Franchise: Building a Good One

Baseball has moneyball, the NFL has Ron Wolf's philosophy that you should "spend your high picks on linemen, get a good QB, and you can pick Robert Brooks late in the draft," but what about the NBA?

What are the shortcuts to success if you plan to compete on the same level as the Packers and Athletics have competed on?

This is going to be the beginning of a large project for me, and by reading this you are acknowledging that anything you read is strictly my property.

I believe there is a way to build in the NBA. There is a set of philosophies that very few teams are following, and yet, if you follow them, you can always be a good year or two away from being a legitimate contender.

So here goes...

1. Get lucky

As time has gone on, I have been convinced that you are what you draft. Since 1991, ten champions have been based in some way around a uber number one pick like Shaq, Hakeem, Duncan or Robinson. In that time, six more have been won by Michael Jordan, who only failed to be a number one pick because Hakeem was there and because Portland had Drexler from the previous draft.

Only two teams have won despite having a player that makes most reasonable people say "hey, they got lucky." In the case of Los Angeles and Miami having Shaq, he may not have been drafted there, but, due to weather and other factors external to the effectiveness of management, they were pre-selected by him as his preferred destination.

But that leads to an important question. Most of the time you will not luck into Shaquille O'Neal or Tim Duncan. Most of the time you won't even luck into Derrick Rose or the third pick Michael Jordan. Ninety nine percent of the time you will be building your team much more like a poker player than if you had the settling assurance of having a player like Jordan.

That leads us to the next square on the board game if you will.

2. When you don't get lucky, don't commit to a wrong way that looks like the right way

The fact is, most NBA fans don't know the intricacies of the game. By any logical estimation, 95 percent of NBA fans will look at a fifty win team, be satisfied, and have no thought whatsoever of the future chances of the team based on the real potential of key players or of the difference between a "true" shooting guard or a combo guard.

To most NBA fans who pay the bills, whether sitting in seats or viewing on television, 45-50 wins on a young team means that logically the sky is the limit.

Reality paints a different story. Reality shows you that there is a pecking order. True centers (and in some eras it can take less to be a true center) and point guards win in the NBA.

If they're not winning, you can bet that a combination of very good true center plus position X is winning, and if that's not winning you're now in the land of Michael Jordan or a glaring exception.