Unless and until the NBA reforms its playoff seeding procedures, it comes across as a bunch of hypocrites if it attempts to tackle the alleged problem of teams tanking late-season games to obtain a higher pick in the lottery.
Prior to 1985, the two teams that finished last overall in each conference (in each division prior to the 1970-71 season) simply held a coin flip to determine the draft's first two picks. This often led to glaring inequities: following the 1972-73 season, the Sixers broke the all-time NBA record for futility with a 9-73 finish; this was later partially broken by the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, who went 7-59 in a season that was shortened to 66 games because of a lockout (the NBA's 66th season had 66 games; sometimes you can't make this stuff up!).
However, because they lost the ensuing coin flip to Portland, last in the Western Conference and with a 21-61 record, the Trail Blazers "earned" the right to select center Bill Walton, while the Sixers ended up with nothing at all because they lost hybrid center-forward Marvin Barnes, who signed with what is now the Denver Nuggets, known then as the ABA's Denver Rockets (to avoid confusion with the NBA's Houston Rockets).
Philadelphia and Portland met four years later in The Finals (a registered trademark of the NBA!) with the Trail Blazers roaring back from an 0-2 deficit to take the series in six games; before that, they had absolutely shocked the world by sweeping the Lakers, who had the entire NBA's best record that season, in four straight. And while Portland's 49-33 final regular-season record may seem "mediocre" by championship standards, the late '70s was the absolute height of a time when road teams couldn't buy a win in the NBA (the Lakers were 16-25 on the road in 1976-77, compared with 37-4 at home).
In 1985, with the threat of tanking looming large because that year's draft was going to be headed by Patrick Ewing, the league implemented a lottery, which included only seven teams because 16 of the NBA's 23 teams made the playoffs that year.
To the surprise of almost no one, the third-seeded Knicks, with a 1984-85 record of 24-58, won the lottery and obviously drafted Ewing. The Pacers, at 22-60 in 1984-85, selected Oklahoma power forward (a term that was just struggling to be born at that time) Wayman Tisdale, followed by Creighton center Benoit Benjamin, who went to the 31-51 Clippers (at seven feet, Benjamin was a nice consolation prize for their missing out on Ewing in the lottery). Seattle, also 31-51, then opted for forward Xavier McDaniel of Wichita State, while Jon Koncak grabbed the show dough in the center derby when he was chosen by the 34-48 Hawks, who had the best record among the seven lottery teams.
Rounding out the lottery portion of the draft were the Kings (who that offseason would move from Kansas City to Sacramento), with another 7-foot center, Joe Kleine of Notre Dame (for one season) and Arkansas (three seasons), and co-number-one seed Golden State drafting Chris Mullin of "The Johnnies," who became the target of a smear campaign by Micheal Ray Richardson because of his well-documented drinking problem.
But if "The Association" is going to "clean up" a tanking problem that no one has claimed even exists, they have no excuse not to also clean up a tanking problem that is very real and applies to the playoffs: since the NBA does not "re-seed" after the first round, they are greenlighting teams to tank the last game or two in order to obtain a 6-seed rather than a 5-seed in the playoffs, since a 6-seed not only guarantees that a team will evade the brilliant and challenging "play-in," but also guarantees that the team earning that seed will not play the 1-seed until the conference championship series.
Give me one good reason why the NBA shouldn't close this loophole — a loophole that the NFL has never had, as it has always "re-seeded." (Baseball, however, does not — and please, my fellow scribes: stop even using the word "re-seed" — and as for putting up the lame argument that "re-seeding" might cause the postseason to end a day or two later: the Bucks completed their four-game sweep of the then-Baltimore Bullets, now the Washington Wizards, on April 30, 1971 — which by the standards of that era was as early as it got; mere days later, Milwaukee center Lew Alcindor announced that he had legally changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
Furthermore, if the play-in teams are excluded from the lottery, the NBA can get pretty close to going back to the way things were in 1985 — when only the worst of the worst had a shot at a legitimate franchise player. Another thing that can be done is to add a partial third round to the draft, in which the best teams from the previous season won't get to make picks. A 90-pick draft sounds about right.
But fans are not idiots. They know hypocrisy when they see it — and even if they don't, the usual suspects who run sports-talk radio won't hesitate to sound the red-alert sirens, in ways that only they can; and just because the chance for an unscrupulous team to do any tanking does not really present itself in the Western Conference this year, it certainly does in the East.
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