A couple of anti-tanking suggestions from Jake Niall in the Age....Only ‘experimentation’ we need is with the draftJake Niall | August 6, 2009
Michael Voss has proposed a lottery for the bottom four, in which the draft order is plucked from a barrel; this is how basketball picks are allocated in America’s NBA.
I don’t like the lottery, which could conceivably place a team with 10 wins on the same footing as a basket case club with two victories. It isn’t terribly fair.
A venerated former premiership coach suggested a variation on the lottery, which I’ll call the round-15 solution. His system had the teams that had won four games or less by round 15 (when everyone would have played once) competing for the first draft pick over the final seven rounds. The team that won the most games (and/or percentage) would be the No. 1 pick, second best would be pick No. 2, etc.
The problem with this seven-round play-off, of course, is that the worst teams are excessively punished. While the incentive created for dead rubbers is a positive, it would defeat the socialistic ideal of the draft.
Even without priority picks, finishing last is a prize. The 16th club receives not just access to the best kid in the land, but first call on an uncontracted player in the pre-season draft; in 2000, St Kilda used the pre-season draft as a lever to recruit Fraser Gehrig and Aaron Hamill, while Carlton and Collingwood managed to land Nick Stevens and Shane O’Bree for nothing.
In the current finals and draft system, the least-attractive position is ninth. As Richmond fans would attest, ninth is the worst of all worlds. No early picks and no finals, the ninth and 10th teams are stuck in a mid-table purgatory.
There’s an argument to say that the ninth and 10th teams should be compensated in the draft, and the rewards to the bottom teams should be reduced. Under what I will term the ‘‘Richmond option’’, the teams that finish just outside the eight would be compensated by receiving the first pick in the second round.
The first round of the draft would remain as it is (but without priority picks), in reverse ladder order. But, once the second round starts, the ninth club is given pick 17, the 10th club pick 18, and so on. The current status quo of reverse ladder order would apply to teams in the eight. The bottom team would receive picks one and 24, which is still superior to the ninth club’s eight and 17, or the 10th team’s seven and 18. Reverse ladder order would resume after pick 24.
There is no perfect system that will allocate access to talent fairly, ensure an even competition, retain interest in late-season games and restore the public’s faith in games in which there is ‘‘experimentation’’.
There might be a better way than what we have now, though.
ANTI-TANKING DRAFT OPTIONSRICHMOND DRAFT (rewarding ninth)■ Priority picks are scrapped and the first round of the draft remains unchanged, in reverse ladder order, with the bottom team having pick one, the second-bottom team pick two and so forth.
■ But once the first round ends, it is the ninth-placed club that gets pick 17, the 10th team receives pick 18 and it continues in actual ladder order from 9-16 until the bottom club has pick 24.
■The draft picks of the top eight remain in reverse ladder order.
Why: The bottom teams are already well-rewarded, and it gives incentive to win games to clubs outside the eight. Ninth is the worst spot on the ladder in a draft system.
SEVEN-ROUND PLAY-OFF■ Proposed by a highly respected former premiership coach, this radical system would use round 15 as a cut-off date. Teams that had won four games or less would then compete for the top picks, with the spoils going to the ‘‘winner’’.
■ The bottom-four club that won the most games (and/or highest percentage) in those seven rounds would receive the first pick, the second-best pick two and so forth.
Why:It creates huge incentives for winning dead games. The downside is that it does not reward the worst-performed team.
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