Motivation: As a Red Wings fan, I've experienced the entitlement of a team capable of staying competitive for over a decade, followed by the unfamiliar frustration of a team that's not used to being bad. My fanbase is split between those [rightfully] wanting to win games because of pro sports' competitive spirit and pride, and those [rightfully] wanting to tank for the chance at a better future. Notice I called both sides right: I don't blame the fans for their divide, but the system creates it nonetheless.
Purpose of the lottery: I think the draft and lottery have a couple purposes and I want to analyze whether it's accomplishing them.
1: Distribute top talent fairly to all teams
2: Create parity by making the worst teams better
3: Discourage tanking
Odds: What I've been hearing a lot lately is "you NEED a top 3 drafted player to compete for a Cup." I'm going to accept that premise without questioning it to simplify things. But it's also important to remember that a top 3 drafted player is obviously not sufficient by itself- you need quality depth and support.
Lottery odds are, for the last place team for example, 18.5%, 16.5%, 14.4% for 1st, 2nd, 3rd pick. Added up, that's 49.4% chance at a lottery pick.
The key is that since it's a probability, it doesn't really make sense to look at a single year. It's 50/50, you might win it or you might not. But probabilities work for averaging over time. So the important number is 1/49.4%, which means the last place team will win a top 3 lottery pick on average once in 2.02 years.
Do this math for all positions, and we see it will take, on average,
[TBODY]
[/TBODY]years for a team in a given position to get a lottery pick.
** This is the main point of the thread. I think this is a much more useful number to look at than anything else, because it breaks the lottery down and simplifies, with the "prize" being a lottery pick, what it takes to win in terms of time spent as a losing team.
Additional analysis with some subjectivity...
I'm going to split non-playoff teams into "bad" 1-7 and "bubble" 8-15.
- The lottery has been this way since 2016, and we've seen wins by #13, #8, and #12. So out of 9 potential lottery picks, 3 were won by bubble teams. We can see it in the odds and we've seen it happen in reality. When we talk about teams refusing to tank and staying a bubble team forever- such a team will get a lottery pick, on average, once in 14 years, while staying in the better half of non-playoff teams.
- For bad teams, tanking, or losing a game on purpose, has the potential of changing the expected value by 1. In a given year, it's a crapshoot (out of those 9 potential lottery picks, only 2 were won by bottom 3 teams). But as far as the year-to-year average goes, it doesn't matter much if you're dead last or 4th to last. If you're a bad team for 5 years you should get a lottery pick regardless of your specific standing.
- The way I see it you can rebuild one of two ways. 1: You can have a bad team with no depth, finish in the bottom half of non-playoff standings, and take on average 3 years to win a lottery pick. Then take several(?) more years to build the surrounding depth necessary to compete for a cup. 2: You can have a bubble team with decent depth but lacking high end talent, finish in the top half of non-playoff standings, and take on average 14 years to win the lottery. From this it seems like method 1 is a bit faster, but there is a lot of fuzziness because no matter which way you choose, everything has to go right. I'd like to encourage method 2 (i.e. discourage "tanking" even more), but maybe the lottery odds need to be adjusted some more for that to happen.
Ok I already spent too much time on this so go ahead hfboards tear it apart if you want.
Purpose of the lottery: I think the draft and lottery have a couple purposes and I want to analyze whether it's accomplishing them.
1: Distribute top talent fairly to all teams
2: Create parity by making the worst teams better
3: Discourage tanking
Odds: What I've been hearing a lot lately is "you NEED a top 3 drafted player to compete for a Cup." I'm going to accept that premise without questioning it to simplify things. But it's also important to remember that a top 3 drafted player is obviously not sufficient by itself- you need quality depth and support.
Lottery odds are, for the last place team for example, 18.5%, 16.5%, 14.4% for 1st, 2nd, 3rd pick. Added up, that's 49.4% chance at a lottery pick.
The key is that since it's a probability, it doesn't really make sense to look at a single year. It's 50/50, you might win it or you might not. But probabilities work for averaging over time. So the important number is 1/49.4%, which means the last place team will win a top 3 lottery pick on average once in 2.02 years.
Do this math for all positions, and we see it will take, on average,
| 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 6 | 9 | 10 | 12 | 15 | 20 | 30 |
** This is the main point of the thread. I think this is a much more useful number to look at than anything else, because it breaks the lottery down and simplifies, with the "prize" being a lottery pick, what it takes to win in terms of time spent as a losing team.
Additional analysis with some subjectivity...
I'm going to split non-playoff teams into "bad" 1-7 and "bubble" 8-15.
- The lottery has been this way since 2016, and we've seen wins by #13, #8, and #12. So out of 9 potential lottery picks, 3 were won by bubble teams. We can see it in the odds and we've seen it happen in reality. When we talk about teams refusing to tank and staying a bubble team forever- such a team will get a lottery pick, on average, once in 14 years, while staying in the better half of non-playoff teams.
- For bad teams, tanking, or losing a game on purpose, has the potential of changing the expected value by 1. In a given year, it's a crapshoot (out of those 9 potential lottery picks, only 2 were won by bottom 3 teams). But as far as the year-to-year average goes, it doesn't matter much if you're dead last or 4th to last. If you're a bad team for 5 years you should get a lottery pick regardless of your specific standing.
- The way I see it you can rebuild one of two ways. 1: You can have a bad team with no depth, finish in the bottom half of non-playoff standings, and take on average 3 years to win a lottery pick. Then take several(?) more years to build the surrounding depth necessary to compete for a cup. 2: You can have a bubble team with decent depth but lacking high end talent, finish in the top half of non-playoff standings, and take on average 14 years to win the lottery. From this it seems like method 1 is a bit faster, but there is a lot of fuzziness because no matter which way you choose, everything has to go right. I'd like to encourage method 2 (i.e. discourage "tanking" even more), but maybe the lottery odds need to be adjusted some more for that to happen.
Ok I already spent too much time on this so go ahead hfboards tear it apart if you want.
