Washington Wizards' John Wall, left, and NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum after the announcement that the Wizards had won first pick in the NBA draft lottery in Chicago on Sunday.Nam Y. Huh/The Associated Press
Over the weekend, the NBA draft lottery worked as it should, which is a pity. The Washington Wizards won and will pick first.
Washington was the worst team in the league last year. How bad was it? Recently, The Athletic anonymously polled players and asked them to name the “least impressive” head coach. One of them said, “I don’t even know who’s coaching the Wizards, but whoever coaches the Wizards.”
The number two and three picks go to equally terrible teams – Utah and Memphis. It is a modern sports ritual to celebrate this incompetence as it is gifted the brightest young talent. They won by losing.
The logic behind the prevailing lottery model is Marxist – to each according to their needs.
Except maybe what teams need isn’t an incentive to rip their fans off.
Washington wins NBA draft lottery, chance to pick first on June 23
The NBA has come around to that idea. Beginning next year, the draft odds will disadvantage the bottom three teams in the standings. This year, Washington had a 14-per-cent chance of winning the draft. If it is in the same spot next year, its odds will be 5.4 per cent (and it won’t be allowed to win two years in a row in any case).
The seven other teams that miss the playoffs, but aren’t in the bottom three, will each have an 8.1-per-cent chance at the top pick. Also, the lottery goes from 14 to 16 teams. This is all in an effort to fight tanking, the thing everybody’s doing, but no one’s allowed to talk about. Maybe that was the first clue.
Tanking isn’t ruining sport – teams were terrible long before anyone gave them a reason to be. But it is ruinous to the spirit of sport.
No team should be incentivized to lose. You wouldn’t do it in Little League, so why do it in the pros? Were sports policed like a real business, doing so would be illegal.
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Sports professionals love the tank because it is a billboard-sized fig leaf behind which to hide their own lack of ability/smarts/cunning.
All of them love to talk about the endless hustle of the sports executive life, until they blow it. Then it’s time to cut the engines and strap on a parachute. Everybody’s going down, except for them.
You know how hard it is to tank a pro sports team? It’s the easiest thing in the world, and I’m speaking literally. There is no other job where being spectacularly bad is considered a good thing. It’d be like the boss giving me a tap on the shoulder and saying, “Corporate says there’s too much cash on hand. Time to start libeling the hell out of everyone.’ I mean, nothing would please me more, but what sort of example would we be setting? Think of all the children I would have to libel.
Any idiot can take the bad employees they have now and swap them for theoretically good ones to be acquired at a later date. The beauty of this system is that no one need ever be right. If the theoretically good future employees prove to be bad in reality, that just means it’s time to tank harder.
Somehow, fans have been tricked into believing this serves their interests. I suppose it’s the same instinct that causes people to fall for online romance scams. Who wants to date some average guy you met at the grocery store when you could be in a hot, hot, Zoom-only affair with Brad Pitt? All that he wants to do is love you (once you send him the money for that operation). If this Brad Pitt turns out to be a catfish, I’m sure next year’s Brad Pitt will be the genuine article.
The NBA’s move nudges sports executives to use their gigantic brains to think their way through problems, rather than defer that professional responsibility to a spinning wheel.
It won’t stop the tank. The idea is too alluring. Everyone will try a little bit harder, until it becomes clear that trying isn’t getting them anywhere. With 10 or 20 games left, that’s when they begin their freefall through the standings. The future belongs to the demure tank. Watching the worst of the worst trying to scramble up to fourth could be fun, though.
Here’s my idea – total randomness, in every league with a draft. Put 32 NHL team names in a hat and draw them out one by one. Then you run the thing back in the opposite order for the second round, like a fantasy draft.
Is this fair? No. That’s why it’s great. Sports isn’t meant to be fair. It’s meant to be even. It’s not the same thing.
Where is the fairness in penalizing good teams for being good? Nobody looks back on those seventies Canadiens rosters and says, ‘Great teams, but a little too good if you know what I mean.’
Wouldn’t it be fun if teams like that still roamed the continent? Instead, we’ve HR’d the superteam out of existence. We can’t have them making all the other teams feel bad about themselves.
Under a random system, you may be worrying that your wretched team, which has always been wretched, will continue to be so forever. Picture me putting a comforting arm around you as I say that you’re right. Your team will never win. Never. Not because of the draft. But because it is run by people who have no idea what’s going on.
They’re doing what all the rest of us do at work – they’re guessing. When they guess right, it’s because they’re geniuses. When they guess wrong, it’s got something to do with statistics. And if they guess wrong at a truly heroic level, then they are given the best teenage player available, which lets everyone know they were playing a long game.
Meanwhile, through good years, bad years and indifferent ones, the club continues to separate you from your money. Did you buy a new jersey every year? Get that upgraded cable package? Then everyone on your team is winning. You’re the only one who’s losing.