Lotto Time
This week 76ers chairman Ed Snider became the latest person to criticize the NBA draft lottery. Snider’s reasoning is that the current system encourages tanking and rewards teams for poor performance.
“There should be just one Ping-Pong ball per team. Teams should not be rewarded for being inept.”
It seems that Snider is just angry his 76ers only have a .7% chance of winning the top pick, because the NBA lottery system (which was recently adopted by the NHL) actually does more to deter tanking than any other sport.
In both Major League Baseball and the NFL a team’s draft position is 100% determined by its won-loss record. That means a team that intentionally loses games can be sure it will improve it’s draft position. In the NBA a team can only increase its chances that it’s draft position will improve. The lengthy NBA season also makes it harder for teams to tank. In the NFL the season is only 16 games long. That means a team can easily tank the last quarter of the season without anybody batting an eye. Even this year the Bucks and Celtics were hard pressed to throw away that many games that easily.
Another thing lottery detractors fail to realize is that giving every lottery team an equal chance still rewards being inept, only in this case it rewards being slightly inept instead of being completely inept. Think about it. This year teams like the Kings, Sixers, and Clippers barely missed the playoffs. Should they then be rewarded with a 1 in 7 chance of landing Oden or Durrant. Giving every team an equal chance wont even eliminate tanking. Sure it would have stopped the Celtics and Bucks from intentionally losing games this season, but isn’t it possible a team like the Kings would tank because they would rather have a shot at Oden than be the 8th seed in the West.
Finally, the biggest reason the NBA lottery system doesn’t need to be changed is that this season was a freak occurrence. The fact that there was not one, but two highly touted players meant that every drop in the standings increased a team’s chances on landing a franchise player twice as much as if there was only one superstar. Most years a team would never even think of tanking because there’s nobody at the top of the draft they’re dying to get. Just look at last year. Sure, what the Celtics and Bucks did this year was not good for the NBA, but this kind of situation doesn’t arise very often and it’s certainly not a valid reason to tinker with the NBA lottery.
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