Yahoo Senior NBA analyst Kevin O’Connor and Tom Haberstroh discuss the NBA’s attempt to curb tanking, and how the cure may be worse than the problem.
Check out the full conversation on “The Kevin O’Connor Show” and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.
Advertisement
Video Transcript
Is the one that they are solely focused on at this point, with some expected changes.
And if, to, as a reminder what concept one is, 18 teams would be in the lottery.
The bottom 10 that missed the play-in, plus the eight play-in teams.
The bottom 10 would have flattened 8% odds each.
The next eight teams would split the 20% remaining in descending order, and all 18 of those spots would be drawn as part of the lottery.
These things are negotiable.
It’s possible it wouldn’t be 18 teams as part of the lottery.
It’s poss- it could be 22, it could be 14.
It’s possible that they don’t draw all 18 spots.
Advertisement
It could be only drawing the top 10.
Things could change.
The 8% flat might end up 6% or 7%.
There’s a lot still to be discussed, but concept one, this general idea, is where the team is looking right now, Tom, and I, I have some real concerns about 18 teams.
I think having 18 teams in the lottery creates two cliffs.
There’s a cliff within the playoffs, where if you’re a s- five or a six seed, you have incentive now to tank into the seven or eight spot because then you get two games to stay in the playoffs and you get your lottery ticket.
There’s also a cliff at the edge of the play-in.
If you’re that team in the 10 spot, you’re looking at far less significant odds of moving up in the lottery than if you’re one of the bottom 10 teams.
Advertisement
So you have even more incentive to fall out of the play-in in order to get one of those bottom 10 spots, when under this proposal, the 10th worst team has the same odds as the worst team, 8% of getting the number one pick in the draft.
And one of the other things discussed during this GM meeting, I’m told according to the people I spoke to that were part of this meeting, is that there is some pushback against 18 in favor of 22, which would mean having all the teams that missed the playoffs in the play-in, the bottom 10 teams, the four teams that lose in the play-in, so that gets you to 14, and then the eight first round exits with more flattened odds because that removes those cliffs that we just talked about.
It would, it would allow more flattening.
You could do something along the lines of, like, 6% flat for the bottom 10 teams, 5% for the four play-in teams.
Advertisement
You could do then descending, like 3%, 2% for the next group of teams.
I think something along those lines is more appealing to me, but I’m curious about your thoughts, Tom, on 18 versus 22 before we get to my actual idea and some, something else that I heard that really stuck out to me, but I wanna hear what your thoughts are first on 18 versus 22.
The cure is worse than the disease.
What I’m hearing from this 18 team, or 22 team for that matter, you’re gonna see, I think would be a huge PR problem for the league.
A, an amazingly bad PR problem, if teams are tanking out of the playoffs.
We’re, we’re basically saying we would rather teams tank out of the play-in, tank out of the playoffs and have a shot at winning the lottery.
Advertisement
These flattened odds are gonna be a worse look for the league when, let’s say, you’re, you’re a team that’s down 0-2 in a series in the first round.
Just bag it.
You’re gonna see this.
We, we’ve seen extremely emboldened tanking strategies already by just saying, “You know what?
Screw the play-in.
We’re not gonna do the play-in this year.
We’re gonna make sure that we get these odds, out of the play-in.”
And when you see the stratified league, you’re only gonna see that more with this.
The 10 teams, if you think the bottom 10 teams are stratified now in the NBA, the A league versus the B league, wait till you see this.
It’s gonna look like child’s play compared to that, because if you have an 8%