When the NBA Board of Governors passed the NBA Draft lottery reform last month, the Dallas Mavericks chose to abstain from voting. As it turns out, however, Mark Cuban has a good reason for doing so.
Cuban actually had two alternative solutions that he believes would effectively discourage tanking than the proposal that passed, and he presented one to the board and the other to NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
The Mavs owner's first idea presented to the board is to completely get rid of the draft lottery and instead give teams money based on their records. The money that each team will receive then can be used to sign rookies.
“The team with the worst record gets the most money and the team with the best record gets the least money,” Cuban told ESPN's Tim McMahon. “It's like a free agency. It makes it a lot harder to tank because you don't know if you get the best players if you're horrible all the time. “Nobody liked that at all, not a single person.”
On the other hand, his second proposal—which he privately suggested to Silver—was a system that would put the worst team into a draft slot, which is not the top pick, thereby de-incentivizing tanking as well. According to the 59-year-old, that idea would encourage teams to avoid the worst record.
“Now all of the sudden, if it's close at the end, you're going to see teams play as hard as they can because if they end up with the worst record, they don't get the best pick,” Cuban said, explaining the logic of his idea.”You basically eliminate them from getting the best player. Everybody else would just be the way it is now.
“Adam didn't like that. That never got to the board of directors, but that one was my favorite. I brought up [the other proposal], but after that one got shot down, I didn't bring up the other one. When I got no response on the one, I just dropped the other because it was obvious that what they had proposed was going to pass.”
As Cuban noted, however, his proposals never had the chance to be considered. And although the Shark Tank star said he's fine with the reformed draft lottery system, he emphasized that it didn't make things any better at all.
“It's OK, but you still have the best chance of getting the best pick if you have the worst record. The hope is if you're one of the bottom three, you're going to try. Now, if you're one of the bottom three, the odds are all the same. It doesn't get any better if you get any worse, and that's OK, but you're still going to try to tank to get a chance at the best pick.”
“If you can't get better than third or fourth (pick with the worst record), if you try to tank, you're never going to get the best pick. It's hard to say, ‘Now we're going to start winning games because we're at risk.' But it is what it is. Hopefully, it's not even a consideration for (the Mavericks) this year or next year.”
The lottery reform will take effect in the 2019 NBA draft, giving teams the time to prepare for the changes. Whether it will discourage tanking remains to be seen, so Cuban has to wait and see if the league should have given his propositions a careful thought.
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