Originally Posted by
Pelicanidae
Yeah this idea is terrible.
It's essentially, as other people have mentioned, a way to ensure that bad teams have a higher chance of being bad for longer, and for good teams to build up an embarrassment of riches.
Bad teams are generally bad for a reason. Sometimes that's not the case and they're just bad out of misfortune or poor timing but if a franchise is bad for an extended period of time it's likely that it's not got very many good players, the coach probably isn't the world's best, and the management may not be good.
So let's say you have the league's worst team, and they get the #1 pick one year and they (being a bad team) draft poorly. Well, that's it for them: their next 3 years are pretty much guaranteed to suck because the next year they're only going to get the #11 pick and then the #21 the year after, and it's not like bad teams are experts at digging out the diamonds in the rough. Besides, the likelihood of diamonds in the rough existing as far as the 20th pick drops if you suddenly have all the league's top FOs drafting in the top 10 in that third year: they tend to recognise higher end prospects. In this system, one bad draft pick derails a re-build for 3 years. The Sixers ''process'' would have lasted about 40 years with this setup.
Secondly, as I mentioned, just as bad teams tend to be bad for a reason, good teams tend to be good. By and large (not always) a good team given a top 5 pick will pick a player who ends up at least working well for their system and roster, if not ending up as one of the best players in the draft. This is just a way to ensure that every 3 years Golden State gets Luka Doncic. Now dynasty's don't last a couple of years until their core ages out, they last (at least theoretically) forever, as good teams are constantly guaranteed fairly high draft picks to continue bolstering their resources and/or trading off high value picks to bad teams to scoop their antsy stars.
As for how it discourages tanking, my question is: does it?
Honestly, while we all know there's some tanking going on here and there through the league, at a certain point it becomes incredibly difficult to tell when a team is tanking vs when a team is just bad. Are we going to punish the numerous actually bad teams and harm their chances of realistic improvement (for a lot of terrible teams, basically the only way to add a star is the draft) because every year there's one or two teams playing the system? That's a way to ensure that your bottom tier teams never improve.