What are lottery changes solving for?

Zach Lowe reported today that a #HoopIdea is being floating within the NBA to “fix” the lottery and remove the perceived incentives teams have to tank. It features a predetermined draft order where each team rotates through the thirty draft positions over thirty years. It is interesting and is meant to eliminate “tanking” (intentionally losing games to improve draft position) by decoupling draft order from regular season record. Personally, I am in favor of something similar to what Slate’s MoneyBox blogger Matt Yglesias has advocated several times: elimination of the draft altogether and move to a more fair allocation of talent that rewards good team management. However, various institutional barriers mean that is basically impossible (at least in the near-term).

The proposal will not eliminate the tendency of top talent to cluster on a handful teams. The NBA’s CBA limits the maximum salary any individual player can earn. The CBA also includes various rules that make it easier for teams to resign their current players (e.g., they can offer more years and more money to their own free agents). This means players tend to either stay with their current teams for more money (e.g., Dereck Rose and Chris Paul) or bolt for attractive media markets with other good players (e.g., Lebron James and Dwight Howard). The proposal does nothing to fix this and potentially will exagerate the trend. Since teams rotate in the draft, already good teams will occasionally get very high draft picks and add more good players to their already good team. In short, the proposal does not introduce more parity.

This is very important in the NBA because in any given year only a handful of teams have a realistic chance at winning the NBA Championship. For instance, this year only Miami, Indiana, Oklahoma City, San Antonio and potentially Houston and the Los Angles Clippers have a legitimate chance at winning the NBA title.

So where does this leave us? There there will still be a small number of teams that can actually win the championship and you’ve made it harder for everyone else to get to that level. While NBA commentators and execs may abhor tanking, rewarding the worst teams in the league with better draft picks gives the fans of those teams reason for hope. I fail to see why a system of cycling every team through every pick is preferable to the current situaiton.