Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
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. 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.
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Except anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of game theory would realize that if 15-20 teams are trying to lose, the expected reward of intentionally losing is really low and there'd be much more to gain by cheaply acquiring the good players from those tanking teams. If the 76ers did it so boldly yet only finished last place in the league 1 of the last 4 years, you'd think there'd have been more scrutiny towards the teams that deluded their gullible fans into thinking they'd be competitive before yet somehow finishing worse than allegedly the only team that was trying to lose.
Quote:
Originally Posted by molson
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.
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This turns out to be a disaster because in a sport as skill-dependent as basketball, the teams that go on these sort of runs actually suck (you don't get projected to win 20 games by accident, and a team that wins 37 games could feasibly be the 22nd-best out of 25 teams that were actually trying to win in a given season) and only achieved that meager amount of success because they got lucky regarding injuries and because better teams weren't trying particularly hard against them. Such a team with intelligent fans and ownership would understand that they would be due for some regression to the mean and should be aggressive in looking to continue to improve, but in reality these teams all delude themselves into thinking the players that they have are awesome and look to hold onto them at any cost.
If you want to talk about incompetence, look no further than teams like Detroit, Orlando, and Portland that have payrolls equal to or higher than Golden State's. Even teams like Philadelphia and Brooklyn go into the offseason looking to sign free agents at a reasonable price, and every year these mediocre teams hoard their bench players in the exact manner I described.