Luke

@bballstrategy Haven’t quite applied to team specific draft capital, but beginnings of that work here (open.substack.com/pub/lukemccart…) and below

Anybody done / willing to do team analysis of expected value of draft assets based on most recent lg proposal? Expected to be implemented in '27? Analysis for '27 & beyond? How is team behavior expected to change in terms of winning behavior, draft asset trading?

This with more words open.substack.com/pub/lukemccart…

Using what I call Tanking Incentive Index (EPM a team gains by finishing one position worse in the standings), we can see the spikes where teams will be most incentivized to drop an additional spot in the standings. I suspect team records will cluster around these spikes

Trying to think about the NBA lottery reform proposals from a team strategy perspective (instead of a league governance one), to find potential value spots. I assume the odds tables for proposal 1 (blue), 2 (yellow), and 3 (purple) would be something close to these.

@haralabob Which aspect of the 2019 reform do you think made tanking worse? Unclear to me how much is the rule changing incentives vs. teams just adjusting to the meta that tanking advantageous generally

In 2019 they modified the lottery rules and that was an abject failure as well, it clearly made tanking worse. The bottom line is the draft and lottery are flawed at the root. If you were serious, you’d scrap the draft entirely, make every rookie a free agent, remove max salaries, and enforce a true hard cap. But they'll likely never do that, nor will they go with the wheel so instead they are fixated on how they can make sure teams don't tank their way out of the play-in to get a better chance at a top 3 pick which tells you all you need to know about the product and the people who run and own these teams. Think about how crazy it is that people would actually thinking about losing games on purpose to avoid playing in the playoffs. The league has had two major innovations of late - one of them was "The In Season Tournament" and the other is a Playin that is so revolutionary that people are convinced teams will tank their way out of it if it means they'll have a better than 2% chance to draft a star rookie. The league is cooked. Lets say they solve tanking at the very bottom, whats next? Apathy. What incentive will a middle of the road team have to compete every night over 82 games? They won't be in the playoff hunt they'll be guaranteed some lotto % so what incentives will they have to actually compete? I'm not sure anyone in the league office or even ownership has thought about that, but they should.

Really good stuff by Nik. And he mentions a really important limitation on my own valuation framework (it doesn’t answer how much a team *should* spend on a given player).

@matthewwinick I have McKeever projected in the ~$600k range this cycle. He’s probably starter level, but certainly not highest paid big on the market.

I've spent all week talking about the importance of grabbing bigs in the portal given how important the position is. But if Andrew McKeever with his 7% dunk rate and 28.3% FG percentage against Tier A comp gets paid CLOSE to the highest amount in the portal, we have an issue.

The conferences losing the most talent to the portal: Big East (13 players, $6.43M in NIL value), Mountain West (11 players, $5.58M in NIL value), SEC (11 players, $5.07M in NIL value). Power conferences account for 41 portal entrants ($19.59M total NIL).

Other value targets. Generally, the model probably doesn't handle players coming off of injury perfectly, so I think a few of those guys get weird NIL value projections.

Other value targets in the portal

Keene is a bit of a personal favorite of mine. Currently ranked 28th among portal entrants. Dude defends his ass off. Does all the little things. On a BPR per $ basis, he'll be one of the best values this cycle.

There are now 263 players in the college basketball transfer portal (per 247sports). We're probably around 10% of projected portal entrants, so it seems like a good time for an overview.

Avdalas sits atop the board, largely because the model sees him as a year 2 growth target. Had some NBA buzz early season that died down as he struggled with efficiency. All in all, I'd expect a pretty aggressive bidding war among the high majors for him this cycle.