NBA commissioner Adam Silver has announced that the draft lottery will stay in place for now, but the league may change that in a couple of years time.
The NBA draft is often a team’s best chance to rebuild if they’re facing uncertain times. For a franchise who have been stuck at the bottom of their conference and have no foreseeable hope of contending in the playoffs, the draft lottery gives them an opportunity to get lucky and go after the top rookie prospect of their choice.
When a player with the potential to anchor a franchise comes along, such as Karl-Anthony Towns or Jahlil Okafor of this year’s class, every team in the lottery will be praying that they land the top pick. Currently, the team with the worst record in the league is rewarded with the best chance of winning that highly desirable first overall pick.
Or, if you’re the Cleveland Cavaliers, you just somehow get incredibly lucky by landing three of the last four number one picks.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has now spoken to the Boston Globe to confirm that the lottery will indeed be in place for the next two years, and made the following comments:
"“There’s a recognition that the lottery is only one aspect of how to build a team,” Silver said following Thursday’s Hall of Fame Family Reunion dinner. “And given the inflow of the new television money next season and the large increase in the cap, ultimately the owners concluded that while we think we need to take a fresh look at the lottery system, let’s wait and look at the system holistically once the new money comes in.Because there’s always unintended consequences and at least everyone understands the rules of the road right now. I think we need to be deliberate about any changes we make, so we’ll turn back to it, but we’re going to leave things as is for now.”"
When asked by the Boston Globe how long it may be until the NBA considers making another change, Silver said that “It will be a couple of years. We will have this very significant increase in the cap next year and I think we’ll have a sense then of how our teams react and what sort player movement we see.”
The cap increase that Silver is referring to is the estimated salary cap of $90 million for the 2016-17 season. It will give teams an awful lot of money to spend come free agency, so perhaps teams near the bottom of the NBA pecking order — who don’t necessarily have players on big contracts already — will have a chance to splash out and land a star player. If this happens and we see more balance restored around the league, then any changes to the draft system can be made accordingly.
Until the NBA decide to consider another possible change to the lottery system, though, we need to accept the fact that some teams are still going to persist with a losing culture.
“If we can’t win anything anyway, why not just lose as much as possible and pray together for the number one pick?” That’s still going to be the mindset of struggling franchises at times, especially when it gives them a chance to acquire a rookie with the potential to become a star.
However, in the meantime, we can also look forward to the increase in salary cap. Because not only does it mean a lot more players are going to make a lot more money, it also creates the possibility for small-market teams to sign big-market players. As a result, their fortunes could change in an instant.
Let’s wait and see what happens in the summer of 2016.
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