NFL Tickets
Undoubtedly, if your team is in the NBA lottery they’ll either get royally screwed or shamefully rewarded. Then with this pick — determined by the drag coefficient of ping pong balls — your team will leverage the fate of their franchise. The best you can hope for is that your team ends up exactly where they need to be. Praying they don’t blow a misappropriated pick on a bust and dreaming they find the next Stephen Curry buried somewhere in the top-14. That is the best case scenario when your fate is determined by balls.
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What is this NBA, the Illinois State Lottery?
I do think the draft lottery is fun, but I’m also not an investor into an NBA franchise. If I lace-up those shoes, then you’d notice my facial expression morph from “this is quite an event” to “why are beer pong balls in a vacuum determining my net worth?”
Although I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I don’t understand why the NBA would even give those tinfoil-heads a leg to stand on. The 2014 Cleveland Cavaliers won the lottery with a 1.7 percent chance, same with the 2008 Chicago Bulls. The 1993 Orlando Magic getting a No. 1 pick the year after landing Shaquille O’Neal? There was just a 1.52 percent chance of that happening.
I do not want to reward tanking either, because fans are investors too — which is why I’m sure that many much smarter than me have proposed other methods to mitigate this madness. Namely, the “NBA Draft Wheel,” just like the one reproduced below:
Here’s a closeup of the #Celtics‘ Mike Zarren’s new #NBA draft wheel proposal. #SSAC15 pic.twitter.com/tiRQz1Tgyt
— Jared Weiss (@CLNS_JaredWeiss) February 27, 2015
And then there’s the theoretically brilliant “Reverse Standings” idea proposed by Adam Gold.
The wheel works by destroying any mystical advantage, removing any doubt of conspiracy and would likely eliminate tanking. Employing reverse standings would shorten the “lifespan” of tanking by incentivizing wins after playoff elimination. It may help to be eliminated early under the reverse standings system, but you would then have to win games to accrue “points” and improve top-pick probability.
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These methods are much drier versions of drafting. But although devoid of the pageantry now, the NBA is a league that knows how to market and the suits wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t figure it out.
Jerry Landry is a writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow Jerry on Twitter at @Jerry2Landry, “Like” him on Facebook or add him on Google.
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