Quote:
Originally Posted by dissentowner
Well, let's hear the solution because I can't think of one.
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Randomness is stupid. Just calculate what you want the reality to be, and then make that happen.
I would start by giving the picks out evenly over a 32 year cycle, and then moving teams down for championships, division titles and playoff rounds won.
Every team should, as a starting point, be picking top half every other year, top 4 every 8 years and top 8 every 4 years, etc. In theory you would pick exactly once in each of the 32 spots over a 32 year cycle. This in itself would fix a lot, a teams should be getting a fairly steady influx of young talent without a need to tank.
Now lets add support for non-successful teams.
If a team wins a championship, all their picks move down during the whole cycle, and for every division title and second round win you move down the next 8 years, every first round win moves you down for the next 4 years, and every conference final win moves you down for the next 16. This might push some of your low 1st round picks to become high 2nd round picks etc.
The effect of one year on one succesful team would be pretty small, but over time this would add up for the unsuccessful teams that never win everything (Flames), as successful teams would keep moving down around them year after year, sometimes multiple spots.
As there would be no difference between a 1st round loser and bottom of the standings, there would.be no incentive to tank. The only way to move up the draft is to not have meaningful success, and it would be a calculation that takes into consideration success in much longer time scales than just each individual year.
You wouldn't need to actually create 32 year cycle on day one of this system, but instead do a lottery formula which would consider both your previous draft positions and your previous success to hand out picks as evenly as.possible given those parameters. It would be pretty complicated, but absolutely doable.
Or you could just do the lottery one time, meaning each team would theoretically always know with pretty good accuracy where they would be picking each year quite a long time into the future. The downside of this is that you would have some outliers as some teams would for example get extra 1st overalls due to just having the right teams move down at the right time. Doing each year separately would help you control this.