With the NBA Draft Lottery coming up on May 19th, that time of the year has come where everyone poses the question: should the NBA reform the Draft Lottery?
Currently, the NBA Draft works like this. Out of the 30 teams in the NBA, the best 8 teams from the Western and Eastern Conference begin the playoffs, immediately after the end of the regular season, in the race to attempt to win the NBA Championship. The other 14 teams are left looking forward to one date: May 19th, the NBA Draft Lottery. Why? All for the chance to get the next best player to enter the NBA.
The Draft Lottery is a night where each team has a percentage chance at getting the #1 Pick in the Draft and this generally means the best player in the Draft. However, because of the lottery, the team with the worst record has a 25% chance of obtaining the #1 pick, the second worst record has a 19.9% chance and so on. The lottery only selects the first three picks; afterwards, the draft is ordered from the worst record to the best.
This lottery system, however, is broken. Because of the weighted system of the lottery, it has become apparent recently that NBA franchises sitting in mediocre positions in the standings are deliberately “tanking” the season to obtain the worst record and subsequently, a significant chance at getting the best player.
It should be noted that players and coaches don’t tank their seasons; if someone is playing a professional sport, losing isn’t in their blood. Management offices are the ones that tank their teams. And they do this through a multitude of trades, transactions and waivers. To make their team worse, they’ll, for example, trade away a good or sometimes the best player for draft rights or a couple of bad players.
They’re all trying to follow the ‘Spurs’ model. In 1997, the San Antonio Spurs’ best player, David Robinson, was injured for the majority of the season and this removed them from serious playoff contention. An opportunity presented itself to try and make a splash at the Draft and so the management adjusted accordingly. The Spurs finished the season with the second worst record, obtained the #1 pick in the lottery and picked Tim Duncan, a franchise defining player who has brought the Spurs 6 NBA Finals appearances, 5 NBA Championships, 2 regular season MVP awards amongst other accolades.
This year, big market teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers, teams that are sacred in NBA history, have all been eliminated from playoff contention this year sit within the 4 worst records in the NBA right now while fans sit on their hands, enduring the terrible, anti-competitive season their teams are going through, praying for the star player to come next year.
Management for the Knicks, for example, has traded away Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith, released Amar’e Stoudemire on waivers and let their hometown star, Carmelo Anthony, basically take off the rest of the season under the guise of an injury, leaving a group of below average players, worse than some college basketball teams to play the rest of the season. They currently sit with the best chance of obtaining the #1 pick, widely believed to be the highly touted college star Jahlil Okafor, a freshman center for the Duke Blue Devils.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has spoken about draft reform. He said, “in terms of management, I think there’s an absolute legitimate rebuilding process that goes on.” He acknowledged the notion of teams attempting to be bad in order to be good. But without the majority consensus of all the NBA owners who understand and accept the plan of their team’s management offices, his hands are tied.
