Here's the sketch I just envisioned:
How do we build a progressive with interesting players that doesn't skew too much towards a handful teams being too good OR too bad?
1) We keep a modern, sensible draft lottery that may have better rules than the one in real life.
2) Every year, we infuse an equal number of players with at least one All-Star season (best way I can think of to balance talent without introducing advanced metrics, which are subjective/not really correlated to how they would measure impact for our purposes!) into the league.
3) No rewinds/resets, except when we reach the most recent season we can play. I feel like it disrupts the long term strategy aspect, which to me is the best part by far
4) With no rewinds or resets, we would have to start early enough to make a real run of it, but not so early that the ascent to better talent drives everyone up the wall and makes people quit
To me, the desired format is pretty simple to envision: we start by drafting all available talent in 1969-70 with a twist: the number of available real life All-Stars is equal in every draft. That year's rookies who would become real life All-Stars (Kareem, Jo Jo White, Butch Beard, Norm Van Lier, Bob Dandridge and Steve Mix) are entered into the rookie draft, along with all other available rookies.
BUT to smooth out the infusion of new talent, the number of rookies matching this criteria must be supplemented or reduced in order to satisfy the average requirement for all future years. 324 remaining All-Stars, removing those selected prior to 1969-70 and those who were named after 69-70 but were drafted before 1969, divided by 55 possible seasons to be played, gives us 5.89 future All-Stars per season, but we'll round it up to 6 to spice things up a bit. (This means the modern era will be introducing five future All-Stars per year as we run out of names on the list, but we don't have to worry as much about talent in the 2020s).
Since there are six in 1969, I don't have to change anything.
If there were 7, we would remove one at random.
If there were 5, we would introduce one from the list of remaining players. To satisfy this part of it:
-If they're introduced in our league, even if they come in before their real life draft class, they'll be removed from the all-time list!
-All players will only be introduced once. This means if LeBron gets introduced in 1974, he's not coming in 2003, but if Dr. J DOESN'T get introduced in 1971 because there's more than 6 future All-Stars in the draft class, he could come randomly at any point when there's an underwhelming draft class, since he'll still be on the list.
No weak drafts, no boring eras, no relative lack of talent, no dynasties. Everyone should have a roughly equal chance to get talent (eventually!) and there should always be parity. You hope no one is too bad for too long that they accumulate players with All-Star seasons, but that's where the lottery (format TBD) comes in.
Would welcome some feedback on this idea.
7/22/2024 11:20 PM (edited)