This does not feel good to me. The NBA may consider a draft wheel system (ditching the lottery) to eliminate tanking. Hit the jump for details & weigh in…
Via CBSSports:
Grantland.com reports that the NBA is set to consider and bring to its owners within the next year a proposal that would radically change the way the draft order is determined. It inolves a cyclical pattern of set draft order, repeating every thirty years. In short, each team would know precisely what pick it will have until infinity.
Grantland obtained a copy of the proposal, which would eliminate the draft lottery entirely and replace it with a system in which 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.
The system is simpler to understand in pictorial form. Below is the wheel that outlines the order in which each team would cycle through the draft slots; the graphic highlights the top six slots in red to show that every team would be guaranteed one top-six pick every five seasons, and at least one top-12 pick in every four-year span:
(Story Continues…)
