Fixing the NBA Parity Problem (Without Punishing Tanking)
When Adam Silver and other league big shots come out against Sam ‘Died For Our Sins’ Hinkie and the 76ers’ Process, I get awfully defensive.
I know that exactly zero of the following suggestions will ever make it to an NBA Owners Meeting, but when Adam Silver and other league big shots come out against Sam ‘Died For Our Sins’ Hinkie and the 76ers’ Process, I get awfully defensive. I agree with Silver that the lack of competition in the regular season makes some games downright unwatchable. I agree that teams purposefully losing is bad both for the sport and for ratings. I agree that it’s horribly unsatisfying when 90% of the fan base can correctly predict the Finals matchup multiple years in a row. The remedies for those afflictions, however, are not, as he suggests, based in carrying bad teams halfway up the ladder to mediocrity — arguably the worst status in the league — but instead simplifying the worst teams’ road to the top.
I’m not suggesting gutting every team in a Madden NFL-esque fantasy re-draft or punishing teams for having success. I’m suggesting taking away some of the roadblocks that presently prevent the league’s worst from pulling themselves into contention.
Really, these aren’t yet legitimate suggestions. If, in the near future, we find ourselves staring down a 5th Finals rematch between Golden State and Cleveland, then we can come back to these. Until then, we’ll let the situation play out and, as always, #TrustTheProcess.
I. NBA Draft Lottery Odds
This is an issue very near and dear to my heart, as the NBA Draft Lottery has been fairly kind to the Sixers the last few years, and Silver’s idea of re-weighting the lottery system to benefit the better teams terrifies me. What if the Sixers fell to #4 in the 2016 draft or #7 in the 2017 draft, the two worst possibilities? We wouldn’t be looking at Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz; we’d be looking at Dragan Bender and Lauri Markkanen. If things hadn’t gone the Sixers way, they could have two Darko Milicics instead of two of the best prospects of the decade.
I understand the point of the Lottery and why Silver wants to alter it. The NBA Draft Lottery is a message to the league that going 0–82 in search of your franchise savior is unacceptable, and Silver wants to further highlight that point. Why, however, must there be such great variety in draft possibilities? Going back to 2005, the lottery has been won by the worst team three times, the 2nd worst team once, and the 3rd worst team twice. That means that 7 of the last 13 lottery winners have been better than at least 3 other teams. The NBA draft is supposed to help the bad teams, not the mediocre teams. These statistical anomalies of past lotteries have altered the course of the league more times than the NBA would like to admit.
The 1992–93 Orlando Magic finished the season at 41–41 as the 11th worst team in the league. They had won the previous year’s lottery and drafted Shaquille O’Neal, who was making waves in his first season in the NBA. The future was bright, much more promising than that of the Dallas Mavericks, the league’s worst team at 11–71. Somehow, despite a 1.52% chance (the worst odds of any team) of jumping from the 11th selection in the 1993 Draft to the 1st, the Magic, for the second year in a row, won the lottery. They took Chris Webber, who they traded for the #3 Pick Penny Hardaway and three future 1st round selections. The next four seasons the Magic went 212–116 with four straight playoff appearances, including a Finals trip. Despite finishing 30 games behind the Magic, the Mavs ended up with the 4th overall pick and missed the playoffs each of the next seven years.
Even luckier than the ’93 Magic were the 2010s Cavs, who won the Lottery in 2011, 2013, and 2014. With a 2.8% chance in 2011, they took Kyrie Irving as their lotto prize. 2014 was an even unlikelier victory, and their 1.7% chance yielded Andrew Wiggins, who they later traded for Kevin Love to put next to LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. The overall likelihood that they would win those two lotteries as well as the 2013 Draft Lottery (when they had the best odds of any team) was 0.0072%. That’s around a 1 in 13,500 chance.
Don’t think those picks have made a difference? If the Cavs had landed where they were most likely to, they would have ended up with Noah Vonleh (2014, 9th overall) and Brandon Knight (2011, 8th overall) in lieu of Andrew Wiggins/Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving. If that doesn’t spell out a Warriors’ three-peat from 2015–2017, I don’t know what does.
The only way around scenarios like these while maintaining the integrity of the draft is to ensure that no lottery team rises or falls any more than 2 spots. If you wanted to go even further, you could keep the top three teams at the #1, #2, and #3 picks, drawing spots to determine the order — the lowest the worst team could drop would be to #3, the best possible team with the #1 pick would be the 3rd worst. This guarantees the worst teams will get the best picks, eliminating the possibility of an average team climbing over the more desperate teams to take a top prospect.
II. Cap Restrictions
This would be exceptionally unpopular among both players and franchises, but it’s the simplest parity booster. Instead of permitting teams like Cleveland and Golden State to run their caps up to $142 million and $135 million, respectively — well over the $99 million cap — the league should enforce a hard (or at least harder) cap, in which fewer exceptions are permitted. The thought that a high luxury tax bill — the current ‘punishment’ — deters owners from going over the cap is clearly flawed. As of August 2017, only five teams have positive cap space for the upcoming 2017–18 season. Even some of the NBA’s worst teams (SAC, LAL, ORL, NYK) are in the red. I thought about suggesting giving the bottom 5 or 10 teams extra cap room, but it’s clear that money alone does not make a contender. In fact, it seems to hurt some franchises, as teams get spend-happy and give ridiculous contracts to players like Tim Hardaway, Jr. (looking at you, Knicks).
The league could keep some of the more dire exceptions: Disabled Player, Mid-level, maybe even Rookie. There’s no need to force teams to play with fewer players than other teams, nor to forbid teams from seeking out young talent on valuable contracts.
The Bird exception, however, needs to be — at the very least — seriously limited. The Bird exception, to provide a little context, essentially gives a team the right to go over the cap to re-sign a veteran free agent, so long as the veteran has played three seasons with the team. It’s a reasonable rule. But it needs to be corralled in from its current state of disarray to one of manageability. The best way to do this is simply to limit it: give each team one or two Bird exceptions, no more. They’ll still be over the cap, but it won’t be nearly as egregious. Not only will this limit the spending of the teams at the top, but it will also indirectly help floundering teams like the Orlando Magic, preventing them from spending a combined $38.75 million (in 2016 alone) on Evan Fournier, Terrence Ross, and Nikola Vucevic, all signed under the Bird exception.
This next idea is pretty far out there, but stick with me: add to the Bird limitation a ‘pay cut limit’ and the NBA will find itself universally competitive again. This restriction would prevent teams from signing more than 2 or 3 players at any less than 15–25% of the player’s fair market value. It’d be widely despised and virtually unenforceable, but if there was a way to measure a player’s exact market value — not the value he creates, but how much teams would pay for him — you could reasonably prevent the formation of veteran super-teams. No teams — not even the Warriors with their Kevin Durant discount — would yet qualify. As such, this proposal is more preemptive than anything, but it would force teams to find real value in players and contracts instead of the intentionally deflated value of players seeking easy rings.
III. Playoff Changes
The last 33 NBA seasons have yielded only 10 champions. The MLB, for comparison, has crowned 20 different champions in the same period. Even the dynasty-friendly NFL has had 16 Super Bowl winners in its last 33 years. The NBA Playoffs have gotten predictable, and if — as Adam Silver suggests — the NBA is seeking to distance itself from its top-heavy past, it needs to offer underdogs a better shot at the Championship.
This change would probably be the easiest to implement, as it’s simply a matter of reverting to the pre-2003 Playoff policy of 5-game first round series. This, contrary to the previous suggestions, would not help the non-playoff teams. It would, however, increase the likelihood of first round upsets, which are desperately needed; only two seeds greater than #5 have won a series in the last five seasons. One of those teams was the 2013 Golden State Warriors — a clear exception — flashing signs of the powerhouse they would become. Dating back to the 2014 Playoffs, seven of eight total Conference Finals have pitted the #1 seed against the #2 seed. The exception? The 2015–16 #3 Oklahoma City Thunder, who rode Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook past the #2 Spurs.
Part of the reason March Madness is so exciting is that even if a #2 seed wins 99/100 matchups against a #15, they only need to lose once to be knocked out. Florida Gulf Coast University only had to beat Georgetown one time in the first round of the 2013 NCAA Tournament to move on, not four times. If the NBA wants year-to-year variety in the final weeks of the playoffs, it needs to remove the overwhelming statistical advantage given to the favorite.
The more games played, the more likely the favorite is to win: hypothetically, if the #8 Seed Trail Blazers have a 20% chance of winning any game in the first round against the #1 Warriors, they’ll win a 7-game series 3.334% of the time. With the same odds in a 5-game series, the Blazers win the series 5.792% of the time. It doesn’t look like a huge difference, but decreasing the series to 5 games nearly doubles the Blazers’ likelihood of victory. If you change the Blazers’ win probability to 10% — a more realistic figure given the Warriors’ dominance — a 5-game series more than triples the likelihood of the upset compared to a 7-game series.*
Losing is in and of itself a deterrent. We want to win because it is, in one form or another, rewarding. We don’t want to lose because it is, in one form or another, punishing. Kicking a team when it’s down is one thing, but does the NBA really need to keep them down until, by some magic or luck, they find the strength to stand? If the NBA seriously commits itself to mending the parity problem, I’m sure they’ll find more amiable solutions than these. Until then, however, these are as good as they get.
- (The numbers change as you change the probability, so don’t use these percentages or probabilities in isolation.)
