FanHouse Draft Lottery

Each Friday throughout the season, I'll provide you with my predictions on whose stock is on the rise and whose is failing miserably like the American job market pretty much everything these days. It's a neat little segment entitled Buys and Sells. There are a few teams/players/issues to buy and a few to sell.

It's that time of the year again, the time when everyone is fixated on playoff races, who's going to make it in and who isn't. That's all well and good, but for a few teams in the league, there's another race going on which their fans are preoccupied with -- the race for the first pick in the draft.

After reading Brian Berger's Sports Business Radio Blog yesterday, I became a little bit upset. In the post Mr. Berger criticized current Memphis Grizzlies GM Jerry West for these comments following the draft lottery:

"It's like pitching pennies. It's grossly unfair to the team, but I've said it before, I don't think the lottery is fair. I never liked it. I don't think it's a good system at all, period.

"There have been a lot of picks in the lottery that have [failed]. There are two in the lottery this year that are not going to fail. There are two superstars in the draft. I think for the teams fortunate enough to get them, the fortunes of their franchises have changed forever."

Berger categorized the comments as "sour grapes", stating that Mr. West only made the comments because his team lost the lottery. However, being the media watch dog that I am, I know that Jerry West had been urging the league to change its current lottery system long before Tuesday's draft lottery. In fact, in a podcast with Chad Ford back in early April, Mr. West spent half of the interview talking about how terrible he thought the system was.

One thing that's been troubling me with all these lousy teams trying to sneak into the playoffs: is it worth it? Yesterday, I linked to a Hollinger article on some useful versions of tanking. Well, if an Eastern team is facing certain elimination, and desperately needs to re-up their talent, are the playoffs the best option?

The obvious answer is "of course." If you glance over the history of the lottery, you'll see that one of the four best lottery teams has jumped the line only once. That would be in 1999, when the Hornets miraculously went from the bottom of the pack to #2 overall. But other than that, in every year of the lottery's current incarnation, those teams end up picking in order.

This isn't even taking into account how exciting it can be for fans suffering through a drought, or the added revenue in brings in. Let's not get carried away, though--no one's watching the first round, especially not the 1-8 games, and early exits can get really galling if they become a habit. Maybe it's a good thing, but it's not that great.

But I keep coming back to the strength of this draft. You could argue that with a class like this, or 2003, any first-rounder is a good pick. Or maybe, exactly because of the glut of talent, there could still be a potential star or two on the board at 11-13. Players that won't be around two or three picks later. I'm not saying that tanking to miss the playoffs is smart, but there are certainly some benefits to being shut out of the postseason at the last minute.

Talk of the Celtics or Hawks tanking for the top pick is kind of ridiculous. After all, in the last twelve lotteries, the first overall pick has only twice gone to the team with the worst record. That doesn't mean, though, that teams don't sometimes have an incentive to lose down the stretch.

Today in The New York Sun, stat deity John Hollinger breaks down all the little reasons to tank. It's a long, involved story, and you probably shouldn't read it standing up. The main point, though, is that it's hard to jockey for the jackpot. But conditions placed on traded draft picks, or unfavorable playoff match-ups, could be dealt with by intentionally losing.

The most obvious example of this, which the FanHouse has touched on several times already, is the Hawks' pick this year. Unless it's in the top three, it goes to the Suns. So If Atlanta were to end up with the league's worst record, there's a pretty good chance that they would end up keeping their pick. As Hollinger puts is:

The Atlanta Hawks are another team with great incentive to lose. Unlike other lottery hopefuls that are merely hoping to end up with a top-three pick instead of, say, no. 5, for the Hawks tanking could mean the difference between a top-three pick and none at all.

Wow, what could the Hawks possibly do to bring on the losses? Suspending their best healthy player is a good start. See, that franchise isn't so stupid after all.