While the NBA recently voted to approve changes to the league’s draft lottery rules, Mavs owner Mark Cuban had a pair of other ideas to dissuade teams from tanking. Neither gained traction but the details that Cuban shared with ESPN’s Tim MacMahon are admittedly intriguing.
One of Cuban’s proposals would see the NBA draft eliminated outright with teams, instead, getting an allotted budget from the league to sign draft eligible players as free agents. The teams with the worse records would have the biggest budgets but wouldn’t necessarily be a lock to land the top talent if they don’t position themselves as an appealing destination.
“The team with the worst record gets the most money and the team with the best record gets the least money,” Cuban said. “It’s like a free agency. It makes it a lot harder to tank because you don’t know if you get the best players if you’re horrible all the time. Nobody liked that at all, not a single person.”
Cuban pitched the idea to the league’s board of governors but the concept didn’t have much of an impact.
The other idea that Cuban had was to lock the team with the worst record into a single draft position, potentially third or fourth. Doing so, Cuban argues, would give teams incentive to compete down the stretch to ensure that they didn’t finish the regular season with the worst record. By avoiding finishing 30th of all 30 teams, a team would effectively keep their chances of snagging the top pick in the draft alive.
Tuck the two Cuban ideas up on a shelf beside The Wheel for future speculation, however, considering that the league moved quickly and enthusiastically to adopts its relatively modest rejigging of the traditional draft lottery format.
There’s more news from around the league:
- The NBA didn’t set a record for international players on opening day rosters but it came close. A total of 108 international players from 42 countries suited up for Game 1, Michael Yuan of ESPN writes, that’s down from 113 international players from 41 countries in 2016/17.
- The G League returning rights to Heat forward Okaro White were acquired by the Long Island Nets in a trade with the Memphis Hustle, a press release on the Nets’ affiliate’s site reports.
- The BIG3 will expand its rosters ahead of its second season of operation, the league announced. This year teams will have one additional slot for a co-captain… which could come in handy.
How about the worst x teams get the worst picked and the the x+1 worst team had the highest chance of the top pick.
Ending the max contract would do much more for competitive balance than these draft proposals
^^
It wasn’t Zach Lowe’s wheel idea, he just reported it.
Tanking is a symptom of the problem, not the actual problem itself. Most of the league knows they’re playing for the also-ran slots in the playoffs at best, and short of tanking, what can a team really do about it? The NBA is a superstar sport and if you don’t have a bunch of superstars, your only real hope is to buy other team’s superstars, tank and draft superstars, or hope that all of the starters for GSW and the small number of teams that have any hope of knocking them off all abandon the season to compete in a hot air balloon race around the world.
Fix the unmitigated agglomeration of talent at the top and you’ll fix tanking at the bottom. It’ll have to be something aside from a salary cap because it’s pretty obvious players chase rings more than dollars in this league.
“Relatively modest rejiggering” of the draft format he says. I think they just changed the tactical tanking point, from pick 1 to somewhere else– 3?– which might matter in the last few weeks. Nobody’s going to change their larger tanking strategy set earlier in the season.
It was like the NCAA basketball trny adding a 65th team because of all the controversy about which 64 teams got in. All that means is the controversy shifts to the 65th team in.