Selzoons
Registered User
- Mar 3, 2018
- 113
- 74
The entry draft and lottery are fundamentally broken. The draft rewards poor teams but is broken in that poor team building becomes an optimal strategy to amass talent. The lottery is a band-aid solution to severe hemorrhaging. Basically it adds randomness to discourage tanking but in the end it just adds randomness. Doing poorly is still optimal, just not as reliable. And now teams randomly get franchise and generational talents even if some are more likely to than others.
My idea is a bit radical but basically the draft lottery is scrapped and replaced with an auction.
- Teams use points to bid on players.
- Teams are allocated points based on how they low they finish for parity.
- Instead of trading picks, you can trade points, which allows for more granularity. (The number of points distributed would necessarily need to be large numbers to ensure enough players are bid on each year.)
- Tweak the point distribution to discourage tanking and make it more advantageous to have assets to deal at the trade deadline.
- Points have a lifespan of up to 2 (3?) years to balance out strong and weak years and to ensure players are bid on each year.
- Each team must place bid on a minimum number of players (60?).
- Players are eligible for more bonuses depending on how many points are spent on them.
Benefits:
- Skill not luck based, while still giving some advantages to weaker teams.
- Trade deadline becomes more beneficial to middling teams. They can trade off assets to higher tier teams for points to leverage as funds for obtaining franchise players rather than be stuck in a cycle of mediocrity.
- Balances years with no franchise players and years with multiple franchise players. If you aren't happy with the players available you can save them up for the following year or spend fewer points.
- Rewards asset development. Middling teams that develop good players can still get good value out of them rather than trading them for middling lottery tickets.
- Would be significantly more entertaining to see GMs bid on players.
Issues:
- Bad optics, players are treated as assets (not that they aren't currently through trades but this is a step up by creating a virtual currency)
- Would remove any pretense out of the prestige of being drafted.
- Could potentially create too much player movement. A generational talent is available. Chaos ensues.
- Converting from one system to another. How should picks be converted into points? One is based on the future (picks), while the other is based on the past (points). It seems difficult if not impossible to reconcile the two systems.
- If there are any imbalances in the parameters, the system could quickly become degenerate.
- Could destroy parity if a few teams are significantly better at gaming the system than others.
It's not a realistic solution but I think it addresses most of the issues fans have with the draft lottery. There are clear drawbacks mostly for the players that would ensure that this would never be implemented but I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. And maybe someone has an idea that could be used to mitigate those problems.
My idea is a bit radical but basically the draft lottery is scrapped and replaced with an auction.
- Teams use points to bid on players.
- Teams are allocated points based on how they low they finish for parity.
- Instead of trading picks, you can trade points, which allows for more granularity. (The number of points distributed would necessarily need to be large numbers to ensure enough players are bid on each year.)
- Tweak the point distribution to discourage tanking and make it more advantageous to have assets to deal at the trade deadline.
- Points have a lifespan of up to 2 (3?) years to balance out strong and weak years and to ensure players are bid on each year.
- Each team must place bid on a minimum number of players (60?).
- Players are eligible for more bonuses depending on how many points are spent on them.
Benefits:
- Skill not luck based, while still giving some advantages to weaker teams.
- Trade deadline becomes more beneficial to middling teams. They can trade off assets to higher tier teams for points to leverage as funds for obtaining franchise players rather than be stuck in a cycle of mediocrity.
- Balances years with no franchise players and years with multiple franchise players. If you aren't happy with the players available you can save them up for the following year or spend fewer points.
- Rewards asset development. Middling teams that develop good players can still get good value out of them rather than trading them for middling lottery tickets.
- Would be significantly more entertaining to see GMs bid on players.
Issues:
- Bad optics, players are treated as assets (not that they aren't currently through trades but this is a step up by creating a virtual currency)
- Would remove any pretense out of the prestige of being drafted.
- Could potentially create too much player movement. A generational talent is available. Chaos ensues.
- Converting from one system to another. How should picks be converted into points? One is based on the future (picks), while the other is based on the past (points). It seems difficult if not impossible to reconcile the two systems.
- If there are any imbalances in the parameters, the system could quickly become degenerate.
- Could destroy parity if a few teams are significantly better at gaming the system than others.
It's not a realistic solution but I think it addresses most of the issues fans have with the draft lottery. There are clear drawbacks mostly for the players that would ensure that this would never be implemented but I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. And maybe someone has an idea that could be used to mitigate those problems.
