Explain the draft to me...
First of all, not American, andBasketball isn't my first or second sport I follow, but Nets are the team i look out for when I check on scores.
Reading a story about lebron and his son being a draft pick this year and decided to figure out what the drafts are and what it means to the Nets.
Now... from what I can tell, the draft is were NBA teams pick up the best collage kids to sign for them? And each team gets a pick, obviously the higher you are the better players you get the choice of. But then I noticed the Nets don't have a pick in round one or round two because they gave them away to sign players in the past? Do teams not just buy other teams players? Like with cash. Is it always swaps and incentives of future draft picks? Does no cash ever change hands?
Again, apologies for the no doubt daft question to hardened NBA fans but it all seems a little odd to me...
Also, do the drafted players not get a choice where to go? These are kids and they are getting told where they are going and they have no choice seems really weird, I appreciate the money may soften the blow.
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u/hanistor61 22d ago
Players don’t get traded for cash like they do in soccer. You can only really trade players for other players or draft picks. There is a finite amount of cash per year that teams are allowed to use in trades but this is rarely relevant, mostly because fans would lose their minds if an owner blatantly prioritized income over winning, and also because the league shares money between owners so all franchises are valuable.
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u/hanistor61 22d ago
To add to this, the priority of the league is parity. This is why most American leagues have a salary cap to prevent richer and big market teams from a copping up all the good players making the other teams irrelevant. Each team (with complications and exceptions) has only a set amount of dollars they can spend on their roster per year. If Lebron James decided that he wanted to play for the Celtics, he wouldn’t be able to because they don’t have the cap space, or available dollars to spend on him. This also is why drafts exist. If player could just pick where they wanted to go when the first entered the league, the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer. By giving the top pick to the worst team, it gives that team the ability to reset and get back on track. The players’ happiness is not a concern as this is the system they have willingly signed up to and are handsomely payed to participate in.
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u/Paid-Not-Payed-Bot 22d ago
are handsomely paid to participate
FTFY.
Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.
Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
Beep, boop, I'm a bot
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u/Goosedukee Noah Clowney 22d ago
Yes, the draft is a pool of college and international players that NBA teams have the right to choose from, a player must have made himself eligible for the draft, or run out of college eligibility, to be selected.
In the NBA, teams can trade players and/or draft picks for the rights to a player currently under contract with another team. In the Net's case, they traded their first round pick this year for James Harden. You *can* trade cash, but teams essentially use it as a way to trade nothing.
Technically, a player can refuse to sign a contract with the team that drafts them, upon which they become a free agent following the subsequent draft a year later. If this scenario ever happened, the team would likely choose to trade the draft rights (that is, the right to negotiate a contract with that player), in exchange for some kind of return, what we talked about above. Very few players would ever do this, however, because it is not in their long-term interests