Draft Lottery?

[evademan]

I am a commissioner of a yahoo league and am thinking of incorporating a draft lottery to our annual draft to spicing things up. What do you guys think? Is this worth instituting or will it just confuse the meatheads in my league.

Here are the details I drafted.

5. Draft Lottery

• Draft position will be determined on draft day. A random number generator will select a number for each manager from a base of 1 – 150. The lowest pick will be awarded to the highest number generated.

• Managers are now able to influence their draft position with a draft lottery. Each manager is allocated a base of 150 draft points. Managers will be able to purchase additional points.

(Example: A manager purchases 30 points. He will now be able to pick a random number between 1 – 180.)

• Each dollar will purchase 1.25 points.

• Proceeds from purchased points will go to the prize pool.

[mattb47]

Interesting idea...one of the leagues I'm in with my friends does something like this with a draft lottery but we don't have to pay for it or anything. Our lottery is like how the NBA does it with it being weighted based on how everyone finished in the previous season...so the team that finished last has the highest chances and the team that finished first has very low chances. It does create some nice fun right before the draft to learn where you will be drafting from and I enjoy it being a part of the process but I don't think I would be interested in paying anything for something like this.

[evademan]

Thanks for the feedback. To put the point per dollar ration into perspective, it's a 12 team league with a $150 buy in.

[mattb47]

Yea...well, to be honest, if I was already paying $150 to play in the league I would be personally less likely to throw out money for a draft position like this. I'm one that thinks he can draft a good team from any position though which is why it would matter very little to me....so take that with a grain of salt.

[spodog]

It's creative.

One of the things we highly value in our competitive league is that the season start out with as much of a level playing field as possible, however.

So if I was to implement this idea, I think I'd do two things.

1) I'd cap the amount of points that could be purchased, so some guy who is pretty free with his cash doesn't just buy his way into a situation where the odds are really slanted in his favor in terms of draft position.

2) I'd assign a purpose to the $'s that owners who chose NOT to buy more points. For example, maybe everyone is allowed to spend up to $50 on buying points for this purpose, but if they choose not to buy any, then the $50 is added to their salary cap or bidding allocation or whatever. Basically, something that makes it a decision that the owner is making about how to best try and improve their team by contributing these $'s to the prize pool rather than just an exchange of $'s for favoritism in the lottery for draft order.