I've grown a little bit tired lately reading guys blasting JL3, ridiculing Marvin, wishing Corbin to hell and debating over Biedrins and Gobert.
Due to the questionable quality of Jazz games I've been transitioning from rewatching the full games during the next evening to rewatching full quarters that might have been competitive and interesting according to the boxscore to watching the LP 8 min summaries during meals and now I've reached the 2 min summaries with little interest to rewatch double digit losses with uninspired coaching. But gotta do something in the morning while brushing my teeth.
Other teams I actually enjoyed watching include the Pacers, Thunder, Spurs, Mavs, Rockets, Magic, Hawks, Pistons and Suns. They have been playing some exciting fine to watch basketball.
But these serious tanking efforts this year are lowering the quality of the league and the league officials can be happy this is not a contract year for television rights, even though ESPN will certainly point out that once a decade there's a tank campaign and they are right to do so, not only to lower their costs, also to ensure better quality for the fans.
So as long as we got a system that grants you better odds to win the #1 with a worse record you'll try to outtank. We've already a CBA in place that punishes long term contracts with non franchise faces severely which should increase the free agent pool each summer increasingly giving more teams a chance to strengthen via free agency.
Look at last summer. The Bobcats, Hawks and Pistons wanted talent influx even though they are a small market while not handing out horrible contracts to good players. Millsap is already one of the most sought after contracts by pretenders that wanna make the jump to contenders. Jefferson might be slightly overpaid but would prolly have also accepted a smaller pay. 3 years duration limit the damage as well. Josh Smith is also market value even though he doesn't really fit the Pistons needs, which is why he may turn out to be a bad contract.
With an increasing number of talents declaring after freshmen and sophomore campaigns you have a lot of uncertainty with your talent in how they will turn out and each year has several gems in the 10s, 20s and sometimes deep into the 2nd round. So having high draftpicks enlarges your chances but doesn't guarantee your franchise success. There's plenty of roads that lead to Rome. Going the shortest way blindfolded is not a good choice though, Cleveland.
But in general front offices are developing in a direction where they rely more on analytics, tools and less on former NBA players who do a good newspaper quote. Yes I'm talking to you Isiah! So I'd argue they are acting more reasonable in general. The massive tanking is a sideeffect of that. They sold tryhard seasons to fans who are now extremely disgruntled to have paid money to not go to actual games of their teams. But in the digital era memory is short and drafting a top prospect will make them keep their seasontickets or get it back 1 year later.
So my proposal is: GET RID OF WEIGHED LOTTERY AS WE KNOW IT. You can't award a team a 4-9% higher chance to get #1 for winning a duel of losing the most games. Don't exclude playoff teams from it, so you don't give incentive to miss them.
So who participates in the lottery? All the teams that missed the playoffs and all the 1st round losers. That gives you a total of 22 teams. The 14 non playoff team get a slightly higher chance of scoring a higher seed.
The bottom 7 teams each get 6% of the lottery tickets for the #1 drawing. The next 7 each get a 4.857% chance and the 8 first round playoff losers each get a 3% chance. This would take any tanking incentive out of the game. Are you going to pull off shenanigans to gain 1.43% more chance? If you're a playoff team you don't do this for less than 2% more chance.
At the same time you make the draft lottery a bigger event and don't only draw the first 3, but you draw from 1 down to 10 and fill the rest according to standings. You could also make it even bigger but that would seem pointless IMO.
That obviously could give you some risk that some team that has an improving nucleus could land another #1 pick, but if you don't include them you're going to risk shifting the tankings from the cellar dwellers to the borderline playoff teams that wanna drop out. Just think about 2014...You'd rather have a 5% chance at Wiggins or get a 4-0 spanking from the Heat/Spurs/Thunder...Self explanatory. So you're not punishing any team for trying and rewarding good basketball.
Of course every 20 years that could lead to some ridiculous contention window, but I have further solutions for that.
First of all if you make rookie contracts scaled, don't leave teams the option to pay 80-120% of the scale. a scale is a scale...
Make rookie contracts incentive based and have these incentives covered by the league and don't count towards the cap. So if you're outplaying your rookie contract you don't get punished and you get rewarded. After 4 years players are restricted but I'd introduce 1 change to the max contract landscape...
The NBA has very few true franchise players and last thing you want to maintain competitiveness is these players teaming up without brutal repercussions.
Each team has 1 franchise player slot, for whom they can pay a starting salary equal to 30% of the cap starting after year 3 as nowadays you have players peaking in their early to mid 20s(athletic freaks like Howard, Stoudemire, Rose), mid 20s until threshold of 30(Durant, James seem good candidates) and sometimes even early to mid 30s(Dirk, MJ, Stockton, Kobe). This way you get paid what a team thinks you're worth from the beginning and teams can really attack youngsters after year 4 with these kind of aggressive offers if the team has 2 superstars.
So you have that 1 slot that you can pay a player a lot on and every other player can start at 20% of the cap with 4.5% raises. So stars would have to forfeit a lot of money to team up or you'd have to be playing a lot of years for the same ballclubs to reach the big numbers as a secondary options with 4.5% raises and new deals giving 105% of the previous contract.
This would leave a more balanced landscape and guarantee competitiveness. I might have of course not considered some obstacles or left out some on purpose. This would of course put new challenges on teams to put together quality teams as team chemistry and coaches might be more important than ever.
It would strengthen franchise identity for top tier talent as they'd have much to lose by swapping teams. I'm not even sure that the franchise player is a good idea but I really dislike these new age big 3 so much that I think it's important to get rid of that. They really cause half of the league to be starving in franchise talent. Building the right team with complementary pieces and stuff would be very important.
That's it for now as I fear any additional word will discourage more potential readers and participants to bring up their own ideas.
Due to the questionable quality of Jazz games I've been transitioning from rewatching the full games during the next evening to rewatching full quarters that might have been competitive and interesting according to the boxscore to watching the LP 8 min summaries during meals and now I've reached the 2 min summaries with little interest to rewatch double digit losses with uninspired coaching. But gotta do something in the morning while brushing my teeth.
Other teams I actually enjoyed watching include the Pacers, Thunder, Spurs, Mavs, Rockets, Magic, Hawks, Pistons and Suns. They have been playing some exciting fine to watch basketball.
But these serious tanking efforts this year are lowering the quality of the league and the league officials can be happy this is not a contract year for television rights, even though ESPN will certainly point out that once a decade there's a tank campaign and they are right to do so, not only to lower their costs, also to ensure better quality for the fans.
So as long as we got a system that grants you better odds to win the #1 with a worse record you'll try to outtank. We've already a CBA in place that punishes long term contracts with non franchise faces severely which should increase the free agent pool each summer increasingly giving more teams a chance to strengthen via free agency.
Look at last summer. The Bobcats, Hawks and Pistons wanted talent influx even though they are a small market while not handing out horrible contracts to good players. Millsap is already one of the most sought after contracts by pretenders that wanna make the jump to contenders. Jefferson might be slightly overpaid but would prolly have also accepted a smaller pay. 3 years duration limit the damage as well. Josh Smith is also market value even though he doesn't really fit the Pistons needs, which is why he may turn out to be a bad contract.
With an increasing number of talents declaring after freshmen and sophomore campaigns you have a lot of uncertainty with your talent in how they will turn out and each year has several gems in the 10s, 20s and sometimes deep into the 2nd round. So having high draftpicks enlarges your chances but doesn't guarantee your franchise success. There's plenty of roads that lead to Rome. Going the shortest way blindfolded is not a good choice though, Cleveland.
But in general front offices are developing in a direction where they rely more on analytics, tools and less on former NBA players who do a good newspaper quote. Yes I'm talking to you Isiah! So I'd argue they are acting more reasonable in general. The massive tanking is a sideeffect of that. They sold tryhard seasons to fans who are now extremely disgruntled to have paid money to not go to actual games of their teams. But in the digital era memory is short and drafting a top prospect will make them keep their seasontickets or get it back 1 year later.
So my proposal is: GET RID OF WEIGHED LOTTERY AS WE KNOW IT. You can't award a team a 4-9% higher chance to get #1 for winning a duel of losing the most games. Don't exclude playoff teams from it, so you don't give incentive to miss them.
So who participates in the lottery? All the teams that missed the playoffs and all the 1st round losers. That gives you a total of 22 teams. The 14 non playoff team get a slightly higher chance of scoring a higher seed.
The bottom 7 teams each get 6% of the lottery tickets for the #1 drawing. The next 7 each get a 4.857% chance and the 8 first round playoff losers each get a 3% chance. This would take any tanking incentive out of the game. Are you going to pull off shenanigans to gain 1.43% more chance? If you're a playoff team you don't do this for less than 2% more chance.
At the same time you make the draft lottery a bigger event and don't only draw the first 3, but you draw from 1 down to 10 and fill the rest according to standings. You could also make it even bigger but that would seem pointless IMO.
That obviously could give you some risk that some team that has an improving nucleus could land another #1 pick, but if you don't include them you're going to risk shifting the tankings from the cellar dwellers to the borderline playoff teams that wanna drop out. Just think about 2014...You'd rather have a 5% chance at Wiggins or get a 4-0 spanking from the Heat/Spurs/Thunder...Self explanatory. So you're not punishing any team for trying and rewarding good basketball.
Of course every 20 years that could lead to some ridiculous contention window, but I have further solutions for that.
First of all if you make rookie contracts scaled, don't leave teams the option to pay 80-120% of the scale. a scale is a scale...
Make rookie contracts incentive based and have these incentives covered by the league and don't count towards the cap. So if you're outplaying your rookie contract you don't get punished and you get rewarded. After 4 years players are restricted but I'd introduce 1 change to the max contract landscape...
The NBA has very few true franchise players and last thing you want to maintain competitiveness is these players teaming up without brutal repercussions.
Each team has 1 franchise player slot, for whom they can pay a starting salary equal to 30% of the cap starting after year 3 as nowadays you have players peaking in their early to mid 20s(athletic freaks like Howard, Stoudemire, Rose), mid 20s until threshold of 30(Durant, James seem good candidates) and sometimes even early to mid 30s(Dirk, MJ, Stockton, Kobe). This way you get paid what a team thinks you're worth from the beginning and teams can really attack youngsters after year 4 with these kind of aggressive offers if the team has 2 superstars.
So you have that 1 slot that you can pay a player a lot on and every other player can start at 20% of the cap with 4.5% raises. So stars would have to forfeit a lot of money to team up or you'd have to be playing a lot of years for the same ballclubs to reach the big numbers as a secondary options with 4.5% raises and new deals giving 105% of the previous contract.
This would leave a more balanced landscape and guarantee competitiveness. I might have of course not considered some obstacles or left out some on purpose. This would of course put new challenges on teams to put together quality teams as team chemistry and coaches might be more important than ever.
It would strengthen franchise identity for top tier talent as they'd have much to lose by swapping teams. I'm not even sure that the franchise player is a good idea but I really dislike these new age big 3 so much that I think it's important to get rid of that. They really cause half of the league to be starving in franchise talent. Building the right team with complementary pieces and stuff would be very important.
That's it for now as I fear any additional word will discourage more potential readers and participants to bring up their own ideas.
