Curb Tanking With Non-Weighted Lottery

The NBA has used the current weighted draft lottery system since 1994. But does it promote tanking?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “The Life of Reason” (1905-06)

From the founding of the Basketball Association of America in 1946 through the merger with the National Basketball League in 1949 and with the American Basketball Association in 1976, a constant in professional basketball has been the draft.

Of the four major professional leagues in North America, the NBA Draft is the second-oldest, predated by only the National Football League, which instituted an open draft in 1936.

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The National Hockey League didn’t institute a draft until 1963 and Major League Baseball waited until 1965.

In the NHL and MLB, players signed with whichever team pursued them to their liking, meaning that inevitably, stronger organizations such as the New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals and Montreal Canadiens captured the lion’s share of the best talent and other clubs were left to scramble for the leftovers.

Drafts are an illegal restraint of trade. But since the draft is agreed to in collective bargaining, it is an exception to national labor laws.

In The Beginning: The Territorial Years

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In its early years, the BAA and later, the NBA, allowed for territorial selections.

A team could surrender its first-round pick—which were ordered in inverse order of finish the previous season (i.e., the team with the worst record picked first and so on)—and pick a player from its immediate geographical area.

The thinking behind this made sense. The league was trying to gain traction with fans and there are few better, quicker ways to do this than to throw some “local boy makes good” stories out there.

There were a total of 23 territorial picks made. The first was Saint Louis University All-American Ed Macauley to the St. Louis Bombers in 1949 and the last was when the Los Angeles Lakers took UCLA’s Gail Goodrich in 1965.

Twelve of the 23 territorial picks would up in the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame, including Goodrich and Bill Bradley (selected by the New York Knicks from Princeton) in the final year such picks were allowed.

But with the NBA preparing to expand to 10 teams with the arrival of the Chicago Bulls in 1966—the tip of an expansion spear that saw the league grow from nine to 21 teams in an 11-year span—the territorial pick was abandoned and the league adopted a new way of determining which team would select No. 1 overall.

Hanging On The Flip Of A Coin

Beginning with the 1966 NBA Draft, the first overall pick was determined by a coin flip between the last-place finishers in the Eastern and Western divisions. When the NBA realigned to a conference-based format in 1970, the teams with the worst records in their respective conferences were relegated to the coin flip.

How well did that work for getting the first pick to the worst team? With a 50-50 chance, the team with the worst record selected No. 1 overall 10 times and went second nine times—just about what one would expect from a coin flip.

Here are the results from the coin-flip era:

But with widespread talk of the Houston Rockets openly tanking late in the season to drop to the bottom of the Western Conference in 1983-84 (Houston lost 14 of its last 17 games to finish 29-53, one game worse than the San Diego Clippers) to give itself at least a 50-50 chance to either get Hakeem Olajuwon or Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA Draft.

So to protect the league from further such blatant front-office gamesmanship (in fairness, the 1983-84 Rockets may have had more mysterious “hamstring pulls” in the final six weeks as any team in modern history), the NBA instituted a draft lottery for the 1985 NBA Draft.

The Early Lottery Years

The first lottery following the 1984-85 season was a simple one. The seven teams that failed to make the playoffs had envelopes with their logos dropped into a hopper. Commissioner David Stern drew them out one at a time to determine the order of selection for the first seven picks.

There was some controversy in that first lottery, which had a grand prize of Georgetown’s all-everything big man, Patrick Ewing.

For the drafts in 1985 and 1986, the entire non-playoff portion of the draft was determined by lottery. Those results from the perspective of the worst teams were:

For the 1987 NBA Draft, the league changed the lottery to have it determine only the top three teams in the selection order. Every other team was placed in inverse order of finish, meaning the team with the worst overall record would be guaranteed to select no later than fourth.

That system remained in place for three years. The results are below:

In 1990, the first weighted lottery was introduced. With 11 non-playoff teams now in the drawing because of expansion, the team with the worst record had 11 chances as the top pick, the second-worst had 10 and so on until the non-postseason qualifier with the best overall record had just one chance.

The lottery would continue to be used only to determine the first three picks.

But after the Orlando Magic secured the top pick in 1993—for the second straight season—despite having just a single chance in 66 of doing so, another change was made to the lottery system..

Here are the results from the 66-chance lottery:

The Current System

And that leads us to our current system. In November 1993, the weighting system for the lottery was changed to give the team with the worst overall record a 25 percent chance (250 out of 1,000) to get the top pick, up from the 16.7 percent chance it previously had.

At the other end, the chances of the best non-playoff team winning the lottery went from 1.5 percent to 0.5 percent.

How has that gone?

(a)—Pick had been traded to Cleveland Cavaliers.

The team with the worst record has gotten the No. 1 overall pick just three times in 22 years—not the greatest percentage (13.6, far below the 25 percent chance). When the Minnesota Timberwolves won the first overall pick in 2015, it was the first time in 11 years the team with the worst record would be selecting No. 1.

Conversely, the team with the worst record has fallen out of the top three altogether five times.

But that hasn’t stopped fans from wanting bad teams to attempt to game the system for as many ping pong balls as possible and it hasn’t stopped at least one general manager, Philadelphia 76ers personnel boss Sam Hinkie, from creating what he calls “The Process” to completely blow chunks on the court for a period of years while “accumulating assets.”

The Seattle SuperSonics/Oklahoma City Thunder, under the direction of GM Sam Presti, laid the blueprint for this with their dazzling draft run from 2007-09 that netted Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Serge Ibaka and James Harden.

But “The Process” has netted, thus far:

• A trade for a 2013 first-round pick (Nerlens Noel) who couldn’t play as a rookie.
• A 2013 first-round pick (Michael Carter-Williams) who earned Rookie of the Year honors and was summarily traded away at the deadline the following season.
• A 2014 first-round pick (Joel Embiid) who may be eligible for free agency before he actually takes the court to play in a game because of lingering problems related to a broken foot.
• A 2015 first-round pick (Jahlil Okafor) who has already had multiple run-ins with the authorities during his first month as an NBA player.

On the other hand, there have been record-tying and later record-breaking losing streaks and they’ve matched the mark for the worst start to a season in NBA history … just for good measure.

To be fair, they do have approximately 452,734 second-round picks in the old stockpile, so there’s that. (Philadelphia could have up to six first-round picks in 2016, actually, but a lot of scenarios have to fall the Sixers’ way for that to happen).

It’s sad, on the surface, to be building teams that are simply not equipped to compete on a night-to-night basis and coach Brett Brown deserves some sort of medal for slogging through all of this.

But it’s been shown time and again that it’s difficult to rebuild from the middle of the pack. The draft-pick prospects don’t have the same potential upside, but there’s also no real chance of competing for a title. It’s like purgatory, only with lots of bouncing basketballs.

And thus teams attempt to game the system, but that only works if the right choices are made (see David Robinson and Tim Duncan).

If the wrong choices are made (see Michael Olowokandi, et al) the rebuilding process just continues to the point where former Los Angeles Clippers GM Elgin Baylor nearly had to declare Secaucus, N.J.—the site of the lottery—as a second residence.

The Reality: There Is No Perfect Solution

There’s no easy fix. If there were, someone in the league office would have had that “ah-HAH!” moment years ago.

But instead, in the course of a little more than 30 years, we’ve progressed to the point where the solution to teams intentionally tanking games and seasons has now become the enabling mechanism by which teams intentionally tank games and seasons.

In essence, we’re right back where we were in the early 1980s; with a tanking problem and no real good solutions on the horizon.

And I’m sorry, but it is a problem when the structure of the league incentivizes teams to lose big because it is better for their long-term prospects than playing to win while still being a couple of pieces away from being a legitimate contender.

The only real way to take the incentive out of being as bad as possible is to de-weight the lottery once again, even if that runs the risk of a team on the cusp of the playoffs gaining a first-round pick.

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Then again, the threat the league responded to with the current system, Orlando’s lottery win in 1993, didn’t turn out nearly as badly for the NBA as the doomsayers feared.

The Magic didn’t become the NBA’s dynasty of the next decade plus.

Orlando reached one NBA Finals in 1995, O’Neal left to find fortune and titles in Los Angeles after the 1995-96 campaign and Anfernee Hardaway (acquired in a draft-night trade for top overall pick Chris Webber in 1993) never became the next Magic Johnson he was projected to become after knee injuries robbed him of his quickness and explosiveness.

The system we have now is undeniably a hot mess—teams trying to get as many ping pong balls as they can even with two decades plus of history saying the odds are better they will pick fourth than they are to pick first.

It’s almost hard to imagine a system that could make things any worse.

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NBA Draft historical data collected in part from basketball-reference.com and NBA.com.