Is this the end of the tanking era?

[Limguogolo]

With the creation of the play-in system, the declining chances of securing top draft picks, and the lottery results in recent years not rewarding any team with the worst results, will and should teams put an end to the traditional rebuilding policies that many teams have pursued in recent years (often successfully, like OKC, and Orlando, with more relative success)?


Today, we can estimate between six and eight teams in the "rebuilding" phase. Washington, Brooklyn, Utah, Portland, Toronto, San Antonio, (and then, Charlotte and New Orleans dealing with young franchise players often injured).


This was the path Detroit chose until this year. Before taking a new turn and successfully strengthening its roster through the free agent market.


What assurances can Washington, Brooklyn, Utah, Portland, San Antonio or Toronto have that their young players will reach the next level, making them contenders in the coming years? Even OKC had to bring in a young star to lead their team. But how much can one ac ulate draft picks, young players, and uncertainty by agreeing to play several seasons to "learn"?


Isn't this whole culture and notion of a rebuilding phase something that teams should revisit? Don't they have a better chance of rebuilding better now, given the uncertainties of the lottery, the draft, and player development, through the free agent market, through trades, or even through the complicated market for players playing in the Euroleague?

The league and the teams would have every interest in playing the game of reconstruction (like that of tanking which we have just seen is not rewarded): the teams would be more compe ive, more mature and the public would always prefer to see a team at the bottom of the table which fights and which has a chance of winning than a team of young people (or Gleaguers) facing stronger teams.


Some Euroleague players, some of whom have played in the NBA, could be excellent players on NBA teams. The ten worst NBA teams wouldn't stand a chance against Euroleague teams. TJ Shorts, Kendrick Nunn, Hayes-Davis, Hoard, Tavares, Vezenkov, Carsen Edwards, Francisco, Hifi, Maledon… many of these players would strengthen these so-called "rebuilding" teams today, but which don't even rebuild with the top three picks each year… Returns are rare (Yabusele, Exum), but player agents in Europe might be well advised to review their exit clauses because there's no guarantee that the future will always be a rebuilding policy…


And this may be even more true if, in the future, prospects are kept in college longer.

[scott]

I have seen an increasing amount of discussion about "unflattening" the lottery odds. The idea of flatting them was to disincentivize tanking, but in reality we still have the same number of teams tanking but now there is a higher liklihood they get "stuck" when you have teams like Dallas and San Antonio jumping to the top of the lottery at the expense of truly putrid teams.

I don't have a strong opinion of what the right approach is yet... but I do think we'll hear more discussion about it going forward.

[DPG21920]

I dont think it’s an issue. Teams are bad just because they are bad. Many teams with multiple top 5 picks who draft poorly and build bad teams.

It’s a much better use of assets for the league to have teams who are decent get best assets to make leaps IMO

[LeBowen]

I think they should've reduced the lottery to top10 after they introduced the play-in.
Flatten the odds for those 10 teams, but add restrictions for consecutive top picks.
No top3 picks in consecutive years, no top5 picks three years in a row.

Run the lottery with 10% odds for everyone and then just move teams down depending on the restrictions.
Someone would still get lucky while bad teams get nothing, but we'd never see sub 20 win teams again.

[John B]

Or send a disgruntled AS to the Lakers (Giannis) and get a 1st overall pick from the commissioner.

[CorrectCrusader]

I'm fine with them unflattening it after the spurs have been absurdly lucky in the flattened odds. We're bound for a correction.

[scott]

Saw this idea on the Kings subreddit and I kind of like it: https://www.reddit.com/r/kings/comme...draft_lottery/

The only wrinkle I'd add is that I'd make it only apply to teams that miss the play-in, and everyone else is just ranked by record.

[Mr. Body]

Go back to previous odds.

[exstatic]

I have seen an increasing amount of discussion about "unflattening" the lottery odds. The idea of flatting them was to disincentivize tanking, but in reality we still have the same number of teams tanking but now there is a higher liklihood they get "stuck" when you have teams like Dallas and San Antonio jumping to the top of the lottery at the expense of truly putrid teams.

I don't have a strong opinion of what the right approach is yet... but I do think we'll hear more discussion about it going forward.

I think it may take a few more blows to the head for these teams to stop aiming for 15 wins, and start developing their rosters, and allowing for 25 or more.

The last 3 ‘worst teams’ all drafted #5, normally out of the running for grabbing a top prospect. Maybe this will eventually sink in, and the flattened odds will have done their job. This is the third time that 3 teams outside the top 4 have jumped into it in the past 7 draft lotteries.

The flattened odds are supposed to discourage tanking. If those teams getting booted back 3 or 4 spots are discouraged, maybe they’ll stop.

[scott]

The flattened odds are supposed to discourage tanking. If those teams getting booted back 3 or 4 spots are discouraged, maybe they’ll stop.

I don't think they will, because playing the odds is still the way to go. 14% is still better than 1.8%, even if the 1.8% beat the 14% out in the past. So long as there is even the slightest statistical edge to be gained from losing, teams will tank. That's what that Kings subreddit proposal is interesting to me. I also think a lottery tournament is interesting. Problem with both of these scenarios is the idea that you're going to ask players to go out and try to win a game so their teams can draft their replacement... a slight conflict of interest.

[spurraider21]

Saw this idea on the Kings subreddit and I kind of like it: https://www.reddit.com/r/kings/comme...draft_lottery/

The only wrinkle I'd add is that I'd make it only apply to teams that miss the play-in, and everyone else is just ranked by record.

thats actually... really cool

[LeBowen]

After giving it another throught, there's just no way of both getting rid of tanking and giving the worst team help they need.
Even if you introduce something like multi-year ranking about who's been the worst team over the past however many years you want, teams would target top stars. Spurs would've tanked for 3 years if it meant 30% odds to get Wemby, have no doubt about it.

They can either eliminate tanking with flat odds or eliminate the rich getting richer possibility, but that would make the tanking even worse.

This year was particularly bad.
Jazz, Wizards, Hornets, Nets, Raptors wanted nothing to do with winning, especially the bottom three.
Blazers also tried to tank, but were too good.
Pelicans and Spurs were struck down by injuries and decided to tank.

Suns and Mavs were the only bad teams that wanted to win games, but it was their own doing and awful front office decisions.

[baseline bum]

I have seen an increasing amount of discussion about "unflattening" the lottery odds. The idea of flatting them was to disincentivize tanking, but in reality we still have the same number of teams tanking but now there is a higher liklihood they get "stuck" when you have teams like Dallas and San Antonio jumping to the top of the lottery at the expense of truly putrid teams.

I don't have a strong opinion of what the right approach is yet... but I do think we'll hear more discussion about it going forward.

Everyone's freaking out because of a 10 and an 11 seed winning the lottery in back to back years, but you know none of these kind of weird looking runs are aberrations with random variables. It's called the law of large numbers because you need large numbers of trials before the random variables start converging to expected values, and with the league having a grand total of 41 lotteries in its history you're just gonna see seemingly weird in small sample sizes. Personally I like the completely flattened odds the league ran with from 85 to 87 where every lottery team had the exact same odds and every pick was determined by the lottery. There is no point in tanking for a 1 in 14 shot at Cooper Flagg and there is no incentive for a race to the bottom where you're holding out key guys or subbing in G-League scrubs in the fourth quarter to chase the top tank seed.

[RC_Drunkford]

keep it that way until 2031 so some our swaps hit. That's the exact reason why Brian Wright loaded up on future swap rights.

[scott]

thats actually... really cool

Yeah, and it kind of accomplishes the same thing of what the spirit of the IST is: making more games compe ive throughout the season. I think you could even maybe break the table into three tiers: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 (or maybe 1-10, 11-18, 19-24 and the division winners automatically just get put at the back according to record) where the order in those tiers is determined by this points formula. I think something like this would be the closest thing the league could get to the kind of excitement that European soccer leagues generate around promotion/relegation and Cup qualification at the end of the season even if the league le is already determined.

[Limguogolo]

If I had, at best, a 14% chance of finding the ideal woman every year, I'm pretty sure I'd end up single at 50.

It still seems presumptuous or adventurous to me to hope to rebuild a team from a generational player or to bet on young players.

14%, wouldn't that be the percentage of flops for draft numbers 1?

Insisting for several years on a reconstruction as Detroit did for so long without result, makes me think a little of those people who calculate (wrongly) that if they lost a coin toss, the next time, they have a 100% chance of winning. Every year, taking care to remain the worst student in the class, at best, the chances will remain at 14%. This is extremely low. The lottery lives up to its name. And if franchises continue to persist on this path, the chances of acquiring the best choice might as well be further reduced.

In Europe or elsewhere, young players join teams according to their talent, not according to the talent that is predestined for them in a few years. Teams seek to field the best team possible every year.

The principle of the draft is great, but I doubt that the fact that it is so publicized and that the league revolves around a star system, produces this kind of phenomenon where a handful of teams do not seem to play the same compe ion as the others.

If someone tells me, especially for small markets, that owners are forced to operate through cycles and that going through years of reconstruction allows them to limit salary expenses, okay. But apart from this financial aspect alone, the logic of tanking and reconstruction seems quite risky to me, especially seeing the examples of recent years.

We'll see...