Knicks · Knicks Draft Potential: New York's Lottery Position Drops & The Pathway Towards Overall NBA Draft Reform (page 1)

https://dailyknicks.com/2020/08/21/ny-kn...

NY Knicks: Who has the worst lottery luck in NBA history?
by Jeffrey Bellone

Is it possible that another team has worse lottery luck than the New York Knicks?

New York Knicks fans reading this headline are probably rolling their eyes in anticipation of learning that their favorite basketball team has the worst lottery luck in NBA history. But it isn’t true: there is one other team who has dropped more times in the lottery than the Knicks and that is the team who won the lottery last night, the Minnesota Timberwolves.

In a recent study of NBA Draft Lottery performance by FiveThirtyEight.com, New York has dropped from their pre-lottery position 13 times since 1985, which was the miraculous year when they won the lottery to secure the rights to select Patrick Ewing.

The Knicks are tied with Dallas for the second most drops in NBA lottery history.

If we were to correct for the number of lottery appearances – perhaps the only redeeming value of the Knicks trading several lottery picks in the past is they have had less appearances to fall backwards – Miami is the unluckiest team, as they have dropped ten of the eleven times they have been included in the annual drawing.

On average, the Knicks pick changes 0.72 in the wrong direction, per Five Thirty Eight, which ranks third worst of any NBA team, behind Miami and Dallas. New York has not jumped in the lottery since 1985.

In a bit of good news, or a reminder of how bad the Knicks have been in the lottery era, their average pick of 6.67 ranks 10th best.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the...

That hasn’t been the case for their old rivals, the New York Knicks, who appear in the lottery relatively often (18 times since 1985) and get unlucky by an average of 0.72 pick slots on average. Yes, New York won the first-ever lottery, grabbing Patrick Ewing and launching a thousand conspiracy theories. But the basketball gods have seemingly made them pay for it ever since. Including 2020 — when they got the eighth pick despite having the sixth-worst record — the Knicks have gone 17 straight lotteries without a pick above their pre-lottery slot. During that span, their picks have moved down in seven lotteries (or 41 percent of the time), with an average pick change of -0.88 slots.

https://imgur.com/dvWVc70

https://imgur.com/cbAucmz

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Lottery Reform Proposals

https://www.theringer.com/nba/2018/2/26/...

Take That for Data: Takeaways From the Sloan Conference

The best big ideas and the latest scuttlebutt from a weekend in Boston with some of sports’ brightest minds
By Kevin O'Connor Feb 26, 2018, 8:11am EST

“I’m not a person that frowns upon analytics,” ex-NBA player Jalen Rose said this weekend during a panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. “I do think it’s a tool, but not the toolbox.”

During a panel called “Take That for Data: Basketball Analytics,” Nick Wright of Fox Sports asked Rockets general manager Morey and Celtics assistant general manager Mike Zarren about the strength of a single-number advanced statistic such as real plus-minus (RPM), which currently ranks Tyus Jones and Fred VanVleet as top-14 players. Zarren said that if a stat is at odds with what you’re watching, then either the way the number is calculated or the way you’re watching the game is probably wrong.

Morey said he thinks the fundamental challenge with trades is that draft picks are the only way to bridge the gap between how two teams value one player. “They’re like cigarettes in prison. That’s the only currency you have,” Morey said Saturday at the “Take That for Data” panel. “The value changes up and down all the time, and it makes for a not-very-liquid market.” Morey said that the league should allow teams to put player-performance conditions on draft picks during trades, so that a pick’s ultimate position could be affected by the success or health of a traded player. But there’s been resistance to the idea from the league office, Zarren said, since it would become difficult to keep track of all the conditions.

Would it really be that hard? Every single draft-pick exchange is tracked online, so the league’s well-staffed office should be capable of adding it to their list. Teams are already allowed to protect draft picks based on team performance...

Zarren later floated an idea that would allow a percentage of a team’s lottery ping-pong balls to be tradable, which would create another form of currency. The union would have to be involved for such a drastic change, but it’s another intriguing idea. The trade deadline, the draft, and free agency are three of the most exciting times on the NBA calendar. Allowing more creativity could lead to even more trades that shake up the league and drive more excitement for the game.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1831...

Here's a solution for tanking straight from the heart of the vaunted MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (via Jared Wade): Decide the early draft order according to the total wins teams rack up after being eliminated from postseason qualification.

To clarify: Let's say one team is eliminated from postseason consideration with 20 games to go, while one is knocked out with five left. The former could still take the top pick with a losing record—one of, say, 7-13—and finish ahead of the latter, even in the event of a 5-0 finish. The second, though, could just as easily leapfrog slightly lesser teams (i.e. ones with 4-6 records after elimination) as reward for finishing strong.

Think about it. Most of the time, teams don't stink because they "want" to stink; they stink because they don't have talent, they're struggling with injuries or some other combination of factors beyond organizational intent.

If the league wants to encourage teams to compete all the time, they should give teams that just so happen to be bad something positive to strive for. Those teams that are plain terrible will be eliminated from playoff consideration much earlier than those that fall just shy of the 16-team field. Thus, bad teams will have more opportunities to win games that could be important to the future of the franchise in a tangible way.

Give bad teams something to play for, even if there's no trophy at the end of the immediate tunnel. That way, players can actually be of service in making their teams better, not just worse.

http://grantland.com/features/if-ruled-n...

I’m re-pitching my 2007 idea for the Entertaining As Hell Tournament with a couple of minor tweaks …

Let’s say we cut down the regular season to 78 games, lock down the top seven seeds in each conference, then stage a week-long, single elimination, 16-team tournament between the nonplayoff teams for the 8-seeds. (No conferences, just no. 15 through no. 30 seeded in order.) The higher seeds would host the first two rounds (eight games in all) from Sunday through Wednesday; the last two rounds (The Final FourGotten) would rotate every year in New York or Los Angeles on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, becoming something of a Fun Sports Weekend along the lines of All-Star Weekend. Friday night’s winners would clinch playoff berths. Sunday’s winner gets two carrots: the chance to pick their playoff conference (you can go East or West), as well as the no. 10 pick in the upcoming draft (that’s a supplemental pick; they’d get their own first-rounder as well).

I’ll flip this around: Why WOULDN’T we do this? Lottery teams couldn’t tank down the stretch or shut down starters for nefarious reasons; not with a possible playoff berth and an extra first-rounder at stake. Fans would remain invested no matter how poorly their team was playing down the stretch (knowing the tournament was coming up). Sponsors would pony up extra money to be involved. We’d get a fun basketball weekend in New York or Los Angeles out of it. The 14 playoff teams would get 10 days off as their bonus.

If you’re still not sold, allow me to fall back on a question that never fails: “Would you watch it?”

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how...

The NBA Futures
Submitted by the Futures Draft Planning Committee of Samuel B. Feldblum and Cody Cutting in New York, NY

In a nutshell: Teams tank because they own their own picks. We could eliminate tanking by creating a world in which nobody owned their own pick, but instead owned stock market-style futures on other teams’ picks.

The Logistics
* Starting some arbitrary year (next, say), in addition to order of finish deciding the order of teams’ draft picks, it would also decide the order in which they get to pick other teams’ finishing positions in the following year as their own.
* Then the worst team gets to pick the team whose draft position they would like to have next year (not their own), next the second worst team would pick whose draft position they want, etc.
* No incentive (after the lead-up year) to tank
* The most basic way to decide the futures draft position for the following year (the order in which teams will pick which team’s draft pick they would like the following year) would be to simply have the futures draft order follow the same order as that of the actual draft. So if the Raptors pick the Heat for the following year, and the Heat finish third-to-last in the league, then the Raptors have both the third pick and the third futures pick for the following year.

Advantages
* Fantastic bizarre rivalries form. Each team is telling the team whose pick they grab “you’re going to be the worst of the available teams.” That’s bad blood, and immediate locker-room ammunition.
* Suddenly teams’ destinies around the league are super intertwined – because of the picking system, similarly-talented squads will be more likely to be interconnected through a future (or even through two!), adding to the sense of bad teams trying to propel themselves out of the quagmire of incompetence by using other bad teams (their peers) as stepping stones.
* There’s a lot of room for number-crunchers in front offices to figure out which teams will rise and fall next year…
* Also increases the premium on good management – GMs will be scrutinized not just for their ability to pick well and manage their own potential but also for their eye for other teams’ competence.
* Going into each season, a look at the futures draft order would basically be an aggregate prediction of the position of each team at season’s end. This would allow for quick and easy comparisons of which teams are exceeding or failing to meet general expectations based on their resources entering the season. (One could imagine a +/- figure next to each teams win-loss record, indicating how their league standing compares to the position that their future was drafted, aka their predicted league finish.)

Disadvantages
* Now, the draft loses some of its corrective ability, and the worst teams are no longer guaranteed to be helped the most.
* Requires creative protection measures to avoid gamesmanship or the appearance of impropriety.

Necessary Protections
* No trading with the team whose pick you have during the season
* Noncompete clauses for GMs – a 1 year prohibition on changing teams that are connected via a “future.” We don’t want any accusations of GMs tanking a team to help out their future team.

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Basic Premise - The Knicks will never win a draft lottery ever again. David Stern and Adam Silver know the Knicks will sell out no matter what and they have other teams they want to prop up to protect the league's marketing and keep overall franchise valuation growing. As long as James Dolan owns the Knicks, this is not going to change.

Basic Solution - If you can't change the player, you must change the format of the game. Draft lottery reform will give the Knicks a better chance to fight for a higher lottery pick. In short, let the basketball gods decide, not some suit in the NBA's marketing department.

Options

A) Put standard pick protections based on traded player(s) overall performance

B) Allow draft lottery balls to be traded

C) Draft position determined by wins total by each individual team once it's been eliminated from playoff berth contention

D) March Madness style single elimination consolation tournament for a supplemental 10th overall pick in the draft

E) Draft position determined by preseason "betting" on another teams overall season performance. (This one has flaws but is creative)

Do you prefer one of these types of lottery reform over the others? Thoughts?

Go back to year one. At least frozen envelopes worked out for us.

TripleThreat wrote:-snip-

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Lottery Reform Proposals

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Basic Premise - The Knicks will never win a draft lottery ever again. David Stern and Adam Silver know the Knicks will sell out no matter what and they have other teams they want to prop up to protect the league's marketing and keep overall franchise valuation growing. As long as James Dolan owns the Knicks, this is not going to change.

Basic Solution - If you can't change the player, you must change the format of the game. Draft lottery reform will give the Knicks a better chance to fight for a higher lottery pick. In short, let the basketball gods decide, not some suit in the NBA's marketing department.

Options

A) Put standard pick protections based on traded player(s) overall performance

B) Allow draft lottery balls to be traded

C) Draft position determined by wins total by each individual team once it's been eliminated from playoff berth contention

D) March Madness style single elimination consolation tournament for a supplemental 10th overall pick in the draft

E) Draft position determined by preseason "betting" on another teams overall season performance. (This one has flaws but is creative)

Do you prefer one of these types of lottery reform over the others? Thoughts?

I really wish that we fans could just stop attacking the owners the way we do. Dolan wants to win as badly as the next owner. He doesn't skimp. There is a point where we have not only been beating a dead horse argument but the argument just stinks.

The FO, coaching and players need to put together better seasons than their rivals. End of narrative. Dolan is just an accountant.

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The problem with "fixing" the draft is to understand first if it has any value and then whether or not its broken.

Last century, when the draft was created there was no spending cap. If memory serves me correctly, the argument of small market teams was that the best players would be attracted to the big cities and the big city money and exposure would keep the small market teams in permanent second-class competitive status. And some teams did move around and change hands.

The original problem: rich teams could monopolize signing new, desirable talent

So the first "benefit" of a draft was to provide a more equal opportunity for small market teams to compete for young talent (in those days, college talent for the most part).

This first "benefit" rested on some broad assumptions:

1.) Income taxation
2.) Weather/climate
3.) There was no internet or global economy
4.) No guarantee of cost/benefit
5.) No guarantee that the player wouldn't leave
6.) No fiscally competitive international opportunities

An early fix to this herding of players into a constrained labor pool was to control costs to teams who now ALL had the opportunity to sign the most [perceived] desirable players but would now be expected to cough up the money. The solution of course was to short-change the players bargaining position. Does this need fixing?

Generally speaking, another fix was to weigh the value of earlier picks to later picks to ensure fixed costs and temporal expectations. The draft carries an incremental draft position fiscal reward AND a contractual obligation to remain a team asset until the team disposes of the player - well-paid indentured servitude.

The Fixed Income/Fixed Obligation fix ensured small markets now had the opportunity AND contractual structure to compete for perceived top new talent.

But this introduces some new problems:

1.) All teams still had the same random chances of winning the lottery
2.) Small market teams outnumbered big market teams 8 or 9 to 1
3.) An incremental ranking of talent introduces the marketing of players into the draft mix - altered player value perception
4.) Contractual obligations worked both ways - sign a lemon and you own that lemon
5.) Some teams are poorly managed no matter what

The only assumptions that got resolved are #4) Guaranteed cost/benefit and we've added a basket full of new issues and #5) Player retention. But if there were more small-market owners than big market owners then they could continue to tinker with the process of acquiring new talent.

You can just feel more "fixing" coming.

Another fix was to map lottery position to the previous season's won/loss record. This addresses the complaint that even winning teams could strike it rich and win prized positions in the draft order randomly. What could go wrong?

Well, this becomes the beginning of the whack-a-mole pattern of "fixes" the NBA is wallowed in.

New problems are:

6.) Losing is introduced as an increasingly profitable way to do business (see the Sterling Clippers)
7.) Lottery picks become an increasingly valuable trade commodity
8.) The expectation for the most desirable draft picks escalates from potentially a great NBA player to a, too often, lonely franchise trophy icon
9.) The lottery itself becomes entertainment filler on sports shows

Concurrent to draft "fixing", the NBA introduces team salary floors and caps to further complicate what has now become an entertainment industry more than an actual sport.

The tentacles of salary cap implications are innumerable. But it soles the original problem, with a salary cap no team, no matter how rich, could afford to monopolize signing young talent without significant penalty. With salary constraints the entire premise of the draft is eliminated.

All of the fixes being suggested to the draft are based on the draft as an obsolete, highly gamed NBA entertainment filler that provides NO sporting benefit to anyone. Its a fiscal windfall for the NBA.

Currently the team salary cap is unform for each team.

This show instead be progressively recalibrated to account for state and city taxes so that there is no advantage to play in a State with no personal income tax vs a State that has one.

Here are some basic articles on eliminating the NBA draft altogether -

https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2017/3/26/1...

Behold rookie free agency

Imagine a world in which declared and eligible rookies become NBA free agents at midnight on July 1. Of course, these players are different than normal NBA free agents, and some special contract considerations and salary cap rules can be implemented to integrate rookies cleanly.

The NBA can do this using rookie salary cap exceptions. Under this plan, each team would receive two rookie salary exceptions per season: one equal to 75 percent of the mid-level exception ($6.1 million in 2017-18) and one equal to the biannual exception ($2.4 million in 2017-18). Let’s name them for clarity’s sake: the full rookie exception and the minor rookie exception.

Just as with other salary cap exceptions, these limit the first-year salary for players who sign them. With 5 percent annual raises, the full rookie exception would be worth $26.2 million over four years. The two-year minor rookie exception would be worth $4.9 million.

How can teams use these exceptions? Just as with the mid-level exception, the rookie exceptions can be broken up among multiple players or only partially used. In a twist on how exceptions are usually treated, rookie exceptions can also be traded. Teams could essentially trade their ability to sign a player to a rookie exception.

Franchises who are more interested in building their teams with young players could acquire multiple rookie extensions for any given year. These would be far less valuable than draft picks currently are since draft picks are guarantees of getting rookies under contract, whereas the exceptions serve only as opportunities to sign rookies.

So these are salary cap exceptions. What about teams under the salary cap?

The rookie max

Teams over the salary cap can only use those exceptions and minimum contracts to sign rookies. But teams under the cap have an advantage in signing rookies, just as they do in signing other free agents.

Under this plan, teams under the salary cap could sign rookies to contracts up to the rookie maximum, which is 150 percent of the mid-level ($12.2 million in 2017-18). Rookie contracts can be no longer than four years. No player options are allowed on rookie deals above the biannual exception. Team options are allowed. Restricted free agency rules remain in place.

There’s one catch. You can only have three players on rookie deals above the rookie exception on your roster at any time. This would prevent franchises from hoarding cap space over multiple seasons to load up on 20-year-olds, or from clearing the books in any given year with the express purpose of adding the five best amateur players in July.

This is not a restriction on how many rookies you can have on your roster. There is no limit to the number of players on deals signed for the rookie exception or below.

https://www.espn.com/nba/draft2015/insid...

The proposal

Get rid of the draft:?Not just the lottery, not just the weighted system -- just get rid of the draft altogether. We have to shift the incentive system to sound management principles and franchise building that has vision and purpose. That can't happen as long as we offer free whiffs at top-tier talent by virtue of being terrible in the prior season.

Turn draft season into a rookie free-agency period:?Each team will have a rookie salary exception at its disposal. Teams would be free to negotiate with any incoming rookie player during this period, and can choose whether to use their entire exception on one player, or divide it among several players (as long as they each draw at least league minimum salary).

Inevitably, bad teams will decry the advantage good teams have, so we can weight the system and size of the exception by the reverse order of the season-ending standings, with non-playoff teams receiving the highest 14 exceptions. Below is an example of how this year's rookie exception distribution would work, with the current rookie scale salaries for the corresponding draft position listed for the sake of comparison.

Notice how the rookie exceptions are more heavily weighted toward the top of the draft; this is to account for the diminishing talent level the further down the traditional draft we go. In other words, we're still giving the worst teams the best financial device to lure the talent (money available), but they still have to convince players to sign there. For example, a team like the Knicks can offer a player like D'Angelo Russell $800,000 more than the Sixers can, but maybe Russell thinks the Philadelphia 76ers to be a team with clearer direction and vision, not to mention a style of play that he finds more amenable. It would be on the Knicks to convince him that signing with them comes with more perks, and not just more money.

Players have more choice in the matter, and teams should have to work hard to gain their services.

Will there be players who'll rather play for Miami for $2.2 million than in Detroit for $2.5 million? Of course, but the idea is that as a team like Miami signs better talent, it'll improve and eventually get smaller exceptions. In other words, while forgoing $300,000 in exchange for a more scenic location is an easy decision, you'll see very few, if any, prospects make that same switch from, say, the Detroit Pistons to the Los Angeles Clippers, who could only offer about $800,000 versus the Pistons' $2.5 million. Remember: Most draftees have never seen a dime of professional pay. In most cases, the need to secure their financial future will outweigh the need to live by the beach.

Another likely objection will be the idea that this system favors successful teams. That's the idea. Players want to be on winning teams. The system should encourage teams to try to build winners.

But players also want playing time, so the argument that a top-five talent will sacrifice money in order to play for the Golden State Warriors doesn't take into account that he probably won't play much because of the Warriors' stacked roster. Since playing time is the best marketing campaign for a future contract, it wouldn't make sense to sacrifice current dollars just to get into a situation that will dampen your chances at playing time and future dollars.

The beauty of the rookie exception system is that it keeps in place many of the features of the current draft like trading futures, including protections, while not guaranteeing anything. For example, the Hawks and Nets have a pick swap this year; in the rookie exception system, they'd have an exception swap, with Atlanta getting $1.6 million to spend versus Brooklyn's $777,453. The Hawks should be rewarded for pulling one over on the Nets, but that doesn't guarantee they'll be able to convince a player to sign there.

What this system does is quickly separate savvy front offices from bumbling ones.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2736...

Speaking to reporters Friday, Van Gundy stated that if the league truly wants to eliminate tanking, it should abolish the draft, do away with the rookie salary scale and make all incoming players free agents.

"I'd get rid of it, just get rid of the draft altogether," Van Gundy said. "We'd just deal with the salary cap. Make all [rookies] free agents coming in, and if I want to go give a guy $50 million a year, good, but I got to do it under the cap."

Van Gundy added that if rookies became free agents, he thinks it would open the door for small-market teams to offer more money than those residing in big-market destinations, which would help the league's parity problem.

"They say everybody would want to go to L.A," Van Gundy said. "Well, how much money are they going to give up to go to those places?"

Van Gundy also suggested the NBA could level the playing field by eliminating max contracts.
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"I think if you did that and you had no individual max on players, we'd start to get some parity in the league, but the league really doesn't want parity," he said, per the Detroit Free Press' Vince Ellis. "They want the superteams, and I get that. It's worked well, business-wise."

https://medium.com/@markybillson/how-the...

Drafts help fans. Implementing a draft in 1935 gave stability to the fledgling NFL, even when they were selecting players based on local newspaper clippings. No longer did teams like the Lansing Oldsmobile or Frankford Yellow Jackets come and go. Eight of the nine NFL franchises from the ’35 season still exist 83 years later, and six are still located in the same market.

Prior to the Major League Baseball Free Agent draft, seven of the 20 major league franchises announced relocations in an 11-year period. Since the draft, only four of 30 franchises have moved in a 53-year period, and only one since 1971.

When acquiring talent in baseball meant finding the best amateur talent in America and waving signing bonuses at them, the largest market team, the New York Yankees, won 29 pennants in 43 years through 1964.

When a draft was implemented in 1965, the Yankees fell to last place in 1966.

The only way the NBA Draft could ever really be abolished is if an owner of a small market NBA team decided he wished to test international waters. Realizing his franchise would be more valuable and profitable in Paris than Milwaukee, for instance, he could also see where such a franchise would have an advantage in signing young European talent.

There were 10 players in the NBA from France alone last season.

Like Walter O’Malley needed Horace Stoneham to move to California with him, said owner convinces the owners of teams in other small markets they’re better off overseas as well. New Orleans moves to Berlin. Memphis to Madrid. You get the picture.

For scheduling, international teams are placed in one conference and American teams in another. While any heartland appeal of the NBA is gone in this country, franchises do become more valuable, and the game grows internationally. The NBA Finals are truly something of a World Cup Tournament.

Furthermore, a French basketball player might be willing to take less money to play for his hometown team than he would by venturing to America, where he’d have a strange language to deal with and likely wouldn’t be as marketable. Hence, he could make more in his home country as a star than in the USA as an unknown.

The first complication I see is any rookie free agency, via some kind of set exception, even on a tiered basis, is going to come into conflict with shoe deals

Zion Williamson signed a 7 year/75 million dollar shoe deal with Nike. Nothing prevents Nike from saying, "We will up your shoe deal if you sign with these 4 specific teams" Since it's outside of the NBA, the league can't regulate it. But if Zion could lose 2 million a year taking a lower tiered RSE to go to the Lakers, he can make that money back on the shoe deal.

Ja Morant is giving hope to Memphis after the slow long decline of Grit And Grind with Conley/ZBo/Gasol. Would Morant pick Memphis is a truly free market?

To be fair, you might have some players play closer to their home towns. Also playing time would be somewhat of a factor. You aren't getting much playing time a stacked Lakers squad.

The immediate fix would be to limit the number of RSE players a team can sign in one offseason. Then that comes into conflict with the idea of actual free player movement. I.E. it's not a question of cap space being open anymore but a limitation on the number of RSE's you can hold.

I think a "Zero Draft" format would be interesting, but how to maintain competitive balance are the larger questions?

fwk00, thoughts?

Baseline starting assumption is the offers from different teams will be the same. As a player do you want to join a winning team or a losing team? Nuff said

so this leads to losing teams needing to pay more to attract the player or make riskier decisions about players, but since there's a salary cap this seriously risks more losing because it means at the end of the day you'll have less talent for the dollar

and while the draft format itself creates no major issues IMO, the younger and younger talent pool does. You're drafting guys who still have a lot of physical and mental maturation as a player in front of them. you have issues of opportunity cost as you're playing guys who may not be ready to contribute to winning, and then their rookie deals start to end and you still can have a murkier picture. Point being, is it makes it tougher for the bad teams to improve because the information guiding decisions is cloudier

I don't have a good answer for the draft perhaps other than to extend the period of rookie contracts or increase minimum age (which i think is a no go for other reasons)

I can imagine more impactful reform on the FA side of things. Bad teams need to take more risk or pay more to turn things around. There needs to be a mechanism (e.g., amnesty, or Guaranteed money like NFL) where teams aren't further hammered for bad FA deals (e.g., Parsons, Noah). it's ridiculous that we have a system where so many trades are influenced in whole or part by shedding bad contracts. If the guy is that bad the answer should be either a renegotiation or cutting the player. That's the world the fanbase lives in. It's very frustrating as a fan who wants sports as a release mechanism having their team hamstrung by bad deals especially when said player seems to be mailing it in.

TripleThreat wrote:The idea of eliminating the NBA draft altogether is an interesting discussion point.

The first complication I see is any rookie free agency, via some kind of set exception, even on a tiered basis, is going to come into conflict with shoe deals

Zion Williamson signed a 7 year/75 million dollar shoe deal with Nike. Nothing prevents Nike from saying, "We will up your shoe deal if you sign with these 4 specific teams" Since it's outside of the NBA, the league can't regulate it. But if Zion could lose 2 million a year taking a lower tiered RSE to go to the Lakers, he can make that money back on the shoe deal.

Ja Morant is giving hope to Memphis after the slow long decline of Grit And Grind with Conley/ZBo/Gasol. Would Morant pick Memphis is a truly free market?

To be fair, you might have some players play closer to their home towns. Also playing time would be somewhat of a factor. You aren't getting much playing time a stacked Lakers squad.

The immediate fix would be to limit the number of RSE players a team can sign in one offseason. Then that comes into conflict with the idea of actual free player movement. I.E. it's not a question of cap space being open anymore but a limitation on the number of RSE's you can hold.

I think a "Zero Draft" format would be interesting, but how to maintain competitive balance are the larger questions?

fwk00, thoughts?

Well, Trip, I thought SVG's commentary echoes my own. Just dump the draft altogether. The other plans for ending it add yet more micro-management/accountant minutiae to it all.

The salary cap takes care of all of that - spend as much as you like - its all high risk, occasionally high reward. Well managed teams will thrive. poorly managed teams will look the same.

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As for the shoe deals and so on. IMO, Nike can demand a player go here or there but they don't hold those cards. If the Warriors, Lakers, and others have all their money tied up, what's Nike going to say?

Zion can always make as much advertising fat farm diets anyway.

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The unfortunate reality is that the draft ain't going anywhere no matter how sensible it is to flatten it. It's like The Price is Right - you can't kill mindless speculation sport. It has an audience. The challenge is to make it work.

TPercy wrote:Yeah getting rid of draft altogether isn't good. Makes NBA less balanced imo

Why?

Most highly competitive teams operate at or above the salary cap. They won't be signing the most desirable newbies on a yearly basis.

So who will? Teams that manage cap space to improve with youth.

If your team has been losing badly, your team salary better not be maxed out or you deserve what you get. No?

Chandler wrote:Taxes are definitely a problem, so is the cost of living differential. That said, even if those disparities are leveled FA still is net positive for the winning teams

Baseline starting assumption is the offers from different teams will be the same. As a player do you want to join a winning team or a losing team? Nuff said

so this leads to losing teams needing to pay more to attract the player or make riskier decisions about players, but since there's a salary cap this seriously risks more losing because it means at the end of the day you'll have less talent for the dollar

and while the draft format itself creates no major issues IMO, the younger and younger talent pool does. You're drafting guys who still have a lot of physical and mental maturation as a player in front of them. you have issues of opportunity cost as you're playing guys who may not be ready to contribute to winning, and then their rookie deals start to end and you still can have a murkier picture. Point being, is it makes it tougher for the bad teams to improve because the information guiding decisions is cloudier

I don't have a good answer for the draft perhaps other than to extend the period of rookie contracts or increase minimum age (which i think is a no go for other reasons)

I can imagine more impactful reform on the FA side of things. Bad teams need to take more risk or pay more to turn things around. There needs to be a mechanism (e.g., amnesty, or Guaranteed money like NFL) where teams aren't further hammered for bad FA deals (e.g., Parsons, Noah). it's ridiculous that we have a system where so many trades are influenced in whole or part by shedding bad contracts. If the guy is that bad the answer should be either a renegotiation or cutting the player. That's the world the fanbase lives in. It's very frustrating as a fan who wants sports as a release mechanism having their team hamstrung by bad deals especially when said player seems to be mailing it in.

The age and unrealistic expectations of these immature players is a big issue, true. The draft only exasperates the already risky proposition of having to 'pick' these players.

Teams can't pick for need when a kid is 18. Maybe at 22 or 23 that kid will fill a need. Otherwise its a babysitting exercise.

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And I'm with you on the bad contracts/ bad faith players.

IMO, Every team needs to have the right to shed a contract that gets thrown into the draft, sink or swim. If say, Noah, was thrown back, the contract is null and void. He's available to any team to be picked in the draft along side kids. If he's picked in the first round he gets a guaranteed contract. If not, as a second-rounder - sink or swim. Otherwise UFA.

Same deal with foreign players wanting to come over. First stop, the draft.

What will happen is that the draft gets richer, talent wise. Players have incentive not to be that guy. Or older players, still useful (say CP3), become available minus sticker shock.