The NBA has a few potential rule changes intended to limit tanking – teams losing on purpose to have a better chance at a higher draft pick – and all of them could potentially hurt the Portland Trail Blazers.
Joe Vardon of The Athletic (subscription required) shares the following potential rule changes to the NBA’s draft lottery process, which will be voted on at an NBA Board of Governors meeting this May:
In one of the 18-team proposals, the worst 10 teams would have an equal chance of getting the No.
1 pick (8 percent), with the remaining odds distributed evenly on the teams that finish with the 11th- to 18th-worst records.
In the other, there would be a lottery for the first five picks, with the five worst teams having the highest (and equal) odds of a top-five pick. There would be a second lottery for the next 13 picks, and if one of the five-worst teams didn’t get a top-five pick, then the lowest they could fall in the draft would be 10th, according to ESPN.
In a third proposal, the lottery would extend past the Play-In to include teams that lose in the first round of the playoffs, and teams would be ranked for lottery odds based on their records over the previous two seasons. There would be a mandatory minimum for wins in each season as part of that proposal, ESPN reported. For example, if the minimum were set at 20 wins, and a team only wins 18 games in a season, that campaign would count as a 20-win season over the two-year aggregate.
Additionally, if teams were found to be losing on purpose in spite of these new rules, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver “…would either be able to take away that team’s draft pick, move it to the end of the lottery or first round and also increase fines into the millions of dollars,” reports Vardon.
If implemented, any of these changes would have potentially franchise-altering implications for Portland.
CBS’s Sam Quinn put it succinctly:
I feel for teams that traded for future draft picks right now. Take Portland. The asset package they got back when they traded a franchise icon in Damian Lillard was built almost entirely around draft picks that will convey after a rule change they couldn’t have known about then.
Without diving too deep right this second, a few things jump out to me:
- Portland (and other teams) have made trades based on (speculative and approximate) expected values of draft picks.
- Any of these proposed rule changes would alter the range of what that expected value may be.
- In Portland’s case, if the Milwaukee Bucks are bad in a few years, the value of their picks (which Portland owns or can swap with) may now be higher or lower depending on just how bad the Bucks are.
- All of this may change the thinking around the value of the Portland Trail Blazers as a franchise if the (speculative and approximate) expected values of draft picks were a consideration in setting that value.
Stay tuned for a more in-depth piece here on Blazer’s Edge on the potential implications of these proposed rule changes.
