Reducing the Incentive to Tank: The Ex Post Gold Plan

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Ex Post Gold Plan, a new draft lottery incentive system that reduces strategic tanking by adding uncertainty to the timing of incentives, encouraging teams to compete earnestly.

Contribution

It proposes the REWIND metric and a modified incentive structure that weakens strategic losing while promoting consistent effort after team elimination.

Findings

The REWIND metric effectively discourages tanking strategies.

The system incentivizes teams to win at least half their games.

The ex post elimination date is earlier than previous pivot points.

Abstract

Many recent proposals for reducing tanking in draft lotteries share a common structure: losses improve draft position early in the season while wins improve draft position later. While such systems improve late-season incentives, they retain a predictable pivot point that tanking teams can exploit strategically. This paper proposes a simple modification that introduces uncertainty into the timing of the incentive switch. The proposed metric, the \emph{Realized Elimination Wins Determinant} (REWIND), ranks teams according to the number of wins obtained after their ex post elimination date, which makes this a variation of the Gold Plan. Because the ex post elimination date cannot be known with certainty during the season, the mechanism weakens incentives for strategic losing while preserving incentives for competitive effort after elimination. Moreover, the ex post elimination date is typically earlier than other proposed pivot points, so there is a longer period where a tanking team's best strategy is to win. The Ex Post Gold plan uses the REWIND metric to create a simple system where every team will be incentivized to win at least half of their games in most seasons.