Tanking Solutions

I like that the Rockets are trying to stay competitive but I hate that staying competitive is probably going to keep them from contending. True Hoop has been posting articles about about how to end tanking as a part of Hoop Idea. This one is my favorites.

http://espn.go.com/b...ve-year-lottery

It still serves the main purpose of the lottery (better in fact) but it would drastically reduce the incentive to tank. Teams that are managed poorly and are consistently bad would get the top picks but unless they find better management they will keep making the wrong decisions and better managed teams will capitalize on their mistakes. The current lottery system may add a little parity to the system but it also subtracts some as well.

The Hornets could have been better this season if they had taken the Rockets/Lakers deal but they chose to be bad. The Trailblazers should still be fighting for the playoffs but they made the same decision. Using the 5 year lottery the Hornets wouldn't get a good pick just from being bad this season because they would be hurt by their success in the Chris Paul years. A new owner wouldn't want to buy a team that has to be awful for 4-5 years in order to get good. The Trailblazers wouldn't have blown their team up if they didn't think a quick turnaround was possible.

Football is the gold standard when it comes to sports parity and they just have a straight up reverse order draft based on the last year's standings but football has huge roster turnover from year and a good team requires many of the right pieces, not just one or two superstars. Basketball is much more stable from year to year so I think this idea would give us more of the type of competition that the NFL has.

There were several other ideas that I liked as well. I would highly recommend checking them out.

I also liked the rolling lottery idea, but not exactly as TrueHoop laid it out. In a 5 year rolling lottery, a team that has been terrible for years but is suddenly transformed by drafting a superstar could still be getting high picks for years afterwards because the other 4 terrible years would still be counting towards their lottery chances. I think a 2 or 3 year period would work better than 5, for starters, and I think more recent results should be weighted more heavily than past years.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure this will solve the problem, and if it doesn't, it will actually make things worse. The problem with this idea is that instead of nominally encouraging a team to be bad for one year, it winds up encouraging a team to be bad for multiple years in order to rebuild a contender. As long as teams still feel that drafting a superstar is their only shot at a title, then they will probably be willing to pay the price to get those high draft picks, no matter how steep.

This was probably one of the better ideas on HoopIdea...I was hoping that there would be lots of great suggestions, but for the most part it feels like a lot of the articles they post are really not thought through well enough. When you are going to make a rule change, it's important to consider all of the potential side effects it might cause, not just the headline that it's trying to fix.

ST