Let's end the NBA draft lottery

I am a fairly intelligent human being, well educated, employed in a field where I use more brains than brawn.  There is not a lot I don’t understand, but I know this:  I do not understand the NBA draft lottery.

Here is an example, describing a conditional pick in this year’s draft, regarding the 76er’s transaction with the Sacramento Kings: “76ers option to swap 2017 first round picks with Kings (Kings pick protected #11-30 if Kings do not convey first round pick to Cavaliers in 2016).”  What does that even mean?

It used to be simple—the team with the worst record picked first, the team with the second worse record picked next, and so on.  But then someone noticed that teams would apparently lose games on purpose in order to increase their draft pick.  Shocking! So a scheme was worked out where draft order was determined not by won-lost record, but by a lottery BASED on won-lost records.  That would eliminate tanking, right?

Well, it turned out that if a team was willing to tank to get a higher draft pick, they would also tank in order to get a higher chance at a higher draft pick.  This was confirmed this week when Maverick's owner Mark Cuban admitted that the Mavs did their best to lose as many games as possible once they were eliminated from the playoffs.

Since the creation of the draft lottery, the situation has gotten more confusing, with conditional picks like the one quoted above. In this year’s draft the Sacramento King’s pick went from 8 to 3 to 5. With all these permutations, how do teams know what they are trading for?  If future consideration was based on outcomes (that is wins and losses) you could do some projecting, but teams are making trades and the value they get back depends on luck, not skill.

Several years ago I wrote about my problem with the lottery, namely that the whole point of a last-picks-first lottery is to help teams with poor records (okay, this year the number one seed in the East got the number first pick, but leave it to the Nets to make a bad trade).  Sometimes a good team will have a bad year, like when the Spur’s great David Robinson was injured and the team won only 20 games.  They won the first pick in the lottery, selected Tim Duncan, and created a dynasty, a dynasty entirely due to the fortuitousness of winning the draft lottery. 

On the other hand, a team like the Kings can be near bottom dwellers for over a decade but never get a chance to improve because they are either unlucky in the lottery, or they win the lottery in a year when there is no transformative player available.  The draft is the only way for the Kings to improve because you know Sacramento won’t attract free agents, unless MAYBE they last played in Utah.   

After Cuban’s comment, there have been renewed calls to “fix” the lottery in order to discourage tanking.  This follows the exploits of the Philadelphia 76ers, who used “the Process” to lose badly, get a high pick, chose a player who is too injured to play his first year, and do it all over.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

But if you want to penalize poor teams for tanking, they best way would be to penalize teams with poor records by having them draft after the good teams.  That’s right, give the NBA champion first pick, the loser in the Finals second pick, and the team with the worst record picks last.  Harsh, yes, but in sports don’t we usually reward winning?

That is, of course, an absurd prospect, but it is what people who want to discourage tanking are basically suggesting.  As long as it is impossible to differentiate deliberately losing games and just being bad, all you do by diluting the draft is to make it harder for poor teams to rise up and assure the same teams make it to the finals year after year after year.

Of course, that is the NBA, which is on the verge of having the same two teams in the Finals three years in a row. Baseball and football may have teams go from worst to first, but that never happens in basketball.  From 1980 to 2010, there was a 30 year period where 6 teams won 28 of the NBA championships: the Celtics, Bulls and Pistons in the East and the Lakers, Spurs and Rockets in the West (the Heat and 76ers won one a piece).  Bottom line: do NOT bet on the Kings, 76ers or Knicks to win the title in 2018.

The NBA should ditch the lottery and just have a good old fashioned last-picks-first draft.  There is no excuse for a system that allows the Spurs to get Tim Duncan thanks to a ping pong ball bounce.  Or the Knicks to get Patrick Ewing based on a frozen envelope.