Quote:
Originally Posted by Jiri Hrdina
I have favored more complicated systems that reward winning down the stretch like MC has proposed. There have been several thought through proposals around something like that made. I can't recall the names of them but they are out there.
But I don't see that ever happening.
So I'm actually in agreement that randomizing the bottom 16 makes a lot of sense.
I hate tanking and that teams are rewarded for it. It's one of the worst things about sports now.
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There is absolutely no need to reward winning. Every player and team will always try to win every game, that's how they're wired. Winning is it's own reward. Nobody wants to finish last under normal circumstances, in fact teams would likely often fight quite hard just to avoid that embarrassment. Most of the time teams will also be motivated to "at least do better than THAT team", "at least be better than last season", "at least look competitive down the stretch" so fans think "maybe next season", and so buy more tickets and merch, etc etc.
Organizations would also likely spend more of the later parts of a bad seasons actively trying out things for next season. Bring up that exciting draft pick, shake up the lines, give the young goalie more starts. If that actually helps, good! If it doesn't, you lost nothing. As things are, there is incentive to just keep doing more of the thing that already killed your season, because once it's dead, you'd rather tank hard.
There are already massive incentives to always try to win. You only need to remove the one huge incentive against winning, and the rest would take care of itself.
Just let fans always cheer for their team and don't actively punish teams that don't tank. That's all, it's not that complicated.
What you could and probably should add is a system that considers previous draft success, so teams that have already gotten help from the draft have pressure to actually start doing something, and teams can't have an endless stream of bad luck.