Last night, the Philadelphia 76ers lost to drop their record to 0-14, inching ever closer to the worst start in NBA history.
Now, the idea of player drafts in the US has always been that teams pick in reverse order in the interest of competitive balance. Given the fact that the Sixers have had numerous lottery picks over the last few years, and are still awful, why should their ownership continue to be rewarded with high draft picks for this incompetence? Why shouldn’t a team that finishes dead last, and appears to make little effort to avoid that fate, be replaced by a lower tiered team who is actually trying to compete?
Imagine if Nerlens Noel, Jahlil Okafor, Joel Embiid, and so on actually were property of other NBA teams instead of stuck in this mess? Or if Philadelphia had to either pay the same salaries while playing in a minor league, or figure out a way to sell them off to NBA teams? Wouldn’t that be a significantly more entertaining situation than the one Sixer fans currently find themselves in? Wouldn’t the lass of NBA revenue streams give Sixers management incentive to stop this mess and field a competitive team?
Seriously, why not do this for any league? I know it would change a lot, and require us to rethink the way leagues work in the US, but it would make things so much more interesting, watching owners risk losing their revenue streams and have to compete to get them back, and dealing with wide-open free agency of players being relegated?
Most of all, making billionaire owners responsible for the on field competitiveness of their team! I’m for that.
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