How do you ELIMINATE TANKING?

I think the existing system is pretty good. The bottom teams have to get the best players in the draft in an attempt to make all teams competitive. By having a lottery, it eliminates the guarantees of tanking for a draft position.

Perhaps you could lock in the draft position with a month left in the season. That way, losing end-of-season games would not improve your chances of getting a pick.

That's actually the best idea I've read so far........

I think you will find that NFL fans are far more interested in the game than a large chunk of soccer fans. This is particularly true of international fan bases. Soccer is the home of the fairweather fan, the plastic fan. And I personally think that it is an entirely bad thing that Man U wins the EPL title 2 in every 3 years. How is that a competition? I watch soccer, but we play against teams whose wages are set up to 3x the wages of our best players. That is a frustrating environment to compete in, and it is getting worse. Eventually it will start to kill the sport. I also think it is pathetic, because it is teams like the Latics, the Swansea's who play the most beautiful football. And no one cares about it. I don't care if my Spurs don't win a title, it would be lovely. But I want the title race to be an exciting as the relegation race, because most years, it isn't

Yes and no. The EPL is such a successful league because it is widely accepted to be the most competitive and highly skilled league in the world. The 'super teams' have just led to a concentration of fairweather fans. They are irrelevant. Broad fan bases are what make sports successful, by concentrating fan bases into a few teams, the whole league suffers. La Liga is widely known as an uncompetitive league. I personally think it is a total joke. People who like soccer will watch soccer. The EPL is the best league. If all that was televised was Blackburn Rovers, Norwich and Aston Villa, I guarantee that there would be more fans of those teams.

One proposal discussed was to have all teams that miss the playoffs get equal odds of winning the lottery. I rather like that plan.

There is then no benefit to losing games late in the season (unless you are barely in the playoffs and you actually try to lose your way out... but that's not a good gamble I don't think).

I don't think I'll find that. There are a lot of plastic fans but that's just because there are so many fans, the same goes for the NFL. The fan culture in soccer goes alot deeper than the fan culture of the NFL or any other sport.

No, it's the fairweather fans who matter. The hardcore fans will follow no matter what the league does but the fairweather fans needs to be serviced. A fairweather fan who adds revenue is worth more than a hardcore fan who doesn't.

People keep saying this without providing a convincing case. And no it doesn't. It becomes the most successful and prosperous league in the world.

That's short term revenue v long term revenue. We could argue about this, but bottom line, for me, is that volatile revenue (aka fairweather fans) only happens to the big club, furthering the hegemony and continue the circle of crap. Check out the revenue distribution of the EPL and have a look how that goes over the last 20 years. It's a joke.

Debatable. In fact, only a small number of clubs actually make money in the EPL. And it ain't Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea. Arsenal does, but only because of their huge property business on the side.

So I don't really understand what measure of 'success' you are applying.

I don't really see how it's a joke unless you assume large differences is a negative which is the point I'm debating. Looking at the extremes where one team wins every game every season or where the field is leveled instantly so all teams are equally good all the time (if a team wins a game their two best players is moved to the opposing team, penalized with -8p next game or whatever the solution would be) only tells me the optimum is somewhere in between, but I have no idea if it's where the PL is or where the NFL is.

Here is an example from another American league:

Guess which year? It's written in 1958. Still, the MLB is doing pretty good and has actually had a higher growth than the NFL during the last 10 years.

My metric was a combination of revenue, media attention, total team value, fan base size and popularity mixed together in my head by a formula to advanced to describe. In all seriousness, I just recalled some Forbes (lol it's actually true) list of the most successful sports leagues and it was topped by the Premiership and the NFL. The metric used was something like average or total team value. It might be off but if I would have ranked the leagues before I'd seen the list I'd put those two at the top so it passed the sniff test for me.

Don't get me wrong, I like the NFL and NBA model alot better than the PL model and I have no idea which one is the best. Heck, I even enjoy the tanking concept since it creates some buzz and alot of good jokes. I'm just opposing the conventional wisdom that competitive balance is of such great importance people tend to claim. It's clearly important to some degree but the payoff function around the optimum may be very flat and compared to other factors generating fan interest, it might have very little influence.

I did behavioural economics for a while, and you are pretty much spot on. People do not like a perfectly balanced league. They like their team to be slightly better than the opposing team at the time, like a 60-40 split. Because this way, they can take comfort before the event that they are likely to win, and if they lose, rely on an argument that the teams were evenly matched.

But the important thing to take from this is that having dominant forces within a league is less optimal than a perfectly balanced one.

On the discussion of eliminating tanking, imagine what the games would look like if the competition for the final playoff spots came down to only one or two games between four teams every year. If the 8th seed was <12 games behind the first seed near every year. That for me is exciting - and for a team, going to the playoffs has a higher payoff in revenue than a slightly higher draft pick. Tanking has a poor payoff matrix compared to competeting and becomes less widespread.

I really like the idea of locking in lottery positions mid-season. Building on that, what if we did this: divide the number of lottery balls in half. Award half the lottery balls to the teams based on their standings as you normally would, but at the All Star break. Award the remaining lottery balls to the teams who don't make the playoffs based on their post-allstar break record. So the bottom dweller that has the best post-allstar record gets the most number of balls from the second bag.

The only way a team can tank for the most number of balls would be to tank from the get-go for the worst record by the all-star break and then go on a tear for the rest of the season. Then again, that's eerily similar to what the Pistons did this year, albeit unintentionally.

All in all, so long as you have a system that tries to balance talent distribution by favoring losing teams, the teams will always jockey around for a worse record in hopes of improving their odds. I don't think you can fully eliminate tanking because of that. However, you can reduce it somewhat by making incremental changes.

I've been a lifelong soccer fan until I moved to Michigan in the late 90s. It is true that in most leagues in Europe there are a handful of teams that have a lock on championships, and these are your usual powerhouses. But, other teams also have very solid fanbases, even though they have absolutely no shot at winning the title. These teams have built their reputation on other things, such as never losing to a contender on their home court etc. They also have other avenues for success. Each league has a tournament that runs in parallel to the actual league. There are also opportunities for the non-contender teams to make it to Euroleague championships even if they don't win the title each year. With all of this, comes money from TV broadcasts, advertisings and FIFA/UEFA rewards. So, even if a team is not good enough to win a title, there are other doors that above average play in the league unlocks for them. NBA is quite one-dimensional when it comes to that.

Also, what most U.S. people don't realize is that leagues like EPL or Bundesliga or La Liga are not the only leagues in their respective countries. There is a tiered model where there are several lower level leagues, and at the end of the each season, the bottom 2-4 teams are demoted to a lower league. In the lower leagues, the revenue, prestige and attendance are also lower and your television coverage goes down the toilet. So, there are some very very tough games against bottom dwellers towards the end of the season. I have seen bottom dwellers destroy championship contenders just to avoid demotion more times than I can remember. Think about the Bobcats spanking San Antonio Spurs or the Heat despite all the starters playing. If the NBA and NBADL were truly integrated and the bottom 3 teams from the NBA were sent to NBADL every year, it would be a completely different ball game. But you can't do that because they are not structured that way.

Pertaining to the last post............

Firstly, what teams do you support? In the EPL etc?

I have heard this relegation argument a couple of times. I personally don't like it.

Secondly, there are two reasons that system can never work in the NBA.
- The EPL doesn't have a 'draft' system. They rely on club owned youth development and scouting.
- The damage that comes from relegation is irreperable. The financial cost is abhorrent and has led to many teams going into administration. The way they can work around this is by having very flexible wage costs. Teams in peril of being relegated have strict wage caps. NBA teams with $60 million dollar salary burdens could never shoulder this risk.

This is a good point.
If bottom feeding teams rarely get top picks, than the system which is designed to promote parity is flawed anyway. The league may as well focus their attention on eliminating taking rather than ensuring that the worst teams get the top picks since it doesn't work that irregardless.

Out of all the truly bad teams this year, I'm proud to say that our Pistons seemed to put forth the greatest effort to 'not tank' (even though many of us wanted them to). As bad as they sucked, I'm convinced that they tried to win despite not looking like they were at times..

Hopfully, the basketball gods will reward our Pistons with some karma when the pingpong balls fall into place.

I'm originally from Turkey, and the teams I followed were mostly in that league. It is structured in almost exactly the same way other Euro leagues are structured.

Also, I didn't mean to come out as advocating NBA adopting the relegation system. It really doesn't fit here at all. I was simply pointing out that when there is a definite and tangible penalty for being at the bottom of the league, it strongly discourages tanking. The only way I can see the concept being adopted at the NBA would be something along the lines of bottom teams losing lottery odds or something like that.

Also, I disagree that the damage of relegation is irreperable. I've seen several teams go down a level and then come back to the premier league after a few years. Yes, some of them are hurt forever, but most continue on.

Again, a system like that won't work in NBA who has trouble maintaining profitability for 30 teams.

It would really reward teams with injured superstars that recover by all-star break.

The playoff teams would still pick in the same order as the current system. If superstars recover by the all-star break, then they should lead their teams into the playoffs.