Your solution for tanking

[pokerface]

Maybe all it took is a strong commissioner to minimize tanking.

No teams are punished for tanking....

 

[Mainstreet]

No teams are punished for tanking....

The NBA Commissioner warned the Bulls for sitting healthy players and fined Mark Cuban for even talking about it.

All the teams have been warned.

Ignoring these warnings is asking for trouble and daring the Commissioner to take action.

It seems teams are starting to take these warnings seriously.

 

[Mainstreet]

Another point. Even the lottery odds have been changed for next season to minimize tanking.

It is being taken as a serious matter.

 

[pokerface]

The NBA Commissioner warned the Bulls for sitting healthy players and fined Mark Cuban for even talking about it.

All the teams have been warned.

Ignoring these warnings is asking for trouble and daring the Commissioner to take action.

It seems teams are starting to take these warnings seriously.

Yeah and they've been warned for years. For such a serious problem you'd think at least one team would be brought in front of the tanking tribunal.

 

[pokerface]

Another point. Even the lottery odds have been changed for next season to minimize tanking.

It is being taken as a serious matter.

The only thing they are going to minimize is bad teams chances of getting better through the draft.

 

[Raze]

I think there is merit here. Players can declare out of high school and be drafted. But they have to play at least one year in the GLeague. If they go to college they will not be eligible for two years (or maybe three).

This would preserve more roster spots in the nba for veterans. It would solve the one and done hardship stuff AND it would improve the quality of college basketball.

The draft would have solid college players with proven records AND risky high schoolers.

I think this is a great and much needed topic. I mean, we don't have much else to talk about anyway. Other than losing. Thanks for the idea.

First of all, I think we can mostly all agree that the league is broken. It's a top heavy league with kids being asked to save struggling franchises. The competitiveness meter is at an all time low.

The signs of a broken league:
Teams are tanking BEFORE the season starts.
The lottery is littered with teen agers.
The regular season is a ghost town.
The first two rounds of the playoffs are unwatchable.
No one cares about the Lebron-less teams in the East.
And worst of all, the Finals are pre determined (barring injury to KD or Lebron).

So the problem is FAR larger than the lottery or tanking. They are just symptoms. The biggest problem is parity. Far too many teams have ZERO chance going into a season. (Not true in the MLB who just crowned Houston. Not true in the NFL who just crowned Philly). I'd say truthfully that AT LEAST 24 teams have no shot of winning it all. And 12 of those teams are are tanking before opening night. Parity at the very least provides hope for a team for a while. Or at least long enough that teams actually try until it's just way too late. The question is how do you bring parity.

We currently have 3 tiers of teams:
The top 6 (With only two really having a shot.).
The middle 12 (None have a shot, but they are mildly entertaining to watch.)
The dirty dozen (Not only don't have a shot, but have no shot the next year, or the next, or the next...)

At the top we have 6 squads, otherwise known as the super teams. They are the millstone around the NBA's neck. After all, if KD, Thompson, Green, Steph were on 4 separate teams, we're talking about a different league. Add in the tandems in Cleveland, Houston, Boston, SA, and the Ball Hogs (aka OKC) and you bring further parity. Ideally, if 30 teams had a top 30 player, each team would TRULY have hope that they could win before the season starts. Right now, the top 30 are probably on about 15 teams.

In order for parity to exist you HAVE to separate the top talent. HAVE TO. The NBA is unlike any other sport in regards to it's stars. If you have one more than the other team your chance of winning is disproportionate in your favor.

So how do you separate the talent? The most obvious and proven system is the hard cap. The NBA needs one in the worst way. They are tanking... err... taking on water at an alarming rate. A sensible hard cap would really help.

There's a separate problem of players taking less money to play with a super team. (Remember the days when we complained that Player X didn't go for the championship but took the money? Now we blame KD for not taking the money and going for the championship.) This can be alleviated with the hard cap, but more might need to be done.

A more controversial method would be to grade out players at the end of a season. The league (or the Competition Committee) would give players grades A through F. They would then have to restrict free agency. So this summer Lebron would be allowed to go anywhere that doesn't have an 'A' rated player already on the team. Which would leave him with about 15 choices.

After the players are all dispersed you'd still have tanking issues, but not near to the degree that there is now.

However, if you truly want to eliminate tanking try this idea: The worst franchise over a two year period is disbanded and permanently removed from the league with the players going into a supplemental draft. How's that for a controversial idea? You talk about a ratings hike for a season. Could you imagine Phoenix vs Memphis in game 82? That game might get higher ratings than the Finals. (Or maybe they just get cast off to the G league for a couple of seasons.)

I really like the pay for wins idea. It's simple. I don't see a lot of negatives. Players could even be encouraged to give the money to charities which would go further to improve the leagues image.

I'm also a fan of using college baseball rules. If you sign with a 4 year college or university, you have to stay 3 years or be 21 to be eligible for the NBA draft. No one and dones. As we can see right now, the NCAA could do without them as well.

As it stands right now, I absolutely hate the league's structure. It's broken.

 

[Hoop Head]

Posted about this before, this is the best way to eliminate tanking and make every game important and competitive. It would overhaul the entire system but for the better, IMO.


Here's a link to an article that describes it. It was created by a guy named Adam Gold for an MIT Sports Conference on Analytics as a proposal to stop teams from tanking....

http://www.sloansportsconference.com/content/how-to-cure-tanking/

Once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs they start earning points for each win from that point forward and whoever has the most points at the end of the year gets the #1 pick and other picks are ordered accordingly. So the slotting of picks would be similar to how they are now, with the teams who are the worst throughout the year up until the halfway point of the season or so having the best chance to rack up points since they'd have more games to do so and teams who are fighting for the playoffs will end up at the very bottom of the lottery because they may not earn any points because they stay in playoff contention all season. Sure, a team may tank the first half of the season but then they'd have to turn things around to start winning once they were eliminated from the playoffs to get that #1 pick. That would cause teams who are bad to try and keep their players at the trade deadline rather than selling off assets to further tank, which may slow down player movement. There would be a lot less buyouts at the end of February of veterans on bad teams who then sign onto playoff teams. It would keep bad teams from sitting healthy players to tank also.

So if the Suns were eliminated from the playoff race in early March, they'd have to try and win as many games throughout the rest of the season to get the #1 pick. If 2-3 other teams are already collecting points then that just means they sucked more during the first half of the year but it makes no guarantee they'd actually have more points than the Suns then, they'd just have more chances at them. They'd have to start competing and winning though to get the #1 seed. There would be no guarantees where anyone would fall and it would bring interest to teams who sucked early in the season because they'd have something to play for. The only problem I see with that is a discrepancy between conferences, a bad team in the east could still be in playoff contention because the East sucks and you can make the playoffs with a losing record. However they could change the seeding in the playoffs to the top 16 teams go, like it should be, rather than seeing a team win 48 games and miss the playoffs in the West while a team out east wins 37 games and makes it in the East.

Here's a video with the person who created this system. He presented it at a sports analytics conference by MIT. His name is Adam Gold.

xc_hide_links_from_guests_guests_error_hide_media

 

[pokerface]

How many f'n teams are tanking and how many teams just stink? This whole bs is just over some rare situations and now the vast majority of the bad teams get punished. There seems almost ZERO concern that bad teams may be doomed to stay bad far longer. No one is even talking about teams that are tanking THIS SEASON because as far as I know there aren't any. Talk about a witch hunt...cripe.

I guess for all the tanking solutions no one has any faith that Silver fixed the problem for next season. Oh wait a minute...there isn't even a tanking problem this season...my bad.

 

[Magnus]

The problem with the NBA is that it sucks to be mediocre. Those couple of years when Phoenix was ranked 9th-11th in the West were worse than this year because you have absolutely nothing to hope for. No young exciting players on the roster, barely out of the playoffs, no big free agent will look at you, and no way (or extremely limited ways) to improve through the draft. So the next year from that point looks pretty darn bleak.

If you really STINK though, you feel more hopeful about the future, because at least there's that chance of scoring a good draft pick. The chance that you get a good pick and that player turns out to be a superstar is still extremely low, but at least it's a chance. I'm not saying any teams currently are sitting people on purpose, but their rosters stink by design in most cases, and rarely because of incompetence. Players will always play hard, because no one guarantees them they'll be there the next year. They play for their own contracts. But the organisation has a job to create a roster that can't win.Once you realize you'll be a middle of the pack team, you sell your best players and stock up on draft picks, creating a young roster that's pretty bad and keeping fingers crossed for the future. Because in a way, the NBA rewards you for losing.

 

[Western Font]

The MIT idea is interesting, but unless I'm misunderstanding it, one problem is that it's very vulnerable to an otherwise decent team that has a star returning from injury mid-season, and would be a much better team at the time they are accruing 'points.' But the main problem, IMO, is that it's just too artificial. Personal preference.

I don't like the wheel because draft classes vary and generational players are not distributed evenly over time, while the picks would be - so it's just another way for team X to get lucky and replace a cornerstone while team Y that desperately needs a cornerstone languishes.

I love the idea of relegation with the G league, so there would be a massive penalty for being the worst (even if it coincided with better draft lottery odds), but the players union would never agree to this. And it would be weird to have two teams controlled by the same organization in the top tier - one with a 5000 capacity venue (not that it wouldn't be cool to see the league's best players visit such a venue). Or maybe the G league team shares the parent arena for a year.

I think the draft lottery really is the best way. But I would be okay with flatter odds. In some ways, if you're the worst team in the league, you should be penalized. And if you're near the bottom but turning it around, maybe it's not so bad if you luck into the a higher pick. And of course the worst team might still get the best player with, say, the #5 pick.

I've been okay with the Suns tanking because I want them to get a higher pick than other tanking teams - but it's definitely a 'don't hate the player, hate the game' situation. I do hate the game: tanking as a practice is detrimental, for all the reasons described in this thread, as well as the fact that it distorts the records and playoff seeding overall.

Someone may squeak into the playoffs because of a few uncontested late wins against tankers, while the #9 seed played those teams earlier when they weren't sitting everyone. Maybe the #4 team gets home-court over the #5 team for the same reason. Maybe the #6 team gets to play Portland while the #7 has to play Houston or Golden State for the same reason.

Tanking should be dealt with first by league rules instead of the draft structure. In its most overt forms it's quite obvious. I'm perhaps still okay with everything up to the trade deadline, since creating cap room is a separate strategy. But post-deadline: how about a limit to the reduction in minutes for pre-deadline starters? Or greater league monitoring of injuries? The penalties don't even have to be excessive: loss of second-round picks, or putting trade restrictions on that season's picks, for example. Fines aren't adequate: there should be enough of an increase in possible penalties and decrease in lottery-odds incentive to get teams out of the habit.

 

[ArizonaSportsFan]

I think the draft lottery really is the best way. But I would be okay with flatter odds. In some ways, if you're the worst team in the league, you should be penalized. And if you're near the bottom but turning it around, maybe it's not so bad if you luck into the a higher pick. And of course the worst team might still get the best player with, say, the #5 pick.

Then how would the worst team get better? Have to look at free agency? Which good-to-great players want to sign with the worst team?
IMO, the odds should be flatter and should progress as such through the entire league. Have a much softer jump at the playoff line. The odds of the #15 worst team should not vary greatly from the #14 worst team. But this would have to work in concert with a salary cap - and minimum and maximum salaries - with top picks taking up cap space in some fashion. For instance, if GS wins the lottery, they can't draft Ayton and keep their existing stars. Green or Thompson have to go. Makes things more dynamic if you want to keep your high draft picks.

 

[elindholm]

As has already been pointed out, NBA teams know less about draft projects than they used to. Often there are one or two players who are clearly at the top, but after that, drafting #3 isn't that much better than drafting #6.

Team tank not because the reward is so great, but because there's no incentive not to. If you can go into the lottery as the #3 seed instead of the #4, you might as well. The chances of it paying off are small, but better than nothing.

What really hurts the league is when tanking works. The Cavaliers tanked to get LeBron James, and hit their 25% lottery ticket after a season of deliberate failure. The Sixers tanked for years and, by my calculation, were very lucky to get the high picks that they did, but others dispute that math. Either way, though, that makes other bad teams think, "If it worked for them, it can work for us," no matter how remote the possibility actually is.

I don't like the idea of a Tournament of Losers because it's just another system that teams will figure out how to game. Think of the Suns in Hornacek's first year as coach, when they won 48 games. As it was, they wanted to make the playoffs, even though it meant a near-certain defeat to the top-seeded Spurs, because the alternative was the measly #14 pick (which turned out to be Warren, but never mind that). But if the "consolation" for missing the playoffs had been being the top seed in a tournament to draft #1, that would have changed the Suns' calculus considerably.

I'd say

(a) flatter lottery odds, and completely flat once you get past the first eight or so seeds, so that there's no difference between going is as #10 and going in as #14
(b) can't pick in the top three in two consecutive years

would go a long way.

 

[JCSunsfan]

As has already been pointed out, NBA teams know less about draft projects than they used to. Often there are one or two players who are clearly at the top, but after that, drafting #3 isn't that much better than drafting #6.

Team tank not because the reward is so great, but because there's no incentive not to. If you can go into the lottery as the #3 seed instead of the #4, you might as well. The chances of it paying off are small, but better than nothing.

What really hurts the league is when tanking works. The Cavaliers tanked to get LeBron James, and hit their 25% lottery ticket after a season of deliberate failure. The Sixers tanked for years and, by my calculation, were very lucky to get the high picks that they did, but others dispute that math. Either way, though, that makes other bad teams think, "If it worked for them, it can work for us," no matter how remote the possibility actually is.

I don't like the idea of a Tournament of Losers because it's just another system that teams will figure out how to game. Think of the Suns in Hornacek's first year as coach, when they won 48 games. As it was, they wanted to make the playoffs, even though it meant a near-certain defeat to the top-seeded Spurs, because the alternative was the measly #14 pick (which turned out to be Warren, but never mind that). But if the "consolation" for missing the playoffs had been being the top seed in a tournament to draft #1, that would have changed the Suns' calculus considerably.

I'd say

(a) flatter lottery odds, and completely flat once you get past the first eight or so seeds, so that there's no difference between going is as #10 and going in as #14
(b) can't pick in the top three in two consecutive years

would go a long way.

That would be the simplest thing. I think eliminating one and done and maybe not letting players play in the big league until they are 19 would help too. Teams that don't have the top picks would then be able to still swing for the fences and draft younger players and develop them in their farm system. The nba needs to focus more on truly developing the players they draft rather than just on drafting particular players.

Some want the football model. A hard cap.
I am proposing more of a baseball model.

 

[gimpy]

I have gotten to where I can't stand to watch a game for more than a couple of minutes. I'm old time. I don't like that they have changed the game and rules to accommodate offense and big name players. The players have gotten too big for the league.

When a player can jump sideways into a defensive player and then the defensive player is called for the foul, or, a player can take three+ steps before dribbling and it not be called traveling, or a player can palm/carry the ball and it not be called, or not have a pivot foot the way it was originally intended and called, makes the game unwatchable to me.

Those kind of rule changes/enforcement has ruined the game and made it so super player dominated, IMO.

Same can be said about the other sports for me. I guess I need to come into the 21st century, but just can't.

Now, down off my high horse.

 

[Mainstreet]

Yeah and they've been warned for years. For such a serious problem you'd think at least one team would be brought in front of the tanking tribunal.

Who wants to be the first team punished?

The only thing they are going to minimize is bad teams chances of getting better through the draft.

Planning to lose for a draft pick such as the 76ers in past years has left the NBA unsympathetic to tanking.

Bad teams, and I repeat, bad teams, do not need to tank.

Tankers and their ideology have lead to changing the current lottery system for the worse because of abuse.

 

[Mainstreet]

How many f'n teams are tanking and how many teams just stink? This whole bs is just over some rare situations and now the vast majority of the bad teams get punished. There seems almost ZERO concern that bad teams may be doomed to stay bad far longer. No one is even talking about teams that are tanking THIS SEASON because as far as I know there aren't any. Talk about a witch hunt...cripe.

I guess for all the tanking solutions no one has any faith that Silver fixed the problem for next season. Oh wait a minute...there isn't even a tanking problem this season...my bad.

Tankers have doomed the worst teams of getting the best odds for the top draft pick.

Thanks to those teams and their proponents, things are a changing.

 

[Hoop Head]

That would be the simplest thing. I think eliminating one and done and maybe not letting players play in the big league until they are 19 would help too. Teams that don't have the top picks would then be able to still swing for the fences and draft younger players and develop them in their farm system. The nba needs to focus more on truly developing the players they draft rather than just on drafting particular players.

Some want the football model. A hard cap.
I am proposing more of a baseball model.

I don't know why the NBA can't adopt a similar draft structure as MLB where a player can be selected and still go to college, or they could go to the G-League for a year or two. If they could accomplish something like that I think the players union would then let the league move the age limit up to 21 or 3 years removed from High School to play in the NBA. A player can enter the draft when they get out of high school but can still attend college and play NCAA ball to polish their game before reaching the NBA. There wouldn't be much incentive to enter the draft out of high school though since they'd be kept from playing in the NBA for a couple of years regardless of being selected. Whichever team selects them holds onto their rights for the next 4 years so once they've turned 21 or have X number of years removed from high school they can join that NBA team. Putting the 4 year limit on their rights would allow the players to hold out, like now, so if they're drafted by a team they don't want to go to for whatever reason they can re-enter the draft but wouldn't be able to do that for another year after their rights expired. That would be after playing in the NCAA for 4 years and then missing a year afterwards. So most players wouldn't want to do that, they could play overseas in that 1 year but that would probably hurt their stock in the eyes of other NBA teams. The draft would change quite a bit if a team could draft players out of high school but they're still years away from coming into the NBA. Not many HS players would want to enter that draft, most would wait until they can actually play to be in the draft.

There are too many busts nowadays. Look back to the drafts from the 80's or early 90's, almost all of the players taken were added to teams rotations right away and made a difference. Now most lottery picks aren't ready to be starters for a year or two and there's only a handful of players selected later that make a team's rotation. If rookies were more polished then the league might be more competitive. The games would be more enjoyable, IMO, since there wouldn't be so many Chriss' or Bender's taking up a lot of playing time and making horrible mistakes that most professionals shouldn't be making. That's the thing, they are supposed to be professional basketball players but very few players come into the league looking like they belong on the court with the best basketball players in the world.

 

[Superbone]

How about a bell curve system for the non-playoff teams? So the the 7th and 8th worst teams would have the best odds and they would get progressively worse as you went out to the extremities. So the worst teams and the best teams of the bunch would have the worst odds. That would definitely discourage tanking. The bottom teams would be fighting tooth and nail to get up into the middle of the pack. The best of the worst would still be fighting to make the playoffs and if they didn't make it, it wouldn't make much difference to what their odds are now. In fact, their odds would be a little better than they are now for getting a high pick.

 

[JCSunsfan]

Who wants to be the first team punished?



Planning to lose for a draft pick such as the 76ers in past years has left the NBA unsympathetic to tanking.

Bad teams, and I repeat, bad teams, do not need to tank.

Tankers and their ideology have lead to changing the current lottery system for the worse because of abuse.

Oh. There already has been punishment. Sam Hinkie was removed at the NBA main office instigation. The NBA is only going to tolerate so much.

 

[Ouchie-Z-Clown]

What about tiered odds? I don’t DINt an 20 win team is demonstrably worse than a 23 win team. SO maybe 0-24 wins is x%, 24-34 is y%, 35-40 is z%. The number of wins is a better indicator of talent than where a team falls in order imo. And thus if your talent brings you to a certain band there’s little incentive to tank for a long time. Maybe just a game or two at seasons end if you’re on the edge of a band.

Alternatively I like a complicated formula to determine odds. Should take things Tolkien the following into consideration:

Years in existence in current city
Championships won
Years in playoffs
Rounds of playoffs
Number of all stars on current roster
Number of seasons of all stars on current roster
Number of all stars on historical roster
Number of top 5 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of top 3 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of #1 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of all nba team members and their respective 1st 2nd or 3rd slot
Number of mvps in roster and historically
Number of DVPOY on roster and historically
Current record
Average record of last 3 and 5 and 10 years
Etc

 

[JCSunsfan]

What about tiered odds? I don’t DINt an 20 win team is demonstrably worse than a 23 win team. SO maybe 0-24 wins is x%, 24-34 is y%, 35-40 is z%. The number of wins is a better indicator of talent than where a team falls in order imo. And thus if your talent brings you to a certain band there’s little incentive to tank for a long time. Maybe just a game or two at seasons end if you’re on the edge of a band.

Alternatively I like a complicated formula to determine odds. Should take things Tolkien the following into consideration:

Years in existence in current city
Championships won
Years in playoffs
Rounds of playoffs
Number of all stars on current roster
Number of seasons of all stars on current roster
Number of all stars on historical roster
Number of top 5 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of top 3 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of #1 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of all nba team members and their respective 1st 2nd or 3rd slot
Number of mvps in roster and historically
Number of DVPOY on roster and historically
Current record
Average record of last 3 and 5 and 10 years
Etc

Now THAT is interesting. It allows bad teams to get better but does not put all the onus just on the previous season record. It also prevents a good team from doing a single season tank job like San Antonio did for TD. Send it to Adam Silver NOW. I like it.

 

[Mainstreet]

What about tiered odds? I don’t DINt an 20 win team is demonstrably worse than a 23 win team. SO maybe 0-24 wins is x%, 24-34 is y%, 35-40 is z%. The number of wins is a better indicator of talent than where a team falls in order imo. And thus if your talent brings you to a certain band there’s little incentive to tank for a long time. Maybe just a game or two at seasons end if you’re on the edge of a band.

Alternatively I like a complicated formula to determine odds. Should take things Tolkien the following into consideration:

Years in existence in current city
Championships won
Years in playoffs
Rounds of playoffs
Number of all stars on current roster
Number of seasons of all stars on current roster
Number of all stars on historical roster
Number of top 5 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of top 3 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of #1 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of all nba team members and their respective 1st 2nd or 3rd slot
Number of mvps in roster and historically
Number of DVPOY on roster and historically
Current record
Average record of last 3 and 5 and 10 years
Etc

I want to see the numeric formula.

 

[Hoop Head]

What about tiered odds? I don’t DINt an 20 win team is demonstrably worse than a 23 win team. SO maybe 0-24 wins is x%, 24-34 is y%, 35-40 is z%. The number of wins is a better indicator of talent than where a team falls in order imo. And thus if your talent brings you to a certain band there’s little incentive to tank for a long time. Maybe just a game or two at seasons end if you’re on the edge of a band.

Alternatively I like a complicated formula to determine odds. Should take things Tolkien the following into consideration:

Years in existence in current city
Championships won
Years in playoffs
Rounds of playoffs
Number of all stars on current roster
Number of seasons of all stars on current roster
Number of all stars on historical roster
Number of top 5 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of top 3 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of #1 picks historically and within past 5 years
Number of all nba team members and their respective 1st 2nd or 3rd slot
Number of mvps in roster and historically
Number of DVPOY on roster and historically
Current record
Average record of last 3 and 5 and 10 years
Etc

I like the general idea you laid out though. Also I like the idea of basing lottery odds on multiple seasons. They could go about using actual ping pong balls again and giving one out for various reasons. Teams would get them for missing the playoffs. They would get more consecutive years out of the playoffs, another for any player that left in free agency the previous summer, another for any players that retired after the previous season. There could be numerous reasons for accumulating them and then doing a drawing to determine the lottery order. The worst teams would probably have the most so they would have the greatest odds of getting a high draft pick but the entire lottery could be drawn. There could be more reasons to accumulate them as well. I think expanding what is determined by the lottery though could help stop some tanking. The top 5 picks at a minimum should be determined by the lottery. I think they're expanding that next year with the lottery changes already but I could be wrong.

 

[Superbone]

I like Ouchie's solution but I'm not so sure about the Tolkien angle.

 

[Ouchie-Z-Clown]

I want to see the numeric formula.

HAHA despite having a masters in tax law I haven’t taken a math class since trig in high school. That said ill bet I could get the CFAs at my work to create something interesting.