Late-Season Fight for Draft Position Again Shows Need for Changes to NBA Lottery
If there is something undermining the integrity of the NBA game, whether it's illegal screens or handshake deals or lack of instant replay, it's the responsibility and history of the commissioner to get on it.
So when legitimate competition is being compromised these days by clubs not trying to win basketball games, something has to change.
The NBA draft lottery has to change.
You might've noticed the ridiculousness of the Philadelphia 76ers being incentivized to lose two recent games to the Los Angeles Lakers. The Sixers, who've been rightly ridiculed for skewing rebuilding into deliberate losing in an array of other ways, succeeded and lost both games and decreased the Lakers' chances of netting a high pick while increasing their own chances. (The Sixers had just traded for the Lakers' pick, which will be conveyed this season only if it drops out of the top five.)
The Lakers have been cited as stealth tankers for not signing better players into their rare salary-cap space the past two seasons, but that's nothing compared to the true stealth tankers: the Minnesota Timberwolves, who face the Lakers on Friday night.
Flip Saunders is the coach and general manager, so there's no possible miscommunication about the importance of the coach executing the general manager's vision.
Those lines of information have been murkier, though, when it comes to injuries, which are now being managed in Minnesota by the Timberwolves' new business partner, the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center.
When they project how long a regular person should take to recover completely from a sprained ankle and apply that to Ricky Rubio, the result is one of the game's exciting young players sitting out for 42 consecutive games (and now sitting out some more, just to be safe, with a little soreness), and the Timberwolves losing more games than any team outside of New York.
Speaking of New York, would sore-kneed Carmelo Anthony have shut it down for the New York Knicks after playing in the NBA All-Star Game if there was no obvious benefit to the Knicks losing games without him? There's the real world of developing young players and the shadowy thought processes of making sure things don't happen to go your way.
We can—and should—eradicate all motivation to lose.
Basketball is fundamentally different than other sports. Getting individual star players is far more important when there are only five guys per side, night after night, which is why there's valid reason to lose if you're not going to win a championship anyway.
The "wheel" proposal that rotates future draft slots for clubs in a predetermined manner regardless of team performance is absolutely fair. It's so fair that it seems crazy to people accustomed to curling up in a ball over and over and waiting for someone to approach with a soothing voice and box of chocolates for you to pick whatever you want (and you pick some weird dark thing with molasses and maple one year and some fruit-filled abomination the next).
The "wheel" was brought up again by Boston Celtics executive Mike Zarren at the 2015 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Perhaps that level of major revolution can be the silver lining to NBA owners getting skittish before this season, as reported by Grantland's Zach Lowe, and voting down league-proposed lottery reform that would've smoothed out the odds and created more randomness through the top six picks.
Those changes would have preserved the bottom of the playoff picture from fears that clubs would prefer to miss the playoffs—and thereby fall into the lottery with an increased chance at a high pick. But many small-market teams were scared and wanted to preserve their best way to add a superstar: lose.
Accept losing and voila! You're into the draft lottery—with instant offseason excitement, even if you're the Timberwolves or Cavaliers and whiff on the picks almost every time. So why not take the easy way out and be rewarded for incompetence with more benefits and handouts?
The greater point of this all is that opportunities in our society should be based on fairness, hard work and positivity ahead of pity, welfare and trickery.
That's what small-market owners are going to have to accept—or NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is going to have to figure out how to make them accept—the same way large-market owners had to embrace massive revenue sharing and the new free-agent spending limitations in the latest collective bargaining agreement.
It's about what's for the betterment of the league, and the NBA's greater good is most certainly not turning on a game these days to see most bad teams trying to be worse instead of better.
Almost every Lakers fan I encounter in this era is happy with the team losing for draft positioning. The most legitimized form of this rationale came from someone who actually works with the club:
No, I refuse to root for my team to lose. However, what I can allowably do is root twice as hard for the Knicks, 76ers and Timberwolves to win.
That's not too bad. Alas, it creates an impossible dilemma when the Lakers are playing those teams: Rooting twice as hard for the Timberwolves to win Friday night will equate to rooting twice as hard for the Lakers to lose.
There is only so much you can do to fudge it when there is incentive to lose. And when everything can change more quickly with one star player who is more likely to come if you lose, well, the motivation is clear.
Look at the Boston Celtics, with team president Danny Ainge maximizing assets for future picks and head coach Brad Stevens motivating players to threaten for a playoff berth.
Yet the Celtics, not much of a free-agent destination, still look ahead and have no obvious path out of perpetual mediocrity. Who knows if they can land a disgruntled star in a trade for a pile of picks? They sure haven't been able to get their hands on one of those highest picks that tanking teams naturally won't surrender when they're more likely to bring a franchise cornerstone.
True, the lottery does throw some curveballs that give clubs such as the Celtics some chance to jump up in the draft. Remember how the balls bounced for San Antonio to move up past Boston and get the top pick to use on Tim Duncan back in 1997? And top players can occasionally be found lower, as the Celtics did with Paul Pierce at No. 10 the year after missing on Duncan.
But if you draft poorly these days, you can lean on the reward of getting chance after chance if you manage the season "creatively."
We can only hope that enough small-market owners understand that a level playing field with everyone getting their turn at high picks is fair enough compared to the overly indulgent system of today.
You'll get your superstar draft shot—and you do the best you can with that and the best you can with everything else you try. That's the way of the real world.
When Duncan didn't opt out of his deal last summer, it was woefully underreported how frequently top players want to stay with teams—even in small markets—when the club has created a winning situation and can pay more. The same quieter side to coverage will come if Marc Gasol re-signs with Memphis this summer and if Kevin Durant re-signs with Oklahoma City next summer.
The world isn't so unfair that small-market teams should be tied to the injustices this draft system allows.
Everyone deserves a shot at the top of the draft, not just those who are lame enough to flame out fantastically.
It's even worse to have so little faith in yourself that you don't trust you have the capability to build through natural progress and sustained steps to achieve excellence.
And what's worst of all? A system that encourages people to stagger to that dark side instead of standing up, doing the right things and trying to be stronger instead of weaker.
Kevin Ding is an NBA senior writer for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinDing.
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