The NBA Draft 2007: Losers Win?

If your job rewarded the least efficient worker by giving him the best office or best chance to progress in his career, would you like it? Or what if the worst singer in American Idol got an extra chance to make it to next year's final even though no one voted for him? For some, that's how the NBA Draft lottery system works: losers have the advantage.

Jeff Van Gundy is a well-respected coach in the NBA and has been outspoken against the draft system. Basically all the teams that don't make the playoffs (14 of them) get a proportioned chance to get the first pick in the NBA draft. The way the draft works is that a number of ping-pong balls with team names are put into a bin. The team with the worst season record in the NBA gets the most balls. The next worse gets the next amount, and so forth and so on until the best non-playoff team has a .5 chance of getting the top NBA Draft lottery pick.

The way the system is designed makes sense in theory. Having the best pick of the best basketball players eligible for the draft allows your team the best chance to improve, therefore leveling the playing field and competition for next year's season. The NBA Draft lottery is supposed to keep the dominant teams from winning year after year after year, like the Celtics and the Lakers of the 70s and 80s. It was an efficient system back then because there were several draft rounds and less teams playing in the NBA back then. Nowadays there are only 2 drafting rounds and an 82-game season.

However, a growing trend and change in today's NBA is making the draft more about who will put people in the stands as opposed to who are the best players for the team. And what happens with teams who know at some point they aren't going to make the playoffs? Well, some of them actually lose or not play as hard on purpose. They don't necessarily sabotage games, but they'll pull their best players out of the rotation and give more minutes to players who have little NBA experience.

The better players sometimes have mysterious injuries that put them out for the rest of the season, yet didn't keep them from playing when they were in NBA playoff contention. Some teams, even though they could make the playoffs in a final spot, have been accused of losing the spot on purpose because they'd rather have a better draft pick than to face easy defeat in the first round of the playoffs. All this for an NBA Lottery pick?

This angers many fans of the NBA, especially season ticket holders. Why go to a game when your team isn't even trying to win just because they aren't in the playoffs and want to get a lottery pick. The Boston Celtics, for example, have a 23-55 record. They have lost 5 games in a row and 9 of their last 12. 4 of those last 5 losses were to teams that had equally bad records. A season ticket holder pays around $60 per game to see this kind of horrible play? That's almost $2,500 in just the ticket price to watch your team try and get a better pick for next year. Last year they weren't much better: they finished 33-49.

Many times this alleged strategy doesn't even pay off. It would only work if the player you were trying to get in the draft immediately and greatly improved your team's chances of winning the championship. The last two high impact players of such note have been Yao Ming and Lebron James from 2004 and 2003, respectively.

I agree with what Jeff Van Gundy believes: the lottery should be opened up to all teams. This would take away the temptation and accusation of losing for the best lottery pick. This isn't a problem in the NFL because there are several rounds of draft picks and often teams barely miss or make the playoffs in the final games. Baseball has a farm team system where the college draft doesn't mean much since the players go through minor league teams before even hitting the majors. But with the NBA you can see whether you'll make the playoffs or not often with 20 or 30 games left in an 82-game season. Let's not reward losing.