Want to know how to get good fast in the NBA? The answer is tanking.
Bad teams can get very good fairly quickly in the NBA if you hit on your high draft pick. There’s plenty examples of this throughout the history of the lottery. Apparently, the NBA is trying to find a way to put an end to this, by proposing a new draft system called the “wheel”.
It’s pretty confusing, but you can try to understand how it would work:
“Each of the 30 teams would pick in a specific first-round draft slot once — and exactly once — every 30 years. Each team would simply cycle through the 30 draft slots, year by year, in a predetermined order designed so that teams pick in different areas of the draft each year. Teams would know with 100 percent certainty in which draft slots they would pick every year, up to 30 years out from the start of every 30-year cycle. The practice of protecting picks would disappear; there would never be a Harrison Barnes–Golden State situation again, and it wouldn’t require a law degree to track ownership of every traded pick leaguewide.”
I understand the logic in trying to prevent tanking because it makes for a better brand of basketball on a nightly basis. This new proposal just gives me headaches.