The playoff team can win the No. 1 pick and draw, which is ridiculous. The draft has deviated from its original intention & the weak team has no hope

(The original article was published on May 13, and the author is Sam Quinn of CBS Sports. The content of the article does not represent the translator's views) What is the fundamental purpose of the

draft in professional sports? It is essentially a balance mechanism. Let the worst teams get the best quality rookie players so that the weak teams can avoid being at the bottom for a long time. However, today's NBA draft no longer plays this role.

For various reasons, no league has the rules of indulging in the NBA as bad as the NBA. Ironically, the NBA has also become the most active sports league to curb bad performance. The NBA is the first large professional league to introduce a lottery system and frequently reform this mechanism. The most recent adjustment was in 2019, when the league could no longer tolerate the 76ers' open behavior during the "belief process", so it reduced the probability of the bottom team winning the No. 1 pick. In 2018, the chances of teams with the worst record to draw the No. 1 pick are 25%; and after the rules were revised in 2019, the probability of teams with the lowest score to draw the No. 1 pick is compressed to 14%.

This adjustment has not effectively curbed the bad behavior. There are still three teams winning less than 20 games this season. The 76ers ended with 24 wins, and the team still had the ambition to compete for the championship at the beginning of the season, just because if its first round pick falls out of the top 6 pick, it will belong to the Thunder. From this perspective, it is hard to say that the Lotto reform has achieved its original intention.

But the reform did hinder the draft mechanism itself from playing a balanced role. When the Mavericks jumped from the 11th pick to the No. 1 pick in this year's lottery, locking in the opportunity to choose Cooper Flag, the problem was revealed, but the deeper crux of this is far from this. Since the 2019 rules were revised, looking at the lottery results of previous years:

Lotto draws in recent years

1. Since 2019, the team with the worst record has never won the No. 1 pick;

2. The team with the bottom record has fallen to the fifth pick for three consecutive years;

3. Among the 28 top 4 picks allocated from 2019 to the present, more than half (15) were won by the 5th pick and after the initial draw;

4. Among the 28 top 4 picks in the same period, 7 were won by the 8th pick and after the initial draw, that is, the team in the second half of the lottery;

5. The teams in the playoffs have won the No. 1 pick for two consecutive years, and this year's Mavericks and last year's Hawks both entered the playoffs (but did not advance to the playoffs).

The last point is especially ridiculous. If the original intention of the draft is to allow the worst team to win the best rookie, then why should the league hand over the No. 1 pick for two consecutive years to the team that can theoretically participate in the playoffs competition? Isn’t this completely deviating from the original intention?

Ironically, it is not the first time the NBA has fallen into this situation. In 1992, the Magic won the No. 1 pick with a 15.15% chance of the second pick, which was considered as the lottery mechanism basically operating normally. At that time, the probability of the Timberwolves being 16.67% was higher. But in 1993, the Magic once again counterattacked and won the No. 1 pick with a slight chance of 1.52%.

The public opinion was in an uproar, forcing the NBA to modify the rules again in 1994: the probability of the No. 1 pick of the bottom team increased from 16.67% to 25%, and maintained the probability until 2018; the probability of the Magic's 11th pick that year was compressed to 0.5%. Since then, with the increase in the number of teams in the lottery area, the probability of the No. 1 pick in the last team has always remained in this extremely low range. The NBA spent 25 years forgetting this lesson and re-relocating the probability of the No. 1 pick back to the level close to 1993. Now we are facing similar dilemmas, the wrong team becomes the lottery winner, while the really bad team is always the loser, and the worst team in the league cannot see the dawn of redemption.

The Wizards have won only 33 games in the past two seasons, and the Mavericks have won 39 wins this season. It is self-evident which team needs help more. Maybe Qicai has found treasures in the 6th ranking, but it is more likely that they will continue to sink. The Hornets are in a similar situation, and the Jazz are determined to make things worse. They have developed the habit of sending away veterans before the transaction deadline to increase the probability of lottery draws. If the purpose of the reform in 2019 is to eliminate the bad situation, it will obviously fail.

The cruel reality is: any system that encourages losing in disguise will lead to bad results. As long as the core mechanism of the draft is to allow weak teams to get higher picks, they will never disappear if they are bad. The NBA is unable to change this, but at least it should maintain the original intention of the draft by assigning the best rookies to the worst teams. Only by winning can the bad culture be ended. When top rookies are the fastest way for weak teams to turn around, the current lottery system is actively creating obstacles for the lower-level teams, which is tantamount to extending their bad performance cycle in disguise. The necessary core reform measures

The lottery mechanism does not have to be completely abolished, but it must be adjusted to return to its original design intention. It is ridiculous to let the playoff team win the No. 1 pick, and the team should choose between the playoffs and the lottery zone. At least the chaos in recent years has proven that playoff teams must be banned from participating in lottery draws and their probability weights will be allocated to the league's bottom teams. Will such reforms cause side effects? certainly. There will be teams that will play badly to avoid playoffs, but this phenomenon has long existed. Raptors CEO Ujeri publicly admitted that he deliberately gave up playing the playoffs in 2021: "Someone always asks, 'Why don't you compete for the playoffs?' What are we going to do? What are we going to want to be the championship." A certain degree of bad performance can never be eradicated.

Now it is a waste of time, and the current lottery system has completely failed. We should not have waited until the Mavericks management is called the most dramatic "rule profit" in NBA history to wake us up. It is time to reform again, because the current lottery draw mechanism has completely deviated from the fundamental significance of the draft system.

Original text: Sam Quinn

Compiled by: Li Taibai