The NBA Lottery Needs To Go

The draft lottery has always perplexed me.  What is the point of it?  The best answer given is to "prevent teams from tanking".  OK that's fine.  But do you really think a team that is 15 games below .500 with 10 games to go, is really going to try hard regardless? 

Winning the lottery can be just that for many teams (Duh).  When the Bulls won in '08, it single-handily shifted the balance in power in the eastern conference.  Could you imagine if the Heat (worst team that year) won it?  It may have prevented the whole "decision" and the NBA landscape as we know it would be totally different. (I don't know if Rose and Wade would have coexisted, but that's a different blog for a different day)

I'm sure the lottery isn't going anywhere.  But I feel it needs to be tweaked at the very least.  The perennial losing small market teams seem to lose out on that coveted pick more often than not, and it's really quite sad.  Look what Duncan did for San Antonio.  Don't you think the Raptors would kill for that?  Or the Bobcats?  (Granted Jordan would draft Kwame Brown 2.0, so that may be a bad example) 

I would like to see something similar to the NHL's lottery be put into place.  If you are unfamiliar, it makes it so that a team can only move up four places, or down one.  Essentially making it so that only the five worst teams can be able to get the number one pick.  That's fair I think, and you still get all the "excitement" of who will be get the number one.