The NBA Lottery Show

I see where TrueHoop has brought up the subject of the NBA lottery and the accusation that teams are tanking to improve their position in the lottery. Since others are offering suggestions, now is a good time to brush off my proposal for how to turn the NBA lottery drawing into a must see  TV show.

First, the problem:  How do you not reward teams for dumping games and yet still insure that the teams with the worst records have the best chance of getting the earlier draft picks.   One way would be to set some arbitrary point in the season, (say after 65 games) and say the teams position in the lottery will be based on their record at that point in the season.  Now there would be no incentive to tank games the last month of the season because your position in the lottery has already been determined. Now if your going to tank games you have to do it earlier in the season, which is far less likely to happen. That would work but I'm sure someone would find something to find fault with.  Regardless of that my proposal works whatever method is used to establish the initial lottery order.

My proposal  gives everyone a shot at moving up in the lottery while still maintaining the strong likelihood that the worst teams would get the earlier picks.

The lottery would be run as follows. The 10th through 14th placed teams would put into the first draw with the 14th team getting the most balls and the 10th getting the least. The statisticians could work out the percentages to determine whatever probability they wanted but for purposes of  this example lets say 14th gets 40 balls, 13th gets 25 balls, 12th gets 20 balls, 11th gets 10 balls and 10th gets 5 balls.  You churn up the balls and out pops the winner (actually loser) and that team gets the 14th pick in the draft.  Now you repeat the process with the 9th place team added in place of the team that got the 14th pick.

Again the balls are assigned in order of the records with the worst record getting 40 balls and the best team (this time the 9th place team) getting 5 balls.  Using this method the teams with best records have almost no chance of getting the top picks but everyone with the obvious exception of the teams with the best and worst records  has a chance to move up or down in the draft.

As an example using the percentages, I have assigned the 14th placed team, right now that's Golden State would have a 40% probability of getting the 14 th pick in the draft, a 24% probability of getting the 13th pick, a 14.4% probability of getting the 12th pick, an 8.6% probability of getting the 11th pick, a 5.2% chance of getting the 10th pick. They would have about a 10% chance of still being alive after 5 drawings and about a 1 % chance of still being alive after the 10th drawing.  My education in statistical probability goes back to the age of the slide rule so I'm a little shaky about extrapolating beyond this point  but the beauty of the draw is that regardless of how many drawings your team has survived  you  still have at least a 60% chance of still having your team alive after the next draw, until we get to the top 4 picks.  

Memphis, the team with the worst record would not be in the drawing until we got down to the draw for the 5th spot in the draft and they would only have a 5% chance of getting that pick.  

Doing this the lottery drawing would be must watch TV for every NBA fan and the NBA could turn it into a one hour extravaganza.

This year with the Knick's pick lets say we end up with the 9th worst record.  We could end up anywhere from the 13th pick to the 1st pick with about an 80% probability that it would be the 7th through 11th pick.