Quote:
Originally Posted by nol
The Lakers (who deluded their fans into thinking they'd be more competitive this year thanks to signing players like Timofey Mozgov and Luol Deng, who are now so awful that they'd have to give another team one of their best young players for free just convince them to take on one of those contracts) won fewer games and got a higher draft pick than the Sixers this past year, yet they didn't have enough to trade the Celtics for the number one pick even though they were trying to do so. So either the Sixers made moves considerably beyond the scope of a 10-year-old or most of the other teams in the NBA are run by a 5-year-old, in which case it wouldn't make much sense to fire the 10-year-old when when all the other 5-year-olds were still gainfully employed.
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If the Lakers are the worst team in the league the next 5 years, they'll be loaded with talent. That's all they have to do to turn it around, lose most of their games.
There's still a bit of a aversion to that in the league, the 76ers are the only team that did it so boldly. But if it works out for them, I'd assume others will follow suit. If a championship is the main goal, the bottom 15-20 teams (maybe more) should all be trying to lose all of their games. That's part of what makes the regular season so insufferable for me - even if a bad team is trying to win, you kind of know that they'd be better off losing, which takes away the drama of a game. Of course, if we got to that threshold, ALL of those 15-20 teams can't get a top 3 pick, so there'd be real heated competition to lose games.
I think the inverse-record order of drafting in all sports is relic of a time when the draft was mostly a crapshoot - a bunch of old drunk guys drafting players they've never even seen play. Today, we know more about these players, and I find it really problematic that these assets are distributed based on how much teams lose. I'd either make it totally random for non-playoff teams (though even then, it's probably be better to lose all your games than finish with a 3-8 seed, since those teams so rarely win championships), or, have rotating spots every year so you know for years in the future where you'll be drafting in any given draft. It wouldn't be the end of the world if a young exciting middle of the pack team got to build on their success with a top pick rather than blow everything up because they realize can't get any more top assets unless they do. And it wouldn't be the end of the world if a bad team with bad players who can't win 20 games isn't automatically rewarded with the greatest assets available in the sport, strictly because they were worse in this competition than everyone else. It's backwards. I think the league would be a lot more fun if you had those stories like the team that was expected to win 20 games goes on a great run and wins 37 instead. And we all could get excited about how that team was ahead of schedule, and how they might attract better free agents. But in reality, that would be an absolute disaster for them. I remember M.L. Carr saying how he was literally pulling hot players out of games if they made too many shots when the Celtics were tanking. So if you're a fan of a bad team, you actually have to get a little nervous if your team wins a few games, and hope they revert back to sucking.
Edit: I think other sports potentially have the same problem, but it seems like the NBA draft is more important than the other drafts, because of how consistently the top picks deliver, and because of the smaller rosters where a few players make a huge difference. And hockey seems to have more year-to-year unpredictability regarding which teams are good. In the NBA, there's not many surprises - the best teams with the best players win very consistently.