Draft rules in modern sports have always been a balancing act of incentives for leagues.
You don't want your team to blatantly flop and produce an unwatchable product for fans, but you also don't want your team to fall so far back that they lose all hope, at least in a league where relegation isn't an issue. . The draft lottery is the most common way to balance these two aspects, and currently the NBA, NHL, and MLB all use this format.
But the Women's Professional Hockey League may be doing something better.
The nascent Women's Hockey League, created through the merger of the Premier Hockey Federation and the Women's Professional Hockey Players Association, is currently playing its first year. The NBA announced its playoff and draft formats on Wednesday, the latter of which included ideas familiar to some hockey fans from the past decade.
The idea was proposed by statistician Adam Gold at the 2012 Sloan Analytics Conference, and the Gold Plan has since generated supporters and detractors. PWHL explains:
Once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, all subsequent games (including all regular season games beginning after the team's elimination) will be eligible for a “Draft” using the league's standard point system that awards three points for regulation. Start earning “Order Points”. 2 points for a win, overtime or shootout win, 1 point for an overtime or shootout loss, and 0 points for a regulation loss. The team with the most draft order points at the end of the regular season receives the first pick in each round of the draft. The non-playoff team with the fewest draft order points picks No. 2 in each round of the draft.
Basically, the team with the most wins after being eliminated from the playoffs gets the highest pick. Bad teams get a head start by getting eliminated early, but eventually they have to win. In the case of the PWHL, which consists of six teams, the competition is between two teams, but you can imagine how this would be in a larger league.
How will the Gold Plan be rolled out in MLB, for example?
The great thing about the Gold Plan is that it solves the unsolvable problems of modern draft orders. Teams like last year's Oakland Athletics and this season's Detroit Pistons have zero incentive to actually win once it becomes clear that they are not competitive. It's true that they want their players to improve, but winning ends up being a negative.
The NBA and MLB are trying to reduce that lack of incentive with the draft lottery, but the core problem isn't that teams have an incentive to lose, it's that there is no incentive to win. For A players, tanking was separate from the important point of not spending money. The Gold Plan could theoretically change that.
For visualization, here are the teams with the five worst records in MLB last season.
1. Oakland Athletics: 50-112
2. Kansas City Royals: 56 wins, 106 losses
3. Colorado Rockies: 59 wins, 103 losses
4. Chicago White Sox: 61-101
t5. Washington Nationals: 71-91
t5.St. Louis Cardinals: 51 wins, 91 losses
And here's how the Gold plan works for each team.
1. Royals (lost on September 13th): 15 wins
2. Athletics (August 26): 12 wins
3. White Sox (September 10): 6 wins
4. Nationals (September 18): 5 wins
5. Cardinals (September 20): 4 wins
6. Rockies (September 20): 3 wins
Suddenly, the end of the season looks much more interesting for MLB's worst team.
Gold plan is not perfect
Of course, there are counterarguments to this. The biggest factor is the motivation of the players themselves. It's easy to imagine players on bad teams going through the motions in perfect check, but that's not how professional sports work.
A player on a bad team is trying hard to make sure his team doesn't become a bad cause. Because that will lead to the end of your career. Team owners and general managers may have no problem with, or even encourage, stuffing it in, but you're giving a struggling player a shot at helping the team's draft position who might be out after a few games. So I try to tell them that it's okay to strike out. A few months.
In other words, the Gold Plan solves the problem of incentivizing losing for teams, but that was never a problem for actual players. The Athletics did poorly last year and didn't want to take a draft pick. Good draft picks are a perk of the process, and they wanted to do it cheap.
There's also the simple fact that the Gold plan still rewards bad teams. Sure, games have to be won eventually, but teams can still reap big rewards even if they are eliminated early. In the example above, the A's are the team with the worst record, the best lottery odds, and he is selected as his second pick, two spots ahead of last year's final ranking.
That's not great, but the purpose of the Gold plan isn't to end tanking, it's to allow you to watch games against bad teams again. Fans want to see their team play for something, and this isn't complicated. Also, they enjoy draft picks to some degree, so it's not really a bug for bad teams to get picks.
And then there's the trade deadline. If you're a fan of big trades, where bad teams release superstars in exchange for picks or young talent, you won't benefit from the Gold Plan. The Nationals might have been more hesitant to trade away Juan Soto in 2022 if they needed him to ensure they kept their top draft pick next year.
There really isn't a perfect way to build a draft order when some teams are concerned about both cost and quality. At some point, it might even be worth giving all non-playoff teams equal odds on the top pick and letting the ping pong ball fall wherever it may. But at least the PWHL is trying to do something interesting with its youth.
