BuzzerBeater Forums

With the draft upon us, reopening draft suggestions. Many teams would love to be able to draft a player that they can actually use, but its a crap shoot unless you finish in the bottom 4 teams of your division.

My Suggestion: Provide two additional BONUS draft picks that are up for purchase. Those two bonus picks are for the 3rd and 4th overall picks in the draft. For example, the 1st and 2nd draft picks still go to the worst two teams in a league. But maybe the 3rd and 4th pick are up for purchase (maybe the price starts at $100k and teams can bid up the price if needed). Then, the 5th pick automatically goes to the 3rd place team, and the 6th pick to the 4th place team, and so on.

If no team in a division ends up purchasing either of the two bonus picks, then they just go unused and the draft order is in the normal order of teams with the worst record.

This would allow a team that consistently finishes in the top half of a league to have a chance at getting a homegrown player. Whereas in real life sports leagues, teams can trade up to get better draft picks, a trade mechanism is hard to police in BB. So this tries to find another way to achieve the goal of getting a better chance to draft a good player.

Thoughts?

It could work if you bought the pick for 1 million.

I see a lot of things i would like to have time spent on instead of this.

I agree.

I agree, there are lots of tweaks that could be made to the draft that could improve it:
1) increasing skill points for 19 year olds
2) increasing the % of 3 and 4 ball potential draftees, and decreasing the number of 1 and 2 ball potential draftees. That way there are less useless players in the draft/game.

But I still think the draft/training part of the game would be improved if teams somehow had more flexibility to focus more or less on getting a good draft pick(s) in any given season. This flexibility exists in real life (I know, BB is NOT real life, but there's a reason this flexibility exists in real life). One year, a team may want to focus on getting a new trainee. But then that team may not want/need a traineee for the next 3-4 years.

If there is a bonus to having homegrown stars on your roster, then there should be a way to strategically plan to increase your chances of drafting that homegrown star other than by tanking or sucking. Teams can trade draft picks in real life. Trading is a hard mechanism to build into BB, so a different mechanism would be good.

As long as there are three rounds in the draft, there will always be the same amount of useless players. Increasing skill level and potential just increases the skill level of all players, including useless players. Also, I see 19-year-olds in the draft as players who decided that they didn't have the skills to play professional yet. So they should naturally be worse than their year-younger counterparts.

I also don't see a need to increase 5-ball potential players. They should be special and rare. 4-ball potential players I would personally like to see more of. And, I agree that more 3-ball potential players and higher 19 year old skills would make the draft a LOT more interesting.

But, I also think part of the reason that the TL is flooded with poorly trained perennial all-star and above players is because the teams that are able to draft them are on average the managers that are less active in the game. ie, the managers who finish in the bottom 6 in their division and have the first 6 picks in the draft. They're able to draft high-potential players, but then they don't adequately train them for whatever reason (lack of understanding of the game, lack of interest, inactivity, etc). By introducing a mechanism where teams who finish with an above-average records can still prioritize drafting a high-potential player, I think on average you'd see better trained players on the TL. I'm just talking averages, not every situation.