Fixing the NBA Draft Lottery

After the hype of reform being in the air for the last couple years, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told the Boston Globe on Thursday (September 10th) that there was no immediate plans to change the NBA Draft process. Instead, the Association plans to see how things pan out following the upcoming spike in revenue from the NBA's new TV deal. The NBA salary cap is expected to spike to about $88-92 million for the 2016-2017 season. A possible reason for this approach is that if NBA teams could use their new influx of money and sign quality basketball players, their incentive to tank would diminish.

Unfortunately, that's probably not going to be the case. (At least for now) NBA players are able to make more money when resigning with their incumbent teams. Players like Chris Paul or LeBron James do not really reach or consider free agency. Players that are actually up for grabs in free agency are usually going to be ones that have some "warts". Players like DeAndre Jordan, Andre Drummond and Al Horford are great cornerstones....but they're not really seen as players that can be the "number one" for a championship contender. Getting a player like them is fine, but you'll still need an even better player to pair with them. Nevertheless, with more teams having money to bid, players like these will profit by seeing teams enter bidding wars for their services. These players are about to become "worthy" of a maximum contract. Thus there will still be an incentive for teams to tank for the chance of drafting a true superstar (like Blake Griffin) that can be the leader of a championship caliber team.