Small Market NBA Teams Protect One Of Their Only Routes To Success – Forbes

In a shocking turn of events last week, NBA owners voted against proposed draft lottery reform, which would have diminished the disparity in chances of landing top picks and redistributed odds from the bottom three teams to other non-playoff teams, in theory giving less incentive to tank.

Reports prior to the vote suggested the 23 votes necessary to pass reform would be easily gathered by a margin of 29-1 or 28-2. However, a 17-13 ballot was delivered, largely due to what appears to have been a clandestine lobbying campaign by Sam Presti, general manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder, which play in league’s smallest market.

Small market teams largely represented the 13 teams that voted against reform (Utah, Washington, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, and Charlotte) as you can see from the following box plot.

*It’s worth noting, though, that removing the four teams in New York and Los Angeles would render the averages nearly identical.

Much of the reason for this voting pattern is due to the draft being a far more critical avenue to success for small market clubs. Superstars overwhelmingly drive team success in the NBA and—thanks to the NBA’s maximum individual contract, which effectively prevents teams from competing on price for players—landing those elite players in free agency is all but an impossibility for the Milwaukees and Charlottes of the league. The two shining paradigms of small market team success this century, the Spurs and Thunder, have done so in large part due to landing a superstar with a top draft pick and retaining him for the entirety of his career thanks to favorable CBA clauses that allow teams to offer their own players an extra year in free agency.

With free agency becoming increasingly critical and small market teams unable to lure new superstars (with the exception of Cleveland, which almost entirely has the coincidence of LeBron James’s birthplace to thank for his signing there), these teams certainly are at a disadvantage—no matter how much the NBA tries to dispel that notion. It’s a question of whether retaining a draft system that incentivizes a sizable portion of the league to tank away their entire season (as revenue sharing ensures that even the worst teams nearly break even) is the most optimal way to level the playing field. The alternative, in which the draft helps little and superstars flock to big markets and dominate, isn’t ideal either.

The NBA has by far the least parity of any of the four major sports leagues. Draft reform, such as the much-discussed “wheel” proposal certainly might help while also preventing tanking. However, there’s a better way to both stop tanking and give small market teams a chance, and it has nothing to do with the draft: Removing the max individual player contract would likely provide the best of both worlds.

Follow Jim Pagels on Twitter at @jimpagels

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