TLDR: For those who don't like to read long things, just answer the title question if you want.
I think as a general proposition, the NBA would probably prefer
The first (parity) is challenging given that, unlike in most other sports, one or two players can completely drive a team's fortunes for years. The lack of NFL-style mechanisms (less of a "hard" cap; the inability to just waive contracts to save money, etc.) also makes it difficult. And I don't think the owners are (or should be) wresting power back from the players to try to turn the NBA into the NFL-type league.
But the second (tanking) could presumably be changed. Tanking only happens because, arguably, it is the easy way out of the harder process of team-building. Just blow it all up, hope for a little luck in the lottery and sooner or later you'll be back in the championship mix (at least that's the narrative, though I really don't think the evidence is as strong for this as many assume). It's assumed to be the way to avoid NBA "purgatory" (I think the existence of this is even less strong than the evidence that tanking actually works, but just following the narrative here).
The easy fix to tanking is to tinker with the lottery odds, of course. Or more likely, radically change those odds. Ideally, you'd want odds that don't reward tanking enough for any team to find value in purposeful tanking, but at the same time you'd want those odds to foster parity by returning more draft value to the lower-finishing clubs so that teams aren't forever consigned to the bottom (and so that prestige teams can't just use wealth/location advantages to maintain supremacy in perpetuity).
But can you actually find such a "sweet spot"? For example, I've been messing around with the idea of a league-wide lottery for all picks (going into effect with league expansion to 32 games). The worst-record team's would give them a 5% chance at the #1 pick and the best-record would have a 1.25% chance (a 4-1 ratio). All other teams would be distributed evenly between those two teams based on their record (a gap of about 0.121% for each step of the ranking). If you think of it in terms of ping-pong balls, the worst team would get 124 and the best would get 31 (with a difference of three ping-pong balls for each step ranking in the standings). The whole first round would then use the ping-pong balls to determine draft position. Based on running approximately 40 simulations, that would return about 6.5 of the top ten picks to the bottom half of the teams and about 3.5 of the top-ten picks to the top half of the teams (with a low of 4 and high of 9 top-10 picks returning to the bottom half of teams over those 40 simulations). This would mean that even a league-worst finish would have only about 46% odds of getting a top-10 pick. It would eliminate the purposeful (Philly, OKC, Rockets, etc.) multiple-years of top 3 picks kind of possibility.
So (trying to ignore the actual Wemby chase that's right in front of our eyes right now) would something like this be desirable to discourage tanking and foster parity over the long haul in the NBA? Or where might a better sweet spot lie if we're thinking of re-doing lottery odds? Or do you think there's no sweet spot to be found and instead that having a legit option for tanking is the only way to prevent too much concentration of power in the NBA within the prestige franchises?
PS -- to give credit where it's due: SLCDunk's James Hansen has a recent article on how tanking is good for the NBA's "ecosystem"; it got me thinking about this a little more.
Here's a random simulation (results are the green/blue) where all the odds are shown for each pick (I used https://zengm.com/universal-draft-lottery-simulator/ ) -- sorry the image quality isn't great:
I think as a general proposition, the NBA would probably prefer
- More parity
- Less tanking -- fewer teams writing off whole seasons/part seasons/multiple seasons in the attempt to "bottom out" so they can be good later
The first (parity) is challenging given that, unlike in most other sports, one or two players can completely drive a team's fortunes for years. The lack of NFL-style mechanisms (less of a "hard" cap; the inability to just waive contracts to save money, etc.) also makes it difficult. And I don't think the owners are (or should be) wresting power back from the players to try to turn the NBA into the NFL-type league.
But the second (tanking) could presumably be changed. Tanking only happens because, arguably, it is the easy way out of the harder process of team-building. Just blow it all up, hope for a little luck in the lottery and sooner or later you'll be back in the championship mix (at least that's the narrative, though I really don't think the evidence is as strong for this as many assume). It's assumed to be the way to avoid NBA "purgatory" (I think the existence of this is even less strong than the evidence that tanking actually works, but just following the narrative here).
The easy fix to tanking is to tinker with the lottery odds, of course. Or more likely, radically change those odds. Ideally, you'd want odds that don't reward tanking enough for any team to find value in purposeful tanking, but at the same time you'd want those odds to foster parity by returning more draft value to the lower-finishing clubs so that teams aren't forever consigned to the bottom (and so that prestige teams can't just use wealth/location advantages to maintain supremacy in perpetuity).
But can you actually find such a "sweet spot"? For example, I've been messing around with the idea of a league-wide lottery for all picks (going into effect with league expansion to 32 games). The worst-record team's would give them a 5% chance at the #1 pick and the best-record would have a 1.25% chance (a 4-1 ratio). All other teams would be distributed evenly between those two teams based on their record (a gap of about 0.121% for each step of the ranking). If you think of it in terms of ping-pong balls, the worst team would get 124 and the best would get 31 (with a difference of three ping-pong balls for each step ranking in the standings). The whole first round would then use the ping-pong balls to determine draft position. Based on running approximately 40 simulations, that would return about 6.5 of the top ten picks to the bottom half of the teams and about 3.5 of the top-ten picks to the top half of the teams (with a low of 4 and high of 9 top-10 picks returning to the bottom half of teams over those 40 simulations). This would mean that even a league-worst finish would have only about 46% odds of getting a top-10 pick. It would eliminate the purposeful (Philly, OKC, Rockets, etc.) multiple-years of top 3 picks kind of possibility.
So (trying to ignore the actual Wemby chase that's right in front of our eyes right now) would something like this be desirable to discourage tanking and foster parity over the long haul in the NBA? Or where might a better sweet spot lie if we're thinking of re-doing lottery odds? Or do you think there's no sweet spot to be found and instead that having a legit option for tanking is the only way to prevent too much concentration of power in the NBA within the prestige franchises?
PS -- to give credit where it's due: SLCDunk's James Hansen has a recent article on how tanking is good for the NBA's "ecosystem"; it got me thinking about this a little more.
Here's a random simulation (results are the green/blue) where all the odds are shown for each pick (I used https://zengm.com/universal-draft-lottery-simulator/ ) -- sorry the image quality isn't great: