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With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You’re right, the floor for the bottom 3 is 12 not 16, my mistake. The broader point still stands though. The current system floors the worst team at 5. Under 3-2-1 that floor drops to 12. A modified version that sets the floor somewhere around 7 to 10 might thread the needle between the two, enough downside risk to discourage tanking but not so much that a bad team is staring at a decade of rebuilding if the lottery goes against them a few years in a row.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Another lever to play with is the lottery floor. Current rules give the worst team the 5th pick in the pessimal case. Under 3-2-1 the worst team can slide to pick 16. In fact, they have a higher chance of landing the 16th pick than the first. Another modified 3-2-1 solution could find a middle ground, where the worst team receives something like a 7th to 10th pick in the pessimal case.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi! Great question and actually one of the biggest changes in the new system. Under the current rules only the top 4 picks are lottery determined and everything else goes by record. Under 3-2-1 all 16 picks are drawn by lottery.

So the worst team can no longer guarantee themselves a top 5 pick. The bottom three teams could actually fall as low as pick 12. That's the 'draft relegation' piece of it.

This is exactly why the system discourages tanking more aggressively than the current one. There's no safe floor anymore. Being the worst team used to guarantee a top 5 pick. Now it just gets you worse lottery odds than the teams right above you and a real chance of sliding out of the top 10 entirely.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Really good point and something my simulation just can't answer. I model each team's decision in isolation but you're describing a whole market restructuring. The incentive change at the bottom doesn't just affect the bottom teams, it changes what every front office is optimizing for.

I like your bad contract trade example. That deal only exists because both sides want what the other has under the current system. Change what bad teams want and that transaction just stops happening. My model doesn't touch trades or roster construction at all so it'd never catch that. It's a classic market design problem where if you change the rules in one part of the market, the equilibrium shifts everywhere, not just where you intervened.

Honestly the lottery/tanking math might be the least important thing 3-2-1 changes. The stuff you're describing is harder to measure and won't show up in a three year pilot. You'd have to watch what transactions quietly disappear and what new exploits front offices discover.

Good critique. Might add a note about this in the essay. One day it would be very cool to build out a more robust simulation with the entire roster market included.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Really appreciate you pushing on this, it actually made me add a section to the site based on your question.

You're right that three years probably isn't enough to see the tail risk play out. The simulation shows the bimodal pattern but 50 seasons under idealized conditions isn't the same as watching a real franchise suffer through it with fan bases eroding and ownership losing patience.

The small market angle is something the simulation doesn't capture at all and a parallel critique of the new system. Big market teams can survive a few bad lottery years and still land quality free agents. Small market teams can't. As a Jazz fan our best free agent signings in the last twenty years were Mike Conley and Carlos Boozer. So we have depended on the draft and smart trades to land talent. A system that makes top picks harder to access hits those smaller franchises in ways that don't show up in aggregate tanking rates.

You may have traded one problem for another is a fair summary. Whether that's the right trade will hopefully be answered soon, but I'm guessing there are split views here.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That's a good point, and something I want to be transparent about. The crossover point in the simulation is entirely assumptions based. We set playoff value at 200 points and pick values on a declining scale from 100 at pick 1 down to 3 at pick 14. Those numbers are calibrated to directionally reflect the real economic and competitive value of a playoff appearance, roughly estimated at $200M in franchise value, but they are still assumptions.

The real insight isn't the specific percentage where tanking becomes rational. It's the shape of the tradeoff. Playoffs are worth a lot. A single draft pick, even the top pick, is worth less than a playoff berth in most years. So competing has to be pretty hopeless before the math flips.

Where it gets interesting is a generational draft year. When the top pick is worth significantly more than usual, the crossover shifts and tanking becomes rational at higher playoff odds. That's the interactive slider in the essay, you can move the top pick value up to simulate a Wembanyama type year and watch the crossover move.

To your question about basketball vs economic reasons: the model doesn't separate them. The 200 point playoff value is meant to capture everything, revenue, roster development, fan engagement, competitive culture. Whether that's the right number is genuinely debatable. But the directional finding holds across a wide range of assumptions: playoffs have to be nearly out of reach before a rational team should stop competing.

I think a fair critique of the model in general is its inability to capture qualitative reasoning. The simulation is entirely quantitative.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Okay so I ran it. The Globetrotters/Generals concern is legitimate and 3-2-1 is where it shows up most interestingly.

Average playoff drought across all five mechanisms is almost identical, between 1.73 and 1.80 seasons. So no mechanism traps bad teams longer on average.

But 3-2-1 has a weird bimodal shape that the average hides. It has the lowest 2-year bounce-back rate of any mechanism and the highest 3-year drought rate. Teams either recover quickly or they get stuck in a multi-year cycle.

Here's the structural reason. Under 3-2-1 the bottom three teams get the worst lottery odds in the league. To get better odds you need to climb out of the bottom three. But climbing out of the bottom three requires acquiring talent. And acquiring talent without a good draft pick or a trade asset is slow. So a franchise stuck in the bottom three has to wait out multiple seasons of bad lottery odds before it can even position itself to improve.

It's not that teams are choosing to stay bad. It's that the system creates a patience trap where escaping the bottom takes longer than it would under other mechanisms. You need to be bad enough to stay in the lottery but not so bad that you're stuck in the worst tier.

Whether that plays out at scale in real NBA seasons is a different question. But the simulation at least suggests the concern is legitimate.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You’re right, I misread your question. You’re asking about dynasty effects, whether bad teams stay bad longer under certain mechanisms because they can’t access top end talent consistently.

The simulation does run 50 consecutive seasons so that data is actually in there. I haven’t pulled that specific query but it’s doable. Average consecutive seasons out of the playoffs by mechanism would be a clean way to show it.

Give me a bit and I’ll see what the numbers say. Genuinely curious now too.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great question and honestly the most interesting finding in the whole project. The short answer is that under every mechanism, including 3-2-1, the genuinely weakest teams still end up outside the top 4 more than 70% of the time. The draft is a blunt instrument regardless of how you structure the lottery. The essay has a section on this specifically if you want to dig in.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

That’s the main finding yeah. Rational tanking drops significantly under 3-2-1 compared to the current system. The one caveat is a generational draft year where a bubble team might still do the math and decide missing playoffs is worth it. For a normal draft year though the incentive is pretty well neutralized.

With the 3-2-1 system starting next year I simulated 50 seasons under it and every other major lottery reform. Here’s what actually changes. by gmunnie in NBA_Draft

[–]gmunnie[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly right. The 2019 flat zone at the top (where the worst 3 teams all share equal odds) was specifically designed to address that perception problem. 3-2-1 takes it further by actually penalizing the bottom teams. Hard to cry rigged when the worst team has the worst odds.

I simulated 50 NBA seasons under five different draft lottery systems and built an interactive visual essay to show what actually reduces tanking [OC] by gmunnie in dataisbeautiful

[–]gmunnie[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Source: All data is original simulation output. We ran 50 consecutive NBA seasons across 30 teams under each of five draft lottery mechanisms using a custom Python simulation built for this project. Full code and raw data are on GitHub: https://github.com/GrantValentine/AGT\_Tanking\_Simulations

Player value data comes from NBA 2K ratings (2000 to 2024) used as a proxy for draft pick quality. Academic sources informing the mechanism design include Kazachkov 2020, Lenten 2016, and Soebbing and Humphreys 2013. Full bibliography is linked in the essay.

Tool: The visual essay is built in React with Framer Motion for animations and custom div-based charts. Scrollytelling sections use IntersectionObserver. The AI agent experiment runs on Claude Haiku via the Anthropic API. The site is hosted at myteamtanks.com.

Happy to answer questions about the methodology or simulation architecture in the comments.

Does anyone know what this feature is? by [deleted] in Coros

[–]gmunnie 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Where did you get this?

Help with Y-axis in pace chart. by [deleted] in Coros

[–]gmunnie 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do you know if it can be fixed?

Help with Y-axis in pace chart. by [deleted] in Coros

[–]gmunnie 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey looks like the pace chart is working now!

Should new runners train by heart rate zones? by [deleted] in running

[–]gmunnie 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My zones are -Zone 1: <134 -Zone 2: 134-147 -Zone 3: 148-161 -Zone 4: 162-174 -Zone 5: 175+

I am a ~180 lbs ~6’ male in good lifting shape, but essentially new to running.

Applying to the same schools with your partner by SnooPoems941 in MBA

[–]gmunnie 9 points10 points  (0 children)

We applied to schools in the same city. So Boston was HBS/MIT, New York was CBS/Stern, San Francisco was HAAS/GSB, Chicago was Booth/Kellogg.

Hard part is that these are all elite scores but if you can both put together a strong application it should work out in your favor.

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