How to replace the NBA Draft

Convincing the league to pull the trigger seems like a longshot. But there's a solid path to a viable system if the NBA is bold enough to decouple losing and elite prospect acquisition.

Good morning. It's 2005 again. Let's basketball.

Back in 2017, before the latest batch of lottery reform, I wrote a decree on why the NBA should kill its amateur draft and replace it with rookie free agency. Nothing about the why has changed in the intervening years: the concept of a draft is a disaster for labor rights and placing amateur talent via the draft incentivizes losing. That's more apparent than ever this year, with now eight teams aiming to lose as many games as possible as of February, with a third of the season remaining. NBA commissioner Adam Silver is getting spicy and threatening hellfire to tank-oriented teams.

What the teams will most likely get is more tweaks to make tanking slightly less viable and more risky. A wholesale reboot of how the league incorporates new players into the league isn't on the table.

It should be. And there's a simple way to do it: treat amateur and young international players like free agents, and build special contract rules that align with the existing salary cap and rookie scale to ease the path.