Mark Cuban Had Some Radical Ideas For Draft Reform Shot Down By The NBA


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The NBA adopted some significant rule changes regarding the draft lottery this offseason in order to try and prevent teams from tanking. The new rules lessen the odds of the worst teams in the league to land the top pick and make it more likely that there will be significant shuffling of teams from their lottery slot to actual draft slot in June.

However, there are plenty that wonder if this will actually succeed in persuading teams not to tank. There is still incentive to get the best odds possible even if those odds aren’t as strong as they once were. Among those that have questions about the effectiveness of the new rules is Mavs owner Mark Cuban, who was the one owner that abstained from voting — Oklahoma City was the lone “no” vote on the changes that passed 28-1-1.

As Cuban recently told ESPN’s Tim MacMahon, he abstained because he thought he had made two stronger proposals than the one eventually adopted by the NBA into law.

According to Cuban, he pitched two different systems to the Board of Governors that failed to get any traction, but he believes would have significantly better impacts on forcing teams not to tank. The first one would have created a “pool system” for rookies where each team would have received a set amount of money for, essentially, rookie free agency based off of their record.

“The team with the worst record gets the most money and the team with the best record gets the least money,” Cuban said. “It’s like a free agency. It makes it a lot harder to tank because you don’t know if you get the best players if you’re horrible all the time. Nobody liked that at all, not a single person.”

The other option Cuban presented was a scenario in which the worst team in the league would automatically get slotted into the third or fourth draft position, to incentivize teams at the very bottom to try hard at the end of the season to avoid having the worst record.

“Now all of the sudden, if it’s close at the end, you’re going to see teams play as hard as they can because if they end up with the worst record, they don’t get the best pick,” Cuban said, explaining the logic of his idea.”You basically eliminate them from getting the best player. Everybody else would just be the way it is now.

“Adam didn’t like that. That never got to the board of directors, but that one was my favorite. I brought up [the other proposal], but after that one got shot down, I didn’t bring up the other one. When I got no response on the one, I just dropped the other because it was obvious that what they had proposed was going to pass.”


Neither idea got off the ground, but it gives you a look into the mind of Cuban and how he’s willing to take far more “outside the box” approaches to issues in the NBA than most other owners. The rookie free agency idea is a more defined version of what some have called for, which is to make rookies simply free agents when they enter the league and abolish the draft completely — as Stan Van Gundy suggested.

Cuban’s system would create a rookie free agency prior to regular free agency, in which teams get an allotted amount of money — not dissimilar to the international pool money MLB teams receive — to spend on rookies. It would give worse teams a chance at signing the best players because they have the most money, but rookies could also conceivably take less money to play for a team they feel is a better fit for them.

That idea would be fascinating to see put into practice, but considering it got shot down quickly, per Cuban, I wouldn’t expect such a radical idea to be put into actual practice any time soon.

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