In an attempt to level the lottery field and weed out aggressive tankers, the league's proposed lottery reform would have mad losing more attractive on the other end of the standings.
From the Celtics to the Knicks, the lower half of the Eastern Conference standings offer a fascinating look at the competing philosophies of the current NBA. You have five mediocre teams fighting hard for two playoff spots. Those playoff spots come with assured whoopings at the hands of the East's only two title contenders. But still, the squads fight on with full-throated support from their front offices. At the bottom are two teams fighting to be the worst.
No one in the playoff mix is ruing the loss of a lottery pick. In some cases, like Brooklyn and Miami, teams may have already traded it away. Any one of the other playoff chasers could have made a conscious effort to bow out sometime in the past month by shutting down a starter or playing more prospects to ensure a top-10 pick instead of No. 15 or 16. None did.
(The teams that kept their picks stand to lose about four spots in the draft order by making the playoffs. To wit, current No. 8 seed Boston would pick No. 15 overall. The current No. 9 would have the No. 11 pick. Charlotte, who is tenuously still in the playoff race, is currently slotted to pick ninth.)
The Knicks hadn't planned on tanking out entering the season: Phil Jackson talked about a playoff run in the offseason. But once things looked bleak, New York shut Carmelo Anthony down, cut Amare Stoudemire and traded away most of its better veterans to go for broke. Philadelphia never intended on competing this season. The prize for each is a top-3 pick, preferably No. 1 overall. Anything else would be a disappointment. Landing No. 1 would make all of these losses -- more than 60 apiece -- worth it. The thrill of victory in actual games be damned.
Why teams act the way they do is an interesting science. The psychology of teams that give up vs. those that fight for nominal success is rooted in more things than we can know, but there are a few obvious contributors. One, and perhaps the strongest, is the basic cost-benefit analysis.
The cost of the Knicks deciding to tank out once the season started off so poorly was basically "jokes on the internet." The Knicks sell lots of season tickets, and those folks don't get refunds if the team doesn't hit 20 wins. There is also a long history of New Yorkers filling up Madison Square Garden even for bad Knick squads. There is no lost benefit in chasing a playoff spot the Knicks could never have reached. But there is a huge benefit in picking higher in the draft, especially at the top where the biggest difference-makers and surest things can be found.
There's especially a benefit for being one of the worst teams. The Knicks could have kept J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert -- there's always next year, after all. If Jackson intended the Knicks to compete for a playoff spot in 2015-16, Smith could have been valuable. Shumpert will be a free agent, but his rights held value.
Keeping them might have meant the Knicks finished with, say, the fourth-worst record, which holds only a 38 percent probability of picking in the top three. The team with the worst record holds a 64 percent probability of landing a top-3 pick. Further, the fourth-worst team can conceivably pick as low as No. 7, while the worst team can pick no lower than No. 4. Once you're bad, based on the current NBA draft lottery design, there's a huge incentive to being really bad.
That's part of the basis of Sam Hinkie's system in Philadelphia -- being bad's not good enough, you've got to be just about the worst -- and a huge impetus for the attempt to reform the lottery system before this season began. Under that reform proposal (which was narrowly voted down by the NBA Board of Governors), the seven worst teams would have had roughly equal probabilities of landing a high pick. There'd be little reason for New York and Philadelphia to be so uncompetitive. They might actually on occasion be interesting to watch.
But that proposed plan also came with rejiggered odds at the bottom of the lottery. The ninth-worst team -- currently the Hornets -- has a 6 percent probability of landing a top five pick in the current system. Lottery reform would have boosted that to 31 percent. There would have been a massive incentive for the Hornets (or another team in the race, like Indiana or Boston) to drop out of the playoff chase.
It'd even be the case for the last team out in the East, who will likely finish with the 11th-worst record in the league. Under the current system that team has a 1 percent chance of winning the No. 1 pick and a 3 percent chance at a top-5 pick. Under lottery reform, it would have had a 3 percent chance at No. 1 overall and a 15 percent chance at a top-5 pick.
In both systems, the last team in the East playoff bracket has zero percent probabilities of the No. 1 or a top-5 pick. Tell me Danny Ainge, competitive as he is, wouldn't have second thoughts if reform had passed. Tell me Larry Bird, who recently decried tanking, wouldn't consider keeping Paul George on the shelf if it meant a non-negligible shot at one of the draft's studs instead of a dice roll in the teens.
Policy matters. The NBA almost shook up the incentive structure for being truly horrible and for making the playoffs, and it could have fundamentally changed how all of these teams acted. That's a huge deal, and while the types of reform the NBA proposed is smart and will kill the most aggressive form of institutional tanking, it would have unintended consequences. The league ought to figure out how to address those before creating that new problem.
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