FanPost

Why a New Lottery Process Might Lead to a "Fixed" Future of the NBA

Last week's announcement from Zach Lowe at Grantland about the proposed new lottery setup sent tidal forces through the NBA tanking world, led by President Sam Hinkie. Here was a process not as ridiculous as the "wheel" setup in which every team will get the #1 pick...ONCE EVERY THREE DECADES, but one that just didn't seem right. For a league that has been accused of being fixed for...well forever, this doesn't do much to change that.

Let's start by taking a quick look at the wheel setup by retroactively applying it, and let's just say the Sixers had won the first Wheel pick in 1983. Now while it wouldn't take affect for a few years to offset draft pick trades already made and potential cries of fixing for a certain team to get the first pick in a certain draft, it still just is short-sighted. Let's say this system started 31 years ago in 1983. You had Ralph Sampson at #1, and that was it. Not one All-Star amongst the next seven guys. 30 years later they could have gotten Anthony Bennett, an injured Nerlens Noel, or Victor Oladipo. Some solid pros in there, none of them likely Hall of Famers/top 20 players of all time. I mention that last point because one year later, a Top 5 team would have been entitled to one of Hakeem, MJ, or Barkley. Thirty years later in the current year, they had a selection of one of the best draft classes of the last twenty years. There is absolutely nothing inherently fair about this, and in a sport where talent comes in waves and cycles, you could potentially see one team just happening to luck into the right cycle period.

So we have the new proposal, in which all lottery teams have a 10 or less percent chance at winning. The reason for this reform is the amount of low lottery teams who have won the #1 pick in recent years (Portland was sixth the year they got Oden, Chicago had a 1.7% chance to get Derrick Rose, and I really don't need to remind Sixers fans of how Cleveland has fared with this process the last five years), even though we have teams, like our beloved Ballers, who go all out to try and get that #1 pick. While this skews the results of say, three to five NBA teams who are trying to be the worst of the worst, recent history has proven that this strategy is far from fool-proof and sometimes you end up with a seven foot center with a stress fracture in his foot instead of Andrew Wiggins.

So why would we promote a system where EVERYONE has a chance? A team could be in the playoff hunt until the last month of the season, see that they don't have a chance, and wave the white flag and begin tanking. In case you don't know, there are fourteen lottery teams that could do this every year. How is it fair that a 40 win Boston team, a titan of NBA history, who finished 9th after trading Rajon Rondo at the deadline and falling out of contention, gets to then benefit from having just about as good of odds as getting the #1 pick as a poor team (like the Sixers) who flat out sucked all year. Or the Bucks, who even if they try are likely just a terrible team by birth right. Bad teams should get reward for being bad regardless if they gutted their team or not. It takes a lot of lost fan support and dollar revenues to do something like that. The Sixers would be buried as a team forever in this town if Sam Hinkie didn't at least seem really really smart, and his early returns weren't already a ROTY and perhaps another one in Noel, with three jumping beans he got in the second round.

So this brings up the fixing part. We already have gripes that the lottery winner is seemingly arbitrary and only goes to the franchise that the NBA deems deserving, all the way back to Patrick Ewing and the Knicks. The Cavs got a LeBron replacement gift (and TWO MORE AFTER THAT!), the post-MJ Bulls eventually got their Derrick Rose, the NBA owned Hornets/Pelicans got Anthony Davis. The Sixers never get anyone they want. It's the way the cookie crumbles in the NBA, and there's nothing that can be done about that.

But now we have a new draft process where the Lakers could blow for a year with a hurt Kobe, somehow land an Andrew Wiggins because somehow that's fair? The Celtics rip apart their team and still "try" to only win 25 games instead of 20, and they get a shot at whatever number of rings they're on now? Under this system, ANYONE could win in ANY given year and it would statistically be feasible and nobody could chalk it up to the NBA rigging it. Everybody has the same c hance, don't you see? It's fair! I can see David Stern winking and elbowing in my head right now as I type.

Maybe this is an overreaction and this never happens and this is an entirely fair process designed to rebalance the integrity of the game by removing tanking. But from this perspective it seems like an overreaction to a process that may result in undesired inputs (teams like the Sixers) but for the last decade has given exactly what the NBA has wanted - parity that rewards teams with the #1 that aren't tanking. So why change it? Because now the NBA gets to say that the third "Sorry you lost LeBron so here's a #1" pick in four years is because of the new process which everyone gets a chance!

This the NBA, after all. Where fair doesn't happen.

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