(Source: https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2018/2/26/17052916/nba-tanking-teams-2018-draft-lottery-picks )
Tanking has been all the talk in the NBA as of late, and for good reason.
We are on pace to have 8 teams in the NBA finish with less than 30 wins.
In a full length NBA season, that has never happened before.
Read that again, never before in the history of the 82 game season have 8 teams won less than 30 games.
Even worse, of those 8 teams, 7 of them own their own draft pick.
Which means that 7 of the 8 have an incentive to do as poorly as possible in order to get a higher draft pick and improve their chances of being better next year.
Source: https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2018/2/26/17052916/nba-tanking-teams-2018-draft-lottery-picks
However, does such behavior lower the overall quality of the NBA product?
I think it does.
It appears the NBA also agrees.
Last year they passed new rules on how the draft odds would shake out for the teams missing the playoffs.
The new rules greatly reduce the odds of getting the number 1 overall pick by having the worst record.
What that means is that for the teams that miss the playoffs, there won't be nearly as much of an advantage in terms of odds to have the worst record or say the 5th worst record.
The odds of getting that number one pick will be much closer for those teams.
Which means that teams should be less incentivized to purposely tank in order to go for that number one draft pick.
Which also means we should have a better product overall.
It's about time they fixed this.
To be honest I was thinking that they should have the team that barely misses the playoffs have the best chance of getting that number one pick.
That way it encourages teams to try and make the playoffs or get darn close.
That's what I think anyways.