Draft Lottery Tournament

[e_blazer]

Do you like this idea or no?

Instead of having a lottery determine who will pick first in the NBA Draft, hold a five-day, 14-team single-elimination tournament at a neutral site, an event similar to what we see with conference tournaments. The bracket would look something like this:



The schedule would be fairly simple: End the NBA’s regular season on a Sunday, start this tournament on the Tuesday and run it through Saturday, when the title game will be played. Then on that Sunday, start the NBA Playoffs, giving those teams a full week of rest while creating 13 more TV games for the league to sell.

But more than just the games, this would create the kind of buzz that we see every March during conference and NCAA tournaments. Everyone loves filling out brackets. Everyone loves mid-week afternoon sports. Doing this for hoops at the highest-level feels like a no-brainer.

The winner would earn themselves the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft. The team that loses in the final would get the No. 2 pick, and personally, I would be for setting up a third-place game to determine the No. 3 and No. 4 picks. After that, the rest of the draft would go in order of the worst record. This would more or less completely disincentivize tanking. Having the worst record in the league would not only ensure that you have the toughest road to actually getting the first pick in the draft — winning five games in five days against better teams would not be easy to do — but would lock you into nothing more than the No. 5 pick. It’s not often that franchise-changing talents are found at pick No. 5.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ya...ba-draft-lottery-reform-really-180043244.html

 

[blue9]

Do you like this idea or no?



https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ya...ba-draft-lottery-reform-really-180043244.html

Seems like an even easier way for the league to rig the lotto than drawing cards from a barrel.

 

[BonesJones]

Hate this idea. A tournament of losers to see he gets a draft pick. Yuck lok

 

[theprunetang]

Hate this idea. A tournament of losers to see he gets a draft pick. Yuck lok

Plus imagine being an aging star on the team. How much incentive do you have to try to get your team to draft your replacement? Same goes for soon to be free agents. What incentive do they have to play well.

Even with that aside, the first significant injury to a star player during the tournament of the damned would end it.

 

[PtldPlatypus]

Hate this idea. A tournament of losers to see he gets a draft pick. Yuck lok

I've been proposing this for years. But it should be 16 teams, not 14, and the top two teams not only get the top two picks, but also get the 8 seed in the real playoffs. And if they play the games on consecutive days, it would only take 3 days to get down to the two playoff teams.

Plus imagine being an aging star on the team. How much incentive do you have to try to get your team to draft your replacement? Same goes for soon to be free agents. What incentive do they have to play well.

Even with that aside, the first significant injury to a star player during the tournament of the damned would end it.

All addressed by my proposed expansion above. Vets/FAs don't care about a pick, but they want a shot at the playoffs.

As for injuries...they can happen anytime.

 

[Sinobas]

The real fix is to eliminate the 7th an 8th seeds all together. Those are the ones that almost never have a chance. Then you can really flatten the probability distribution among the losing teams.