ESPN NBA

Brett Koremenos suggests Hakeem Olajuwon's offseason workouts might not be all they're cracked up to be.

 

The New York Times is a heavy-hitting paper, and a good chunk of its heaviest hitting comes in the Sunday Review section. It's not often about sports, but this past Sunday's cover is dominated by an enormous Rebecca Mock illustration of a baseball player taking a cut in an otherwise entirely empty stadium. The headline over Jonathan Mahler's article asks: "Is the Game Over?"

Tough question.

What follows is sober analysis of how the "national pastime" came to be as irrelevant as it is. Baseball can't touch football by any metric, and now is looking pretty bad compared to basketball too. This all projects to get worse as audiences age, and become more global. Mahler investigates, and makes some points that are straight from the HoopIdea playbook. Basically, in the name of tradition, baseball failed to adequately foster excitement.

As crazy as it sounds, baseball was once celebrated for its speed. Into the 1910s — before all of the commercial breaks and visits to the mound — it was possible to play a game in under an hour, says the author Kevin Baker, who is writing a history of baseball in New York City.

To the game’s early poets, baseball’s fast pace was what made it distinctly American. Mark Twain called it a symbol of “the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century!” The 21st century, not so much.

At the NBA offices, they're congratulating themselves for being on the right side of this point. But that's no reason to rest. If there's any lesson of baseball's decline it's that institutionalized complacency, and an unreasonable attachment to tradition, can quickly catch up to any sport.

The first HoopIdea was to combat needless delays and standing around, sapping the fun of NBA crunch time.

Dramatic tension is to sports as cheese is to a quesadilla. It's not everything, but nobody'll give you a penny for one without it.

Mahler goes on to explore some reasons for the NFL's dramatic ascendance. They include some "structural advantages," like playing only once a week, elimination games all playoffs long, and a scarcity of games that helps each one rise to the level of mattering to a national audience. (With 162 games, plenty of them just don't matter. Mahler points out that a recent Astros game had TV ratings implying fewer than 1,000 people in Houston watched. Meanwhile, the trick is to matter on SportsCenter and in the national consciousness, a tough assignment for a baseball game.)

The funny part about that is ... every league could have those things. It's not like the NFL lucked into a better format. They chose it.

Meanwhile, there are, of course, real, long-term business reasons for minimizing the delays and standing around, and maybe even for reducing the number of games.

Ironically, the reasons those things haven't happened already in the NBA is: business. There's money to be made from the way things are. But that's short-term thinking mired in tradition and a fear of letting the game evolve.

The simple truth is, as much money as there is from the current set-up, there may be even more to be made, long term, from making every minute of every game as energetic, artistic and delightful as possible. That's what HoopIdea is about -- making the best game in the world even better. Getting those things right is fantastic. Getting them wrong ... look how that worked for baseball.

As #NBArank rolls on, David Thorpe says any player's value depends mightily on context.

Coaching, generally, is a multibillion-dollar global business. NBA coaching accounts for something like $120 million of that -- that's roughly how much the 30 teams' coaching staffs make together.

The key skill: inspiring the most accomplished individuals in the game to do what's best for the team, and to do it hard, consistently and professionally, as many nights a season as possible, through injury, exhaustion, politics and constant disappointment.

One of the NBA's mysteries: How do you motivate young men to be, essentially, good soldiers?

Asked literally, that's a question that wins wars and thus has been researched for millennia. And to the extent war has answers, they are surprising. And both delightfully clear and applicable to sports.

Journalist Sebastian Junger spent 15 months on the ground with soldiers in just about the toughest part of Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley, with some of America's most battle-hardened infantrymen. Even then and there, despite all the clear differences between sports and war, Junger writes in his book "War," the task is one of teamwork:

Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it's much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win.

That choreography -- you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up -- is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gitigal.

The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for him, but on what's best for the group.

If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.

The message: For success, cohesion is necessary, just as in sports. But somehow what works best to motivate soldiers remains underappreciated in sports.

To show what I mean, and assuming you can handle a few pointed curse words as well as vivid talk of violence, I can't recommend strongly enough that you watch this excerpt of the Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary "Restrepo," from Junger and now-deceased photographer Tim Hetherington. This clip, detailing the episode that later led to the first Medal of Honor given to a living soldier in four decades, drops some powerful clues about what really inspires performance under pressure.



Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta and his brothers in Battle Company spend their days not just focused on the group task, but risking their lives for each other in the toughest conditions. Every hour contains heroism, of a kind: Battle Company, Junger reports, "is taking the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion is taking the most contact -- by far -- of any in the U.S. military. Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company."

Not to mention, the parts of the job that aren't violent are hardly delightful: searing heat and brutal cold; days of carrying heavy packs, slathered in body armor, lugging heavy weapons; weeks without warm running water; intermittent electricity at best; scorpions; no real rest and relaxation in the country at all; and anti-malarials that give you crazy dreams. The urinal is a PVC pipe stuck in the ground.

What keeps them going? From afar, people talk about things like patriotism, duty, religion, honor, the mission and the flag. But the more people have dug into it, and the more you listen to the words coming out of the mouths of people who live it, like Giunta, the more those things take a back seat.

Lots of things have the potential to make people brave.

But what's the main thing?

Love. Not so much for families back home, but for fellow soldiers.

Junger cites 49 research papers from the last 50 years in the section of his book called "Love," and he affirms the researchers' findings in anecdotes from World War II, Vietnam, Afghanistan and beyond. He summarizes:

The army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a way they were just different ways of saying the same thing. ...

The platoon was the faith, a greater cause that, if you focused on it entirely, made your fears go away. It was an anesthetic that left you aware of what was happening but strangely fatalistic about the outcome. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever.

Heroism is hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self -- you're prepared to lose your own life for the sake of others -- so in that sense, talking about how brave you were may be psychologically contradictory. (Try telling a mother she was brave to run into traffic to save her kid.) Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered "bravery." Soldiers see it the other way around: either you're doing your duty or you're a coward.

In the NBA, motivation has long been seen as a personal thing -- Bill Walton once told me he couldn't care less if his teammates are motivated by a big contract, a title, or the pretty girl in the front row.

Coaches push all those buttons and more.

But the news from the front lines is that of all the motivations, love for teammates is the special one. That's the river that runs deepest. Powered by big hearts and brains evidently wired to work a certain selfless way, people will actually, amazingly, fall on grenades to save each other, and that kind of thinking underlies the most effective teams. Under duress, humans are capable of the most incredible bravery and selflessness -- so long as their hearts are full of love.

Economist Tyler Cowen (He's "America's hottest economist," who was on TrueHoop TV recently talking about the end of the NBA's middle class), foresees a world in which NBA coaches work very closely with incredibly intelligent computers.

In fact, he says, it's happening already.

Tyler Cowen is one of America's foremost economists, the author of a new book called "Average is Over," and a blogger at Marginal Revolution.

Cowen is also a big NBA fan, which he proves by regularly purchasing Wizards tickets.

Here's the shocker: Cowen says advanced analytics are on track to help eliminate the middle class -- in the NBA, and in society. Fascinating and a little scary.



If you're interested in more, here's an interesting NPR conversation with Cowen.

Memphis Grizzlies CEO Jason Levien is delighted the Memphis Grizzlies topped ESPN the Magazine's Ultimate Standings list. And a tiny bit surprised.

 

Ethan Sherwood Strauss discusses why you should ignore NBA Rank at your peril.

 

Damian Lillard says he could play better. The reigning rookie of the year says shorter minutes would help.

In the second part of a conversation (here's part one, rapid fire) he also discusses scams ("it's more common than people think"), egos ("it's something you get tired of"), and more.

The history of the Lakers is that they may stumble now and again, but never for long. One way or another, huge names come to play in L.A., and as a result they contend near-constantly.

The franchise is by any measure one of the strongest in sports, and here's a crazy statistic: Since beginning life in Minneapolis in 1948-1949, the Lakers have never gone more than eight years without making the NBA Finals. To keep that streak alive, they'd need to make it back in the next five years. The race is on.

This year has all but been conceded, with stopgap post-Dwight Howard signings combining with aging players to produce a team ESPN Forecast predicts will finish 12th in the West.

But wait, the Laker faithful say, until the next star arrives to save the day. And it's true, the Lakers have everything it'd take to lure a major player by free agency: a desirable city, a respected brand and deep pockets at the ready.

And let's be honest, for all the excitement about the 2014 draft, in terms of likely impact, it’s nothing compared to what the 2014 free-agent class could become. Need I remind you LeBron James can opt out of his contract, as can Chris Bosh and almost every single member of the Miami Heat? Carmelo Anthony could be on the market, along with Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki. The year after that names like Kevin Durant and Paul George become realities.

So ... why all the long faces, Lakers front-office executives?

Why did a source close to Lakers management tell ESPN.com: "Within the organization there isn't a single person that believes we can bring LeBron aboard"?

Why was GM Mitch Kupchak on Colin Cowherd’s radio show in the last few weeks saying "I don’t know if we’ll get a star player”?

The first reason is that the Lakers may not have all that much cap room. Getting huge amounts of cap space would require a ground-level reboot, yes, including renouncing Kobe Bryant, which seems unlikely now that the team has used its one-time-only amnesty cut on Metta World Peace. (If you were going to part ways with Bryant a year from now, it would have made much more sense to amnesty him before this year, when he is making a ton of money, and is a threat to be diminished recovering from an Achilles injury.) With Bryant in the fold, there might not even be enough money to offer a free agent a max contract.

There are conceivably ways the Lakers could have Bryant and huge cap room, as Bradford Doolittle has explained (Insider). But it would take a big pay cut for the Black Mamba, who has been sending signals that he intends to do no such thing. Instead, he's saying he intends to play at a high level for years to come, and without taking a pay cut. He’s the highest-paid player in the league at more than $30 million a season. The new collective bargaining agreement restricts team spending all kinds of ways, and prevents almost all other NBA players from making anything like that much. But big contracts such as Bryant's were grandfathered in, and every player in the league is entitled to seek pay raises, no matter how much he made last year. If Bryant keeps making anything like that what he makes now, and the Lakers still have Steve Nash, Robert Sacre and various cap holds, they’ll only have around $15 million for a free agent, which means asking a star to take a pay cut to join a vacant and aging roster. It's hard to envision realistic trades that could alter that math enough to matter.

The second reason the Lakers may struggle to get a free agent is that Bryant has gained a reputation as a difficult teammate. The Lakers have been a fine destination of late for role players, but not for would-be stars such as Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol, Shaquille O’Neal and Andrew Bynum, none of whom get the ball as much as they'd like, and all of whom, despite playing well, become targets for media scorn.

“Pau is a two-time champion and a five-time All-Star and he’s one of the most disrespected players ever,” notes one agent. “He gets bad press all the time.”

Another agent says: "The Lakers are Kobe. You have to understand that. It's not the organization for you if you want the ball or the spotlight. All that glitters ain't gold."

I asked a third agent, who has a Lakers client right now, if he thought Bryant might be a sticking point for free agents. His immediate response: "Uh, duh. Yes."

This might sound like a lot of rumor spreading, but players already have declined the option to play on the Lakers alongside Bryant. Howard turned down more guaranteed money to move on to a less celebrated franchise.

And don’t forget the fascinating case of Ramon Sessions. He was the toast of the Lakers for a brief spell -- and when he reached free agency there was every chance he could have returned as the Lakers’ starting point guard.

Instead he declined the Lakers' offer and opted to become the backup point guard for the Charlotte Bobcats, who were coming off the worst season in league history. Sessions has never expressed the slightest hint of regret.

The multiyear deal Charlotte offered was part of Sessions' calculus. But sources with knowledge of his thinking say tricky Lakers politics, where the blame tends to fall everywhere but with Bryant, was also on his mind.

The theory of finding a star to play alongside Bryant hinges on the notion that such a star would find joy in doing so. But who’s the role model for that? Here’s a Nash quote, from an interview this summer on Grantland:

I knew it wasn’t gonna be the same. I felt like I was going to try something new, and that I was going to adapt — and to accept that, and embrace it. I think it’d be nice to find a middle ground where he does his thing but the ball still can move for great parts of the game. Hopefully we can find that this season. But I knew it wasn’t going to be the same. When you play with Kobe Bryant, the ball is gonna be with him most of the time.

Does Nash sound joyous to you?

Bryant is the face of the franchise, a huge moneymaker and a global icon. It would take tremendous guts for the Lakers -- whose embattled lead decision-maker, Jim Buss, has already been belittled publicly, many times, by the likes of Phil Jackson -- to rile up Lakers fans by parting ways with Bryant.

But keeping Bryant isn’t simple either, especially when trying to rebuild through free agency.

Of the stars on the Lakers’ short list, Anthony is said to be the only one who might actually sign with L.A. in 2014. But even that courtship starts on rocky ground. For one thing, there’s no assurance it will work. Bryant and Anthony top the list of stars modern analysis shows hurt their teams with their unwillingness to share the ball, and neither is a defensive stopper at this point. And then there’s the matter of Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni -- he and Anthony already had to be separated once before, in New York.

The Lakers are among the most successful franchises in sports by any measure, and history suggests they’ll find their way out of this latest bind, too. Either some star will come to L.A. to play with Bryant, or one day the Lakers and Bryant will part ways and some star will fill the void. The Lakers have the money to spend and the cachet. It will work, eventually. It always has.

But there is one last concern: The Lakers have succeeded in the past in no small part by outspending their opponents. Historically big salaries got the Lakers the likes of O’Neal from the Magic, Phil Jackson on the sidelines, and an unprecedented 25-year-deal kept Magic Johnson a Laker for life. They even outspent the competition to get Wilt Chamberlain back in the day.

The 2011 collective bargaining agreement, however, really does constrain top spending in more meaningful ways than ever -- it functions as a de facto hard cap. The Lakers may have the league’s best local TV deal, with plenty of dollars to spread around in theory. But they simply can’t woo LeBron or Carmelo by offering to pay more than anybody else.

So they have to win free agency by being a more attractive franchise in other ways -- which is tough.

• Bob Wofley of the Journal Sentinel: Caron Butler’s introduction as a member of the Milwaukee Bucks Thursday at Racine Park High School was a press conference wrapped in a family reunion inside a high school pep rally. Butler, 33, warned those gathered in the fieldhouse where he played for a year that there might be some water works to go with his words. He made good on his prediction. “I’m a little emotional definitely,” Butler said. “Y’all see me crying at press conferences and at other things all the time – draft night – but it’s a different emotion now because this is a dream come true. This is something that I always dreamed about, thought about. I never thought it would happen. So it’s special. Thank you.” The enthusiastic audience of Park high school students and staff in attendance applauded Butler’s heartfelt comments, like this one, when some words quivered and he teared up. Butler was joined at the press table by coach Larry Drew and general manager John Hammond. Bucks owner Herb Kohl also was in attendance. Hammond said he had Butler penciled in as the Bucks’ starting small forward.
• Joe Cowley of the Chicago Sun-Times: Gar Forman isn’t into playing -favorites. Sure, the Bulls’ general manager is eager to see what Derrick Rose 2.0 looks like when the MVP point guard takes the court in full five-on-five scrimmages in less than a month, but it’s about the big picture for Forman on what could be a make-or-break season for his current roster. … As Boozer also knows that this group has a shelf life that is on the brink of running out. Deng is a free agent after this season, while Boozer is a prime candidate to be amnestied. It’s basically now or never for the core in the 2013-14 season. But it will all start with Rose. Like he promised at the end of the season, he doesn’t play pick-up games in the summer, and that didn’t change this offseason. So Rose’s first real test will be Oct. 5, in a preseason game in Indiana. “He hasn’t been playing in games [this summer], but that’s not unusual for a lot of players,’’ Forman said. “He’s done his work and has put the time in on making himself better.’’ Now it’s about seeing what Rose will look like post-knee rehab. Less than a month away and counting.
• Marcus Thompson II of The Oakland Tribune: It perhaps took some time, but Stephen Curry seems comfortable in his role as the man. He's long since been anointed by Warriors management. And his playoff performances pushed him up a tier on the star hierarchy. But now his teammates, the youngsters and the newcomers, are looking to him for guidance. His coaches are expecting him to be a vocal leader. The fan base is banking on him carrying the franchise to heights it hasn't sniffed in decades. And the fifth-year guard seems to be embracing it all matter-of-factly. "I'm 25. Still young. But I know the drill. I know the expectations," Curry said in a chat with local media after working out at the team facility Thursday. "For me to have the same coaching staff, the same leadership, for three straight years is big. ... We have the stability for us to make that move (to another level), and I hope to lead that charge." Certainly, Curry's not alone in leading the locker room. David Lee and center Andrew Bogut share the leadership load, and Andre Iguodala figures to eventually emerge as a leader. But not even Curry's reputed humility can help him escape the pedestal on which he is now perched.
• Darren Wolfson of 1500ESPN.com: Even after spending $117 million in free agency in July and August, Minnesota Timberwolves president of operations Flip Saunders will have another sizable monetary decision to make. Before his third year begins -- Oct. 31 is the deadline -- the Wolves need to figure out if they will pay forward Derrick Williams $6.3 million for the 2014-15 season. In a phone conversation earlier this week spanning a few topics, Wolves owner Glen Taylor acknowledged the team isn't quite sure what to do. "We'll evaluate his summer program, and how he looks coming into camp (which starts Oct. 1)," Taylor said. "I heard he is looking good." Exercising Williams' fourth-year option is potentially enough to carry the Wolves over the luxury tax and not allow them to sign a free agent for the mid-level exception, according to Grantland.com's Zach Lowe. Williams is working out in Los Angeles with trainer Gunnar Peterson, who said recently via email that Williams is stronger and more balanced than a year ago.
• Howard Beck of The New York Times: The league on Thursday announced plans to install sophisticated tracking cameras, known as the SportVu system, in every arena for the coming season, creating an unprecedented treasure trove of data about virtually every wrinkle of the game. SportVu, developed by Stats LLC, records data points for all 10 players, the three referees and the ball, every 30th of a second, measuring speed, distance, player separation and ball possession. Every step, every dribble, every pass, every shot, every rebound — really, every movement — will be recorded, coded and categorized. … The N.B.A. is the first major professional sports league in the United States to fully adopt the SportVu system. It will have other implications for the league, far beyond the playbook and the box score. Not everyone might welcome the change. General managers will surely exploit the more sophisticated statistics when negotiating contracts with player agents. Not all assists, points and rebounds are created equal — and teams will soon be able to demonstrate that vividly. Referees are also tracked by SportVu, which means the league will have yet another tool to analyze every call, non-call and missed call as it ranks its officials. Those rankings help determine which referees are chosen for playoff assignments and the finals.
• Steve Serby of the New York Post: Former Knick Bernard King took a timeout for some Q&A with Steve Serby before King’s Basketball Hall of Fame induction this weekend. Q: What are you most proud of? A: I’m most proud of the fact my wife and I raised a wonderful daughter. That’s what life is all about. In terms of basketball legacy, we could always point to back-to-back 50-point games, the 42 I averaged in the Piston playoff series, or the great year in ’84-85, or the 60 points (Christmas Eve against Nets). What stands out in my mind was what I was able to do at a time when players were not coming back from ACL injuries. I had my entire knee reconstructed. I was told I would never play again. I told myself, “I’m from Brooklyn. I’m from Fort Greene. I grew up on the toughest playgrounds in the world. In one of the toughest neighborhoods in the country, and I made it all the way to the NBA, and I rose to the top of my profession at that time. You don’t know my heart. If I could do that, this is nothing!” I set about the task of working to make it back at a level I could be satisfied with. I did that. To do that for five hours a day, six days a week for two straight years, and not once wavering, always having faith. … I did it. I became an All-Star again, and that was my goal.
• Staff of The Sacramento Bee: Chris Mullin, 50, a former front-office executive with the Golden State Warriors, will have a variety of basketball operations responsibilities, including advising Ranadive and general manager Pete D'Alessandro on player transactions and scouting. "I couldn't be more excited about joining the Kings and playing a part in making this team a winner again," Mullin said in a statement released by the Kings on Thursday. "I'm especially grateful for the unique opportunity to work in close proximity with a world-class ownership group led by Vivek Ranadive and the talented group of individuals assembled in our front office."
• Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News: In a move that could bolster their perimeter defense and add competition in training camp, the Lakers signed free-agent guard Xavier Henry on Thursday to give them 14 players on the roster. Terms of the deal weren’t immediately available. But considering the Lakers’ desire to keep cap flexibility for the 2014 offseason, it’s likely Henry’s contract consists of a one-year deal at the veteran’s minimum. It’s also unclear if his contract is guaranteed. The Lakers recently added small forward Shawne Williams and Elias Harris to partially guaranteed deals. The Lakers are expected to sign second-round draft pick Ryan Kelly, though he’s still rehabbing from foot surgery in April. NBA teams can field a maximum of 15 players on their roster. … The Lakers plan to have anywhere between 18-20 players to fill out their training camp roster, including Marcus Landry, who led the Lakers’ Summer League team in scoring. It’s likely Henry, Kelly, Williams, Landry and Harris will compete for roster spots since the Lakers will keep anywhere between 13-15 players.
• Mary Schmitt Boyer of The Plain Dealer: Two NBA sources have confirmed that Steve Hetzel, former Cavaliers video coordinator, will be hired to coach the Cavs' owned-and-operated NBA Development League team, the Canton Charge. The hire was first reported by the News-Herald. Hetzel, a 2005 graduate of Michigan State where he served as a student manager for the men's basketball team, was named the Cavs' video coordinator in July, 2006. He stayed until 2009, when he left to join former Cavs assistant John Kuester's staff with the Detroit Pistons. After Kuester was fired, Hetzel remained with Lawrence Frank for two seasons. Hetzel replaces D-League coach of the year Alex Jensen, who left the Charge to join Tyrone Corbin's staff in Utah.
• Dan McCarney of the San Antonio Express-News: France atoned for its opening loss to Germany, riding five double-figure scorers to a resounding 88-65 victory over lowly Great Britain on the second day of play at EuroBasket 2013. Nicolas Batum led all scorers with 17 points and Tony Parker added 16 at Les Bleus improved to 1-1 in Group A. The game, as expected, was never close. France led by double-figures after one quarter, and put Great Britain away for good with a 26-11 outburst in the third quarter. France, which also got 11 points from Nando De Colo and four from Boris Diaw, will play group bottom-dweller Israel on Friday. Also at EuroBasket, Italy improved to 2-0 in Group D with a 90-75 spanking of Turkey. Spurs reserve Marco Belinelli had 17 points for the Italians, who will Finland on Saturday. Across the Atlantic at the FIBA Americas championship, Canada destroyed Mexico 89-67 behind another strong performance from Cory Joseph. The young point guard registered 21 points, eight rebounds and six assists — his fourth game of the tournament with at least 17 points, eight boards and four assists.

A number of an economists have addressed the issue of tanking and found that the phenomenon comes and goes, depending on the details of the draft lottery format. A study I co-authored with Brian Soebbing and David Berri -- both of whom have weighed in here on tanking at TrueHoop -- suggests that NBA teams did not tank during the period when the NBA draft lottery format was weighted equally among non-playoff teams in the late 1980s.

Under this format every team that finished out of the playoffs had the same chance of getting the first pick in the next draft. But that format was scrapped because of concerns about competitive balance after several teams that barely missed the playoffs were awarded the first pick. Going back to the equal weight draft lottery would eliminate some of the incentives to tank, but this may have unintended consequences for competitive balance.

But if I was czar of the NBA, my solution would be more radical, and would take care of another problem generated by the NBA entry draft with a single stroke. I would eliminate the draft entirely. All tanking incentives in the NBA originate with the draft, so eliminating the draft eliminates incentives to tank. The alternative is that all incoming players are free agents and can be signed by any team, forcing teams to compete for all incoming talent.

Critics would howl that this policy would wreck competitive balance. The large-market teams would buy up all the good players, leading to a lopsided league of haves and have-nots!

My response to this criticism is: This would be unlikely to happen with the current NBA roster limits and salary cap. Incoming players would be subject to the cap, and rosters spots on NBA teams are limited, so large-market teams could not stockpile all the incoming talent.

The entry draft also gives teams market power (monoposony power, in the jargon of economics) because of rookie-scale contracts, which reduce the earnings of players in the first two or three years of their careers. Free agency would benefit these players, in that some of them would clearly earn higher salaries.

Also, a significant body of economic research suggests that entry drafts, salary caps and revenue sharing do not have any appreciable impact on competitive balance. This further strengthens the argument that eliminating the draft would not hurt competitive balance in the NBA.

I also think it's important to think about tanking from the fan's perspective. While seeing your team intentionally lose games at the end of the season might reduce attendance in the short run, getting the first pick in the NBA draft can significantly improve a team in the NBA, and fans might be willing to trade-off short run intentional losses for long-run success generated by the first pick. No research has addressed this issue, or examined how tanking affects attendance or media revenues, but it’s worth thinking about.

Brad Humphreys is a professor in the College of Business and Economics, Department of Economics at West Virginia University. His research focuses on the economics of sports and gambling.

The purpose of the NBA draft is to promote parity by assigning the highest draft picks to the worst teams. The problem is that this creates incentives to tank -- teams may exert less effort to try to disguise themselves as being of low quality. In this piece we focus specifically on everyone’s favorite example of egregious losing, the 2011-12 Golden State Warriors.

The Warriors finished a once-promising season on a 5-22 freefall, giving them the seventh-worst record in the NBA. At 23-43, Golden State was just bad enough to avoid an outstanding trade obligation to send that June’s first-round draft pick to the Utah Jazz.

The terms of the trade created what we call a discontinuity in the Warriors’ payoff function: Additional losses at the end of the season could be the difference between Golden State getting a top-seven pick in a talent-filled NBA draft or coming away from the offseason empty-handed. The value of additional wins, on the other hand, was difficult to quantify and potentially small.

An oft-suggested method to eliminate this kind of discontinuity is to disallow the practice of including "protected" draft picks in trades. However, this could create a large amount of illiquidity and reduce the volume of trades. The fair value for some players happens to be a draft pick in the range of 8-14. Without pick protection these players become untradable to the detriment of everyone in the league.

A new kind of draft
We instead advocate overhauling the way draft picks are assigned. The rights to draft slots (the right to pick at a particular number) will be sold via sequential auction before the date of the draft for “credits.” Teams will bid with their credits and the highest bidder earns the right to make the pick come draft day. Credits will be allocated at the end of each season based on record with the worst teams receiving more. This preserves the original push for parity.

Under this system, teams trade credits rather than future protected draft picks. This eliminates the discontinuity that Golden State faced. One can no longer exert low effort as a way to avoid outstanding obligations. Another benefit is that teams could split up their credits in the manner they deem optimal. In certain drafts, having the first pick may not be a desirable outcome if there is no franchise player to be had. Having more credits may allow teams to spend on acquiring multiple draft slots or potentially save them for future seasons.

Of course, teams still may want to lose to get more credits, but the reduced certainty on the value of these credits shrinks the incentives to lose intentionally. A complex formula for awarding of credits, taking into account relative performance of all teams in a given year would add to this uncertainty without losing the redistributive benefit. For example, we could dock teams credits if their performance in the second half of the season is significantly worse (statistically) than their first-half effort.

A significant real world benefit of our suggestion is that the NBA could keep existing wage structures and the draft intact. The only change would be to replace a draft lottery with a month long market or auction. The day-to-day intrigue on who is bidding what for which pick would give fans of the less fortunate teams something to keep them engaged. Imagine the vibrant conversations of arm-chair GMs and auction-style fantasy league veterans debating the merits of each days bids.

Arup Sen is an economist at a Princeton based consulting group and holds a PhD in Economics from Boston University with a research focus on the NBA.

Timothy N. Bond is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.

I was asked how I would end tanking in the NBA. We could get radical and do away with the draft altogether, screw parity and let the free market determine what each player is worth right out of college and which teams are willing and able to pay for him. That’s the libertarian answer that you might expect from an economist.

But I’m a bleeding heart liberal economist, one that’s concerned about equity. And in the NBA, equity means parity -- every team having a fighting chance.

The NBA draft tries to equal out the playing field by trying to direct the best talent to the teams that need it most. However, by doing so, we’re forced to risk tanking to improve parity. (Or at least the chance for parity, assuming management and owners know what to do with their draft picks.) How should the league manage this balancing act between parity and tanking in the draft?

Here’s the thing, they already have a great tool to tip the scales away from tanking, all within the current system of amateur drafts, luxury taxes and limited first contracts. But first, a history lesson.

Go back with me to 1985. New Coke. “Back to the Future.” Stallone at his apex.

And Patrick Ewing.

If ever there was a reason for teams to tank to get a chance at the first pick, Ewing was it. But, my colleague Beck Taylor and I have crunched the data, and we found no evidence that teams tanked that year (Taylor and Trogdon, 2002). Why? In 1985, the first year of the draft lottery, every non-playoff team had an equal shot at Ewing (at least in principle).[1] Once a team was eliminated from the playoffs, there was no benefit from additional losing. In fact, the lottery was instituted to avoid tanking, which we showed was happening even in the prior season. So if the lottery was supposed to end tanking, why is it still a problem?

Jump ahead to 1989. New Coke is gone. Milli Vanilli. Shoulder pads. And the NBA switched to the current weighted lottery system, which gives teams with worse records more opportunity for higher picks (i.e., more pingpong balls). Eliminated teams don’t guarantee higher picks by losing, but they increase their chances. Here’s the key point from our analysis of this system -- teams were likely to tank again, but not as much as in the pre-lottery days.

That means the league already has a tool to address tanking -- lottery weights. The lottery weights are a control dial that can be set to tweak the parity/tanking tradeoff. On one end of the dial, the weights are the same for all teams (e.g., 1985). This would eliminate tanking but there’s a chance a “good” non-playoff team gets the top pick (less parity). On the other end of the dial, the weights just sort the non-playoff teams from worst to best to determine the draft order (e.g., pre-1985). The teams most in need of talent get the best options (more parity), but lots of tanking. You could even use the lottery weights to reward the winningest teams post-elimination.

If Adam Silver, the next NBA commissioner, is serious about ending tanking, he doesn’t need to reinvent the entire draft process to do it. He’s already got the right pingpong ball machine for the job.

Justin G. Trogdon is a senior research economist at RTI International.

There are essentially three ways a team can acquire the productive talent it needs to contend for a title:

The Heat approach: Acquire productive veterans
This approach has also recently been used by the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. The problem is that the NBA has a maximum salary. This means that teams cannot use higher wages to attract better talent. Instead, productive veterans are now considering whether or not your team is likely to win. In other words, the Miami Heat approach seems to require that you already have stars to attract more stars.

In addition, teams have to know which veterans to acquire. The New York Knicks have tried to build with veterans for years. But in most recent seasons, the Knicks have failed because they tend to acquire relatively unproductive veterans (primarily because the Knicks focus too much attention on per game scoring).

The Spurs approach: Acquire productive players in the latter part of the NBA draft
When we think of the Spurs, we tend to think Tim Duncan. Although Duncan was the most productive regular season performer for the Spurs in 2012-13, about 48 of the team’s regular season wins came from other players -- the five most productive were Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green, Tony Parker, Tiago Splitter, and Manu Ginobili. Each of them was either a non-lottery first round pick or a second-round pick. All teams have access to such players, but the team must be able to identify such talent. And since the Spurs are relatively unique in utilizing this approach, it’s reasonable to assume most teams cannot consistently identify productive players outside the lottery.

The Thunder approach: Acquire productive lottery picks
The third approach is to acquire productive talent in the NBA lottery. Most recently, the Thunder accomplished this when they built an NBA Finals team around the talents of Kevin Durant, James Harden and Russell Westbrook. Lottery picks are granted to the NBA’s non-playoff teams, so you have to lose to implement this strategy. You also must have a fair amount of luck. Not only does it help to finish very high in the lottery, you also have to be able to select the productive players with those high picks. In some years, though, this is difficult. For example, none of the top seven talents selected in 2010 have become players who produce wins in large quantities. A similar story can be told about most of the players at the top of the 2006 NBA draft.

There is another problem that the Thunder discovered. Initially draft picks play under a rookie contract, so these players can produce wins at a very low cost. But this contract expires fairly quickly. Specifically, the Thunder were able to employ Harden for only three seasons. Once a player moves on to his second contract, the team essentially moves to option No. 1 (i.e. building through productive veterans). So not only does this approach requires luck, it’s also a short-lived strategy.

Nevertheless, teams seem to try and follow the third option. And for that to happen, teams have to lose -- or pursue the strategy of tanking. Such a strategy essentially contradicts a fundamental promise made by sporting competitors; that the competitors will do their very best to win the game.

To eliminate this strategy, we simply need to remove the incentive behind this approach. Again, teams only get high lottery picks by losing. And the more you lose, the better your chance of getting the top picks in the draft. If we want teams to stop doing this, we need to change the incentives of the people who implement this strategy.

This can be done in three ways:

Return to a non-weighted lottery
In a paper I co-authored with Joe Price, Brian Soebbing, and Brad Humphreys, we presented evidence that the NBA’s non-weighted lottery -- utilized in the 1980s -- seemed to reduce the tendency to tank. Back in 1985, only seven teams didn’t make the playoffs. Today it is 14 teams. If all lottery picks were selected via a non-weighted lottery -- as was the case in 1985 -- the worst team in the NBA could receive just the 14th pick in the draft. This would effectively eliminate a team’s incentive to be as bad as possible to get the best pick possible.

Eliminate the draft
A more radical approach (for North American sports fans) is to eliminate the draft. In European sports, there is no draft. But on this side of the Atlantic, it is taken for granted that the losers in professional sports leagues are rewarded with high draft picks. However, as we have noted, this gives teams an incentive to tank. So a simple solution is to abolish the draft and allow top amateurs to negotiate with more than one team.

One issue with this approach is that the top amateurs could simply choose to sign with the NBA’s best teams. This is especially likely if the NBA’s rookie salary cap is kept in place. After all, if the wages of the top players are going to be the same, then these players will simply choose to play for the best teams. To avoid this problem, the NBA could implement a system where playoff teams cannot sign a player until 14 amateurs have already received offers from non-playoff teams. And once a player received an offer from a non-playoff team, he could not sign with a playoff team (but could still sign with any of the other 13 non-playoff teams).

This system would force the non-playoff teams to be as competitive as possible, since the top amateurs would probably prefer to play for the best non-playoff team possible. And again, would eliminate the problem of the tanking.

Punish the losers
The tanking strategy is easy for decision-makers in the NBA to embrace. Teams that pursue this strategy are essentially trying to lose to enhance the team’s draft position. This is a simple strategy to follow. Trying to win is difficult, but losing is easy and the more incompetent the decision-maker, the better the strategy can be implemented. Imagine how easy it would be to do your job if you were rewarded for doing the job badly!

To stop this behavior, the NBA could simply implement a rule that says if a team misses the playoffs for three consecutive seasons, the team must fire its general manager. If this rule was put in place, constant losing would lead to consequences for executives.

David Berri is a Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University. He is co-author of The Wages of Wins and Stumbling on Wins (FT Press, March-2010). He has written extensively on the topic of sports economics for academic journals, and his work has appeared at The New York Times, the Huffington Post, Freakonomics.com and Time.com.