Today, 02:45 AM
I don't think you can ever truly eliminate "tanking." If you have the BEST teams getting to draft the best new players, you kill the ability for the currently-bad teams to have the talent to compete. So there will be some sweet spot for teams to fight over, and you can't eliminate that place everyone wants to be (or the chase for it).
The NBA tried it the other way, where the draft was very random with more teams being drawn, and it was way worse. It offered less certainty if you were bad, in getting a shot at one of the best new players, but even in that, there was still tanking going on, but in that world you had even mid-tier teams - not just the worst - getting to decide if they wanted to tank too.
The more random you make it, the less assurance that the teams that truly NEED some good players will be getting them. And wherever that sweet spot is to get the good players, that's what teams with nothing else to play for will chase.
I think one improvement would be to make a rule where teams lose some lottery opportunity for a number of years after being "successful" in the lottery the first time. Lots of ways to make it work, as to which teams get dinged for how long, and whether some teams get an added boost the next time, and maybe a team can decline the lottery jump and would do so -- bearing in mind that EVERY penalty and EVERY bonus will create incentive to some teams to lose more, not less.
But I think it's part of the landscape. You want your bad teams to get better and compete and draw fans too, and the draft is the way they do that.
The NBA tried it the other way, where the draft was very random with more teams being drawn, and it was way worse. It offered less certainty if you were bad, in getting a shot at one of the best new players, but even in that, there was still tanking going on, but in that world you had even mid-tier teams - not just the worst - getting to decide if they wanted to tank too.
The more random you make it, the less assurance that the teams that truly NEED some good players will be getting them. And wherever that sweet spot is to get the good players, that's what teams with nothing else to play for will chase.
I think one improvement would be to make a rule where teams lose some lottery opportunity for a number of years after being "successful" in the lottery the first time. Lots of ways to make it work, as to which teams get dinged for how long, and whether some teams get an added boost the next time, and maybe a team can decline the lottery jump and would do so -- bearing in mind that EVERY penalty and EVERY bonus will create incentive to some teams to lose more, not less.
But I think it's part of the landscape. You want your bad teams to get better and compete and draw fans too, and the draft is the way they do that.
* Dumont reportedly "has no problem going into next year with a healthy AD and a healthy Kyrie with Cooper Flagg and seeing what it looks like."