I am an expert at games. Poker in my 20s, DFS in my 30s, and along the way a top 10 player in the world at a bunch of obscure games you’ve probably never heard of. The word “game” can be misleading, as game theory can be applied to markets and all sorts of adult sounding things, like optimal tanking strategy in the NBA.
From a macro POV, I’ve thought for years that there weren’t enough tankers, that ¼ of the league should be tanking instead of ⅙ of it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to get to ⅓ of it, but this appears to be a very strong draft, and as Ricky Bobby once said, “If you ain't first, you’re last.”
There's nothing you can do to truly eradicate tanking short of some extremely serious reforms that I don’t see coming. Those reforms, like letting draft eligible players go where they want [1], or the Papal Conclave idea where decision makers vote on who should get top picks, seem to be unrealistic in my lifetime. Instead of a defeatist attitude, I'd rather focus on practical things that can be done (some of which you've definitely seen before, some of which perhaps you haven't).
Limit, or do away with, pick protections. I’d argue the most ‘necessary’ pick protection is lottery protected. If a team trades for a player and it causes them to make the playoffs, yay! Now the other team gets a bad pick. Top 4 protected? Sure, just to stop the embarrassment of giving away something extremely valuable. But anything else is unnecessary. Though there are still some outstanding obligations, I don’t see why changing this going forward would have any adverse effects. In fact, in the future I think it would actually help teams get more deals done because there’s an understanding that it’s something you can’t even haggle over.
Randomize every draft slot. It’s madness that the NBA realized that they should flatten the top 4 odds but didn’t realize that they should also “flatten” the odds for each subsequent pick. With the current format there is still a massive benefit to having a worse record (the worst record can’t get worse than the fifth pick, the third worst record can get as bad at the seventh pick). Who the hell is on the competition committee anyway?!
Make the rookie scale salary more accurately reflect pick value. This is extremely low hanging fruit. To get data to visualize my cause I took a look at some sample “NBA draft pick value" posts. I picked this one by Duncan Taylor because it used EPM as a baseline (a favorite all in one metric of this blog). If you put it alongside the current NBA rookie scale contracts, you can see the value of current rookie scale contracts is too flat (with $11.5m for the #1 overall pick and 2.3m for the #30 overall pick).
Just make the top pick earn $20m, the second pick $15m, the third pick 10m, and keep 4-30 the same. It more accurately represents the value of those picks and the pressure that should be on the teams making them.
See? Much better! In some years people wouldn’t even want the top pick if it meant having to pay Zachary Risacher way more than he’ll ever be worth (yes I know, the current system does that just fine 🙃). An added benefit: teams would have to be much more decisive about picking up third and fourth year options on rookie contracts for early picks, potentially allowing players who get off to slow starts to move somewhere they might have a better chance to develop.
Now, of course the NBAPA would always be against this because the olds run the league in the same way the olds run the country! Call me ageist, but we gotta stop letting the oldest people make decisions in all facets of life. I'm not a hypocrite, you can send me out to pasture when I'm past my prime. The NBAPA head should be someone in their prime who understands that player value should mimic how much they make, not have it tail so aggressively such that teams get stuck with albatross contracts paying guys like Anthony Davis way more than they’re worth [2].
And finally, the most important solution: For lottery equity, have losses count at the beginning of the season, wins count at the end of the season [3], and randomize the day this takes place. I could figure out a more objective way to do this, but for now let’s assume the first half of the season we count losses, the last quarter of the season we count wins, and at some point between the 41 and 60 game mark we randomize where the schedule flips (don’t worry, we can overpay some suits from Ernst & Young to do it) and no one knows until the season is over.
This would be extremely hard to game given the uncertainty of when the schedule flips, it would make it so that bad teams may even be incentivized to make mid season win now trades (as they actually did already this deadline– except this time they’d actually play the players they traded for).
The argument against is that teams would just tank even earlier. That’s fair and likely to happen, but to me it’s both harder to execute (every team, even the Pelicans and the Kings, has some hope in October), and even if teams do successfully execute it, they have to be much more honest about it. Giving away Colin Sexton and John Collins before the season was a realistic assessment of where the Jazz wanted to be this season (they knew they had to keep their top 8 protected pick). Make those teams that are clearly rebuilding show their cards early, instead of being able to late season tank after injuries (another positive effect– it would make it harder to do the one year drop downs when players get injured mid or early season, like the '97 Spurs or '20 Warriors).
And even if this does happen, and it plays out exactly how a naysayer would say, you’d still get quality games down the stretch while all teams are fighting for something in the silly season of March. This would help teams going forward into next season with more sober assessments of where they are. So instead of letting Jalen Green have a few big months against tanking teams and sign an extension that he’s not worth [4], you’d have real conversations about how an up and coming team was winning games against playoff teams. To me that’s just a better time of year for the games to be good anyway.
None of these are drastic changes, just some low hanging fruit. Someone tell Adam Silver that he can hire aejones, inc. as a consultant and I’ll ask the best poker players in the world how they’d game the system, that’ll improve the incentive structure real fast.
[1] This idea, with the worst teams getting higher salary for rookies, seems pretty good. I think the opportunity, and the money, would spread the talent around somewhat equally. It would actually reward competence too egregiously, and there's just no chance that the small market teams would ever agree to it. Alas, this would take an entire blog post to actually consider the pros and cons.
[2] An easy fix here: <5 years of service 27.5% max, 5-10 years of service 32.5% max, 10+ years of service 30% max (currently goes 25%->30%->35%, with award escalators)
[3] Perhaps wins should count as half as much as the losses, I haven’t really thought that through yet. I’ll give it a more thorough examination when the competition committee hires me.
[4] Jalen Green catching strays, sorry bud, at least I didn't bring up the 40 year old girlfriend!
