Reform may change team behavior on the fringes. Bledsoe types may play more. The next version of the Sixers might
Josh Reddick Jersey be more open to signing a couple of stable veterans, even at the "risk" of winning a couple more games. April basketball will be a little less bad. But there will still be bad teams, and bad teams will still have reason to lose games. Some less-bad teams might have even more reason to lose games, especially late in the season. No league can legislate away rebuilding. Wins are a zero-sum game. A reverse-order draft, even one warped a bit by lottery odds, encourages losing. As long as the best young players go to a subset of teams at the bottom of the league, those teams will chase high picks. You could argue that the league shouldn't have a reverse-order draft at all. Some of my colleagues, including the estimable Kevin Arnovitz, have argued for the abolition of the draft. Mike Zarren, assistant GM of the Celtics, proposed a complex wheel system in which teams semi-randomly rotate between all 30 draft slots year-by-year. Some have argued the best teams should select first as a way to incentivize winning, or that all 30 teams should participate in a lottery with equal odds of landing in any spot. Whether you prefer those solutions or not -- I don't, though the wheel intrigues -- they would actually eradicate tanking by snapping the connection between team record and draft position. That is the sort of systematic overhaul it takes. "I don't know what the final solution is," Mark Cuban, the Mavs' owner, told me in 2014, when the last attempt at lottery reform bit the dust. "But I don't think only changing the draft will be the ultimate answer." Teams tank for many reasons. A lot are organic, the product of
http://www.officialathleticshop.com/authentic-10-marcus-semien-jersey.html an inevitable rise-and-fall cycle to which none -- not even the Spurs, tankers for Tim Duncan -- are immune. They tank because in basketball more than any sport, singular superstars drive winning, and the only fail-safe way to get one is to draft very high in the right year. That is the best way to keep them, too; rookie first-round picks enter the league on four-year, cost-controlled contracts, and then proceed into restricted free agency -- where incumbent teams can match any rival offer. Barring a David Kahn-level snafu, a team that drafts a superstar gets him for seven or eight years. Make good choices during that time, and you should be able to convince that superstar to stay longerIf you want to eliminate tanking, you have to change every part of that system. Shaking one branch of the tree isn't enough. You do things that make superstars more portable -- more available to everyone. Maybe you cut the length of rookie contracts, or eliminate restricted free agency. Maybe you raise the individual player salary limit, so that, say, the Magic could offer Ben Simmons $50 million a season three years from now. Is that kind of league you want, though? Maybe it is. Player freedom of movement is a good and fair thing. Restricted free agency really isn't. But you are crafting an entirely different league, with consequences we can't anticipate. What the league approved today will reduce only a tiny sliver of overall tanking, and that's fine. Rebuilding is natural. The
Mark McGwire Womens Jersey Bobcats reignited the tanking debate in 2011-12, when they went 7-59 after trading away Tyson Chandler, Gerald Wallace and Stephen Jackson from an aging and mediocre team -- and then signing zero meaningful free agents in the summer of 2011. But what should they have done? Doubled down? That sort of (gulp) process is exactly what teams experience in almost every major sport. They chase wins, top out, get old and expensive, and very reasonably decide to reset. Who knows what the 76ers might look like today had Sam Hinkie retained Jrue Holiday, Evan Turner and Spencer Hawes. (Hopefully they would not be paying them half the salary cap combined.) It's not clear that they would be in a better position, if you judge by future championship equity. It is possible to enter the championship contention circle without tanking. The Rockets are there now, and the Pacers did it a few years ago without drafting higher than 10th. But the odds of nabbing a championship-level building block that way are worse, and the risk of getting stuck on the treadmill of mediocrity even greater. Engaging tank mode in February and March remains the objectively correct path for teams hopelessly behind in the playoff race. If you are going to finish 10-plus games out of the
http://www.officialathleticshop.com/authentic-9-reggie-jackson-jersey.html playoffs in a league that uses a reverse-order draft, you should play your prospects -- the NBA's version of September call-ups -- and absorb a few extra losses as the price
