Helping the Middle

Magic Johnson recently said: "I hope the Lakers lose every game. Because if you’re going to lose, lose. And I’m serious. If you’re going to lose, you’ve got to lose, because you can’t be in the middle of the pack. You either have to be great, or you’ve got to be bad to get a good pick.”
The current NBA draft philosophy places the bottom fourteen teams who don't make the playoffs in a lottery contest. They weight the odds so that the worst performing team has the highest percentage chance of getting the first pick. They use a random selection process for the first three picks and then the rest of the selections are allocated in order of worst win/loss performance the year before. They claim this promotes parity in the league by allowing poor teams to draft the best players to make them more competitive for years to come.

Wrong. These lottery picks can be traded so sometimes the awful team doesn't even enjoy the favorable pick that their losses provide. In the NBA it is rare that one player will make an awful team significantly more competitive in the three years that he is required to stay. What this policy does promote is the undesirable race to the bottom where even the best and most competitive athletes advocate for their teams to lose. The great teams don't need much to stay great, but this offer to help the worst get better simply promotes poor and non-competitive play.

These races to the bottom seldom seem to help the poor teams get better, but it is an excuse for another spectacle, more sports commentary and meaningless controversy.  I'd rather see professional leagues put a premium on inspiring excellence rather than encouraging complete failure by the lure of a draft pick. To change the real competitive edge I'd like the league to offer the first four draft picks to the teams who finished 5-8 in the playoffs. These are the upper middle class of the league. The teams that are just knocking on the door and looking for a hand up.

These are the teams that, with one good player, could move from a good team to a great team and they would become competitive with the upper echelon teams of the league. Some may say that this would relegate the poor franchises to the standings' cellar. It might. But teams have other avenues to improve their teams than the draft. Professional sports are businesses where you have to spend money to make money, and even then it's not always a guarantee for immediate success. Let’s reward those who are almost there rather than those who would blatantly lose and mock their own sport.

Losing on purpose demonstrates worse sportsmanship than doping. Players on the court are there to win. When a competitor like Magic Johnson speak in favor of his former team losing all of their games, it’s time for a change. It’s time to bring competition back.

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