could we please stop winning

always suspected tater has fuzzy feet.

That's OK. I really didn't expect the sweat. When did Darko EVER work up a sweat except maybe from waving his towel from the bench? But would you mind sending the wrist band, anyhow?

No problem. You can give me your mailing address with a PM. Once I get the shipping and handling charges wired to my PayPal account, I'll get that wrist band shipped your way.

Muppets. I liked the guy who used the handle Darko M and just kept saying :

I just vant to play

I got kicked off the detnews forum for not closing out the strike through on my post....it put a line through everyone else's post. I guess I did it more than once.

Oh yea, that was fun. You could start a tag like <font color="yellow"> and then never close it. You could change the format of the entire forum. The good ole' days....

I don't know how many people do economics on this forums, so a couple of points. Firstly, its not a zero sum game. The sum of all turns is not zero. Secondly, its is a single game, played over multiple turns.
W L
W 2 1
L 1 0

But unlike Nash equilibria/game theory, there are more than two protagonists.

The NBA Draft order is the creation of a significant moral hazard. This is closest economic representation in the NBA of an event where people will throw short term expected value in return for the long term.

The Lottery is the NBA's counterbalance to this. By adding an element of chance, it becomes much harder for any single entity to rationalise the expected outcome of the event, much less prepare for it. In other words, the risk factor explodes. As profit rational entities, NBA teams will generally be risk averse. The presence of regulatory bodies and the demands of the revenue stream (read: fans) further cements this view.

Secondly, the lottery is a long term balancing activity - a counterweight to unbridled success. And its a rational decision - people want sports to be fair (relatively speaking, they actually want it to be 60% competitive). Nothing more, nothing less. It is not a reward for failure, but a sign that the NBA is cognisant of that teams failure and a desire to create a level playing field - for revenue of course. As many people have already mentioned, some teams are unable to attract talent through free agency. The Draft allows for that talent to pass through.

Sorry, I was at work, so it was a hurried exercise.

Unbridled success is a very value laden - I am speaking casually, not in pure jargon. If we take a really simple agent utility optimisation argument to the NBA, then I see the Draft something like this:

At the end of an NBA season, each team, based on their outcome of the season, gets a number - counted, by two, from 60.
No1=60
No2=58 etc etc

Without having any real numbers in front of me, lets say the 1st draft order has a EV of 30, and I'll ignore the value of the 2nd round.
1st draft
1 pick - 30
2nd - 29 etc

With nothing else changed, the impact of the draft is to make worse teams, more competitive. Year on year, they can continue to improve through the draft, but the closer they get to the top, the lesser the impact is on their success.This is the idea of the draft. It isn't a reward. There are no medals for a first draft pick - only the knowledge that you are not delivering.

Fair/egalitarian are both probably wrong in this instance. Its like an optimum outcome, reducing the spread of utility, increasing total utility.

My application of Moral Hazard here was really simple. A rational team tanking, with none of the stop gaps the NBA puts in place, gains the additional utility of a 1st draft pick, but because they know the value of the outcome, there is no risk - a utility maximising agent. The other teams in the NBA lose that as a possible outcome, and their EU for the draft is reduced. There is still positive utility should the team not get the 1st pick, and this impact is again passed on.

The lottery, and other measures, reduce the ability of this agent to effectively measure the expected utility of tanking v (say) doing well and making the 1st round of the playoffs. They will be unable to determine whether additional revenue will have more value than a draft pick which they cannot predict.

I don't mind the reference of the draft lottery as a zero sum game. The sum does add up to zero if you base it off of the EV of each team and no matter how many times you play the game, the global outcomes add up the same. The way that you play the game is that you would tank as much as your reputation and fans can tolerate to increase your probability of getting a better value.

As far as "moral hazard", it doesn't meet the strict definition, but it is similar enough. There's probably a name for the dynamic that he was referring to here. The incentive structure is set up in a way that rewards undesired behavior. Others have made the same comparison (e.g. http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/6390/malcolm-gladwell-the-moral-hazard-of-the-nba-draft).

i guess you're right, everything moves on.
but we shouldn't forget where we came from.
and it's good that cj, slip, webz and max are here. they have done a good job.
but it's also true that the foundation of this forum are guys like b-bills.
and your sustained rudeness to him after all these years over an imagined slight is a little too hard for me to swallow.
you're mad at me. he did little, said little outside of the obvious. sometimes we can no longer see the forest for the trees.
you're success in here, it's foundation was in large part due to a lot of smart witty guys leaving the news site and coming here.
they did it, we did it, bills did it, because we liked you. you were funny. and we wanted to see you succeed.
but it's not so funny when you diatribe about a 'no haggling site' and then go all "clarence darrow" on your oldest supporters.
it's uncouth. and in my case i didn't respond because the quick turn towards ugliness was beneath both of us. it lacked dignity.
and brother - look around, you're the only one in here bullying folks at the moment.
it's not right even if you don't know it. and imo you owe b-bills an apology. it's misdirected anger. and it's a poor read on human nature.
the guy was reaching out not rejecting you. and by-the by, many of us have other things prominent in our lives.
with that, as i'm sure you won't mind, i'll be checking out. good luck and godspeed.

agreed with most of that G.
but it's your holier than thou attitude toward a little tanking that started this.
I've never found rasc rofl funny. rarely have I seen him go for a sock to the gut punch line.
bright sharp level headed financially all over the place decent describe rasc.
*
limit Panda and P99 to one post per thread.

If people don't want me posting thats fine.

Pm me about it.

The value can be arbitrary - as it was in my example.

G-Man take care..........I'll miss your posts.............