To Stop a Tank

  Lost in the recent ‘revelation’ that shoe companies are bribing collegiate coaches to bribe teenage players to attend the universities that are paid millions of dollars to wear the apparel supplied by the shoe companies and the hubbub over whether professional football players are kneeling, standing, or locking arms during the national anthem was the National Basketball Association changing the draft lottery rules in an attempt to prevent teams from losing on purpose in order to get better draft picks.

  The practice of ‘tanking’ or being as bad as possible in order to get a potentially transcendent player is as old as the basketball draft. Up until the early 1980’s the team with the worst records in the eastern and western conferences conducted a coin flip to determine which team would get the top pick and led to celebrations (and championships) when the Milwaukee Bucks and Portland Trailblazers won their respective coin flips and drafted Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, respectively. This system worked until the early 1980’s when the Houston Rockets were accused of losing their last few regular season games to get in the coin flip two years in a row, winning both and selecting Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon.

  The new lottery system was designed to give each non-playoff team a one in seven chance at the top draft pick. The first lottery winner was the New York Knicks who drafted Patrick Ewing and earned the league ‘conspiracy theory’ accusations of a rigged lottery to get New York a franchise superstar. The equal chance at the #1 pick lasted only five years and was replaced with the current weighted lottery system where each non-playoff team gets a chance to get one of the top three draft picks with the best of the non-playoff teams having a minuscule chance at a top pick and the team with the worst record in the league a 25% chance at the top pick, a 65% chance at getting a top 3 pick and are assured of no worse than the fourth pick in the draft. These percentages have been in force since 2005 with minor tweaks before that.

  Practice has shown that getting the top pick in a draft with a transcendent player can alter a franchise’s destiny. Tim Duncan transformed the Spurs from a good team to a championship team while Dwight Howard and LeBron James brought their teams to the NBA Finals within five years. Practice has also shown that a poorly run franchise will not make good use of their fortune at getting a top draft pick and remain a lottery team for years. Kwame Brown was Michael Jordan’s choice as the #1 pick for the Wizards in a relatively barren 2001 draft and made no noticeable impact on the team while top picks Greg Oden, Andreas Bargnani, and Andrew Bogut (2007, 2006, and 2005 top picks) were so injury prone that only Bogut of the three was able to help his team make a token playoff appearance.

  Starting with the 2019 Draft, the three worst teams in the league will each have a 14% chance at the top pick in the draft and a 47% chance at getting a top three pick. The beneficiaries are the teams with the seventh through tenth worst records in the league and have doubled or tripled their chances of getting a top three pick. Presumably there will be less incentive to be the worst team in the league since the same draft lottery odds can be obtained by being the third worst team in the league instead.

  This reform is a reaction to the handiwork of former Philadelphia 76er general manager Sam Hinkie. Upon taking over the team in 2012 Hinkie was clear in stating that his process for rebuilding was to stockpile as many top draft picks as possible with the goal of landing enough superstar talent through the draft to have a championship team instead of the low level playoff team he inherited. Hinkie traded every player of value for future draft picks and he continually drafted players that either couldn’t play in their rookie seasons due to injuries (Nerlins Noel, Joel Embiid) or foreign players that were going to play overseas (Dario Saric) which had the effect of an awful team not getting better by virture of their draft picks because the draft picks didn't play for the team. The 76ers were woeful but never had the worst record in the league under Hinkie and never got the number one pick in the draft. They did have the 6th, 3rd, and 3rd picks from 2013 to 2015. During the 2016 season the 76ers hired consultant Jerry Colangelo (head of USA basketball and former owner of the Phoenix Suns) who installed his son Bryan as the president of the team. There is a widespread belief in NBA circles that the change in leadership was pushed on the 76ers by other owners and commissioner Adam Silver in order to improve the ‘optics’ of the 76ers being so blatantly bad for so long in order to accumulate top draft picks. Hinkie resigned shortly thereafter and as fate would have it the 76ers finally got the #1 at the end of the season. Colangelo used the pick to draft consensus top prospect Ben Simmons but in Hinkiean fashion Simmons was injured in training camp and held out for the entire year which gained the 76ers the third pick in this year’s draft which they traded along with another first round pick for the #1 pick in the draft (Markelle Fulz).

  Now the 76ers are the envy of many teams in the league because of all the young talent they have assembled and look like a playoff team for the next few years and if everything breaks right could even be a Finals contender. Other teams have noticed and are also working hard to enhance their draft position. The Phoenix Suns held out all their veteran starters over the last two months of the season and were rewarded with the second worst record in the league which translated to the fourth pick in the draft because of the 76ers and Lakers jumping them in the lottery.

  The copycatting of the 76ers success at assembling talent by being bad is the main reason for the lottery ‘reform’ but it will barely make a dent in tanking in my opinion. A bad team will always have an incentive to be worse to get a better chance to get one of the top picks. The new system removes the incentive to be the WORST team but increases the incentive to be one of the 10 worst teams and there is still a considerable incentive to be one of the three worst teams in the league. The new system sounds great and makes it look like the league is taking tanking seriously but there will be a new system as soon as a big market team like the Knicks, Bulls, or Lakers find themselves continually one of the worst teams in the league but continually lose out on their 42% chance to get a top three pick and wallow in the depths of the standings. This is what happened to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the years before drafting Kevin Garnett with the fifth pick in the 1995 draft and after trading Garnett to the Celtics in 2007. The Wolves were perpetually unlucky in the draft, never getting top draft pick and have never made the playoffs without Garnett on the roster. The Wolves were further beset by awful management. They are favored to make the playoffs this year after trading for #1 draft pick Andrew Wiggins and finally winning the lottery and getting the #1 pick Karl Anthony-Towns in the next season. The NBA had no problem letting the Timberwolves wallow at the bottom of the league but I cannot imagine letting the same fate befall a big market team and will rerig the system to once again reward the worst team with the best chance at a draft pick.