Mark Cuban apparently tried to go full Shark Tank on the league.
According to Tim MacMahon of ESPN on Thursday, the Dallas Mavericks owner attempted to pitch other members of the NBA’s board of governors on abolishing the draft and moving towards a system where each team would get a pool of money to sign rookies based on record.
“The team with the worst record gets the most money and the team with the best record gets the least money,” said Cuban. “It’s like a free agency. It makes it a lot harder to tank because you don’t know if you get the best players if you’re horrible all the time. Nobody liked that at all, not a single person.
Cuban, who was the only owner to abstain from the recent NBA lottery reform measure, also had another idea to lock the team with the worst record into a given draft slot (either third or fourth). It similarly failed to gain traction.
The billionaire owner is never short of revolutionary ideas, and he might actually have the support of one NBA head coach. Nevertheless, doing away with the draft entirely is probably a bit too radical of an idea to be realistic.
