After drafting 11th in this year’s NBA draft, the Golden State Warriors would really like to stay out of the lottery for the next few seasons. If they do end up there, they’ll be subject to some temporary anti-tanking reforms.
Shams really writes like a poet, doesn’t he? The “relegation zone” also feels like an idea that would have existed had comics legend Jim Kirby consulted with David Stern on the original draft lottery proposal.
Here’s the gist of the changes. The new format of the draft involves what’s being called a “3-2-1 lottery,” which sounds like it was suggested by a consultant named Big Bird.
The name refers to the number of ping-pong balls each lottery team will receive. The teams with the 4th- through 10th-worst records get three balls. The three worst teams get two balls, as do the No. 9 and No. 10 seeds, which certainly creates a disincentive to win play-in games! The loser of the 7-8 game in each conference gets one ping pong ball.
What’s the big takeaway? It’s no longer worth it to be terrible! The odds of getting the top pick when you’re one of the NBA’s three worst teams dropped from 14.1% to 5.4%. This year, the Warriors’ odds would have improved from 2% to all the way to 5.4%. They also can’t protect picks landing between 12 and 15, which is extremely important when the Warriors front office leaks their trade offer for a superstar, two days after he lands with a different team.
Tanking hasn’t really been an issue for the Warriors since 2012. That was the year the Warriors owed a top-7 protected pick to the Utah Jazz, thanks to a complicated series of transactions. The Dubs gave the then-New Jersey Nets a protected first-round pick to add point guard/laptop thief Marcus Williams, who played 54 minutes for Golden State. Not games — minutes.
The Warriors panicked at the possibility of losing a lottery pick for a guy who barely played, so they sent the Nets two second-rounders to push the pick back to 2012, where it remained protected for picks 1-7. It made sense at the time — the team was bad. They were tied for the NBA’s third-worst record with one game to play and the draft featured future stars like John Wall, Boogie Cousins, Gordon Hayward, and Paul George.
In that final game, the Warriors went to Portland with six healthy players. They had only five players after Chris Hunter hurts his knee in the 1st quarter. Somehow, he was the team’s starting center. Devean George fouled out, but stayed in the game because by rule, the team can’t play with four. Steph Curry and Monta Ellis played 48 minutes each and combined for 76 points, while Reggie Williams and Anthony Tolliver never came out of the game.
The result? Golden State 122, Portland 116. The victory leap-frogged the Warriors ahead of the Sacramento Kings and Washington Wizards, so they were only the 5th-worst team in basketball. Subsequently the Wizards won the draft lottery and drafted Wall, while the Dubs took Ekpe Udoh at No. 6.
In 2012, the Lacob administration wasn’t risking anything. The team closed the season on a 3-22 run. Coach Mark Jackson delivered a master class in losing down the stretch. David Lee, Andrew Bogut, and Steph Curry all had surgeries the same week. Mikki Moore played 91 minutes in the Warriors’ final four games and never played in the NBA again. Mickell Gladness played 68 minutes in the final two games and never played in the NBA again.
Someone named Chris Wright almost ruined everything by scoring 25 points in 46 minutes in a close loss in the season finale. He would not play in the NBA the next season, and only eight more NBA games in his career. Mama, there goes that man — straight to the lottery.
It all worked out when the team stayed at No. 7 and landed The Black Falcon, also known as Harrison Barnes, who is now one game away from his third NBA Finals appearance after a 10-year absence. You could say the Warriors tanked during the 2019-20 season, but it’s more accurate to say they just sucked after everyone got hurt.
The new draft rules only last until 2029, when either management or the players can opt out of the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. That means the Warriors may well be facing a new set of rules entirely for the post-Steph Curry era.
Our guess? Like Commissioner Adam Silver’s tinkering with the All-Star Game format, the new rules will end up being even more confusing and arcane in terms of restrictions on trades and pick protections, and probably include tradable draft credits, incentives for beating DraftKings over/under totals after the All-Star Break, and an artificial intelligence model for randomizing draft order that goes rogue and moves the New Orleans Pelicans to the site of a data center in rural Montana.
Eventually, the draft order will be determined by a combination of NIL money, TikTok follower counts of the draftees, and the declamations of a blind, nude oracle in a subterranean temple below the Intuit Dome. And upon that oracle’s death, or bribery by a tree planting charity deeply in debt to Steve Ballmer, they’ll go back to comically-large envelopes in a large glass ball.
