The Pistons have now taken part in 14 NBA Draft lotteries and moved up once. They've dropped seven times, including Tuesday night from No. 1 to No. 5 in the Victor Wembanyama sweepstakes. Compare that to the Spurs, Tuesday night's winner, who have taken part in six lotteries and moved up in five of them. Karsch is fed up:
"Lotteries blow. They just effing blow. What’s the upside to this system? I got all kinds of better ways to do this."
Instead of a lottery, Karsch says the NBA should hold a tournament with the non-playoff teams at the end of the season. The winner would get the No. 1 pick and the runner-up would get No. 2, with the rest of the draft determined by the inverse order of the regular season standings.
Gator says that's a ridiculous idea where you "reward the team that wins a crap tournament." Karsch says "it’s less ridiculous than this effing system."
"A) it would be way more entertaining than a lottery, B) those teams would try and win. That would be compelling basketball. And you wouldn’t have a team dropping from 1 to 5. And I would give the two worst teams a bye so that they have a better chance to win it."
Gator says instead of getting rid of the lottery altogether, "you need to favor the odds a little bit more to the worst team in the league." The Pistons only had a 14 percent chance of winning it Tuesday night, despite losing an NBA-worst 65 games this season, compared to a 48 percent chance of dropping to 5. He also says "you need to cut the number of teams in the lottery."
"Instead of having every team that didn’t make the playoffs in the lottery, maybe it's just the bottom six teams in the league and you give better odds to the worst team in the league and then it falls in line after that. You let the ping pong balls fall as they may and the team with the worst record can do no worse than third in the draft."
Karsch just isn't having it: "The one thing about a random draw, we know that if there’s any randomness to it, Detroit’s going to get screwed. I want to nuke the whole idea of lotteries."
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