- A team will tank just as hard to keep a top-4 protected pick as it will to keep a top-8 protected pick. Maybe harder.
- If lottery odds freeze at the deadline that just tells teams to start tanking earlier.
- If teams can’t pick top-four in consecutive drafts that just incentives more tanking into the middle because there’s suddenly a much cleaner path to a top-four pick with a non-bottom-four record.
- If lottery odds are allocated based on two year records then teams will just tank across multiple seasons. Whenever there’s a Wemby on the horizon this stuff will get more egregious than ever.
- Adding more lottery teams won’t convince anyone to stop tanking but it will give us some inevitably stupid result like a 47-win team that would’ve won 57 if it were healthier randomly getting a top-four pick.
- Any odds flattening just incentivizes tanking from a different portion of the league. There are absolutely teams who would be better-served in the long run taking a 1-in-14 swing in the lottery than getting swept in the first round by the No. 1 seed.
Most of these ideas are bad in pretty predictable ways, and then there are always going to be unpredictable problems that only crop up when it’s too late to fix them.
Idk what the solution is, but it’s not any of this stuff. Either get more creative and do something truly out of the box or leave it alone and let teams operate as they see fit.
