.. I'm talking about great failure. I think you can apply a stiff enough penalty on tanking and enforce it and it would be more beneficial to the league.

This is especially true when you look at the numbers over the last 10 years. For the last ten years, the worst team was screwed out of the top pick 9 times.

Where is fairness?

Here's the main points.

1. The lottery fails to stop tanking (when the pick is important).

2. The lottery punishes the worse teams (more often than not).

3. The lottery rewards teams that are not worthy of the top pick. (more often than not).

These are the facts...

It's a broken system that needs to be changed.

[Wretch]

Address the issue. If you want to stop teams from tanking, remove the benefit of doing so and penalize offenders. Reward teams for improvement

How?

More factors should be put into deciding drafting position - besides regular season records and ping-pong balls. I like the lottery, but they should introduce a weighting system. The league should allocate points based upon various things.

- teams that regularly visit the lottery should be penalized with "bad" lottery points (call this the LA Clipper Rule ); run the lottery then adjust it based upon the weighting system.

- points would be cumulative and roll over to the next season (either partially or completely...whatever works)

- teams who "win" the lottery should be weighted against the following year and ineligible after "winning" the lottery for (x) consecutive years (say 3 or 4)

- teams who fail to imrpove should be weighted against; and teams who make sharp falls (including prior playoff teams) should be adequately penalized (no exceptions for injuries, personnel changes, nada).

- teams that show marked improvement should be given "good" lottery points

I'm sure that with the money the league has and the knowledge they have of their own game that they could take this basic formula and grind it in some kind of computer simulation. They could hire some gee-whiz mathmetician/statistician gurus, along with a few techno geeks, and come up with a more viable solution to the current lottery system - which at the very least promotes tanking if anything at all.

The new system in a most simple example...

The lottery is run, teams are placed, the order announced. Then, the lottery points are totalled and applied to an "adjustment" number which either moves a team up or down based upon whether they tanked or gave it their all (and also based upon the movement of the teams around them). A team like San Antonio who fell from playoff contender to the absolute bottom of the lottery is heavily penalized - maybe the fall 7 spots. A team that shows steady progress is rewarded (or at the very least keeps their position).

Apply the negative adjustments first. Everbody who falls is placed. Then apply the positive adjustments. The end result would be a fair system that still introduces randomness and flair.

[Lascar78]

First of all the lottery is weighted. But I get what you mean by weighting more than just the record.

The problem is that the numbers don't tell the whole story. If you get high draft picks and they keep sucking / getting injured, you shouldn't be penalized at all. If you keep getting draft picks and letting them walk after their rookie deals on purpose to lose on the cheap like Sterling used to do with the Clips, you should get hammerred. But there is no real way to quantify that any more than there is a way to quantify tanking.

Should we be penalized because we were in the bottome 5 teams 2 years ago, worst record last year, and bottom 3 record again this year? I don't think so but your system says we should. I can only imagine the complaints.

The only one that could make sense would be to weigh against teams that got really lucky the previous year, but even then I'm not sure that it makes sense to do that. If Bogut sucked balls and the bucks were genuinely horrible this year, why would it make sense to penalize them for getting lucky last year? They still need the help

Same thing for teams that suddenly suck a lot more. So you're saying after we decided to rebuild and got a horrible record we should have been penalized? I'm not sure why.

Also, for instance, a team that has a supertar that leaves them (vince carter) is screwed and will fall way down and needs help. On the other hand a team with a superstar that had an year full of injuries will have an equally bad record but doesn't really need help (houston this year), yet the change in their record will look the same.

The bottom line is that no matter how you do it, people will screw around and work the formulas to their advantage. It would only lead to 10 times the conspiracy talk, and I doubt it could be made effective.

The bottom line is that statistics pan out over the long run. It's how casinos are guaranteed billions and billions of dollars, they're not gambling. The lottery odds will pan out in the long run. The worse your team was, the better your odds of improving, it makes perfect sense to me. Some people will get lucky, other will get unlucky, but that will happen with any weighting system as long as randomness is involved.

In due time everyone will get equally lucky / unlucky.

[Wretch]

You are only focusing on the penalization and part of what I was saying.

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The problem is that the numbers don't tell the whole story. If you get high draft picks and they keep sucking / getting injured, you shouldn't be penalized at all.

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This forces a team to be more cautious about who they pick and their actual needs. Pick the "potential" if you want, but realize where your team will be in 3 years and don't expect the lottery to bail you out of your own mistakes.

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If you keep getting draft picks and letting them walk after their rookie deals on purpose to lose on the cheap like Sterling used to do with the Clips, you should get hammerred. But there is no real way to quantify that any more than there is a way to quantify tanking.

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Excellent point. Which is why I gave a BASIC outline of a new system.

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The only one that could make sense would be to weigh against teams that got really lucky the previous year, but even then I'm not sure that it makes sense to do that. If Bogut sucked balls and the bucks were genuinely horrible this year, why would it make sense to penalize them for getting lucky last year? They still need the help

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And that they do. However, do they need the help of the #1 pick in the draft this year? How about next? Or will a pick in the 5 - 9 range do? They will still be in the lottery in this system, but perhaps they don't land the #1 or #2 pick the following year.

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Same thing for teams that suddenly suck a lot more. So you're saying after we decided to rebuild and got a horrible record we should have been penalized? I'm not sure why.

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Well, the "why" is simple. Keep sucking, keep getting penalized. Play well, be rewarded. Fall from the top of the heap to the absolute bottom, don't expect to draft Tim Duncan. Maybe we move one spot based on our history. Maybe the Clippers move 2 and we draft ahead of them. Everybody gets evaluated though and that is the main point. We wouldn't be the only ones. The lottery landscape doesn't change much year after year.

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Also, for instance, a team that has a supertar that leaves them (vince carter) is screwed and will fall way down and needs help. On the other hand a team with a superstar that had an year full of injuries will have an equally bad record but doesn't really need help (houston this year), yet the change in their record will look the same.

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This is a PRIME example. What the hell does Houston, freaggin' 50 game winner last year...with TMac and Yao...need with a top pick in this draft? They don't need any help and their slide from playoff contender to lottery team should weight heavily against them. New system: they know going into the lottery with that kind of slide that they are guaranteed to fall 4 - 5 places from potentially the #1 spot. And should they fall all the way to the last pick in the lottery....so what? They're the same team that won 50+ games last year with two Allstars.

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The bottom line is that no matter how you do it, people will screw around and work the formulas to their advantage. It would only lead to 10 times the conspiracy talk, and I doubt it could be made effective.

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I could care less about conspiracy talk. The problem with our current system is that it only encourages teams to lose if they know they aren't going to make the playoffs or if there is a can't miss prospect at the top of the draft. If done properly with consideration to all teams in the lottery the basics of what I put up outline a formula for removing the incentive to tank. It rewards the "better" teams in the lottery by moving them up and it completely removes 50+ winners like Houston, San Antonio, and Seattle (who was a previous lottery dweller like us).

[Lascar78]

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Well, the "why" is simple. Keep sucking, keep getting penalized. Play well, be rewarded. Fall from the top of the heap to the absolute bottom, don't expect to draft Tim Duncan.

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To me, you're not really explaining the why, you're just repeating the "what".

Why is it that a team that sucks at drafting should be penalized on top of that with worse draft picks? Why should a team who loses their only star player and suddenly sucks balls be penalized?

To me the basic idea of the draft is that the worst teams should be helped the most. The ONLY problem is that record doesn't always show how bad the team needs players because:

1-tanking makes a team's record worse than it should be

2-that year's roster isn't the same as the next one's: maybe an injured star will be back, maybe you'll sign a major star, maybe your main guy will walk

Problem 1 is partly adressed by a lottery that lowers incentive to tank. Problem 2 is virtually impossible to quantify fairly.

If you try to add other factors like penalizing a team that stays in the lottery, you have to add all kinds of other factors too. If your only star is a UFA, you're going to suck next year and should get more help too. If you have a ton of capspace, maybe you need less help.

The bottom line is that the record is the best we have to go by even though it doesn't really represent how much help you need from the draft next year.

I could see adding a weighting penalty for teams that got real lucky the previous year to make the lottery seem "more fair" (even though it wouldn't be), but adding other factors like how fast you've faded, how long you've been in the lottery don't make sense to me because just like your record, it can be an indication of different things (i.e. losing a star vs the star being injured that year).