Create Your Own Alternative Basketball League (draft pick, draft, playoffs, finals)

[Matthew Duck]

For whatever reason, you decide you are fed up with the NBA and want to create your own alternative professional basketball league. This is a thread for us to get creative and play the role of league founder and commissioner. How many charter teams? What do the conferences/divisions look like? What's the playoff format?

For my league, I have decided to start with 10 charter teams in the Western and Eastern conference.

Western Conference
Kansas City
Omaha
San Diego
Seattle
West Texas (El Paso)

Eastern Conference
Baltimore
Jacksonville
Ohio (Columbus)
Pittsburgh
St. Louis

For the first few seasons of 10 teams, there will be two guaranteed playoff teams for each conference. A wild card will be rewarded to the best third place team. The conference with three playoff teams will have a best-of-three wild card round. The conference championship series will be best-of-five and the league finals will be best-of-seven.

Over the next few years, the league will continue looking to expand into cities like Albuquerque, Austin, Boise, Colorado Springs, Des Moines, Tulsa, Vancouver, and Wichita in the West. The league will look at Birmingham, Buffalo, Hartford, Louisville, Nashville, Raleigh, and Tampa in the East.

I don't know, but I have fun doing things like this. If you ever thought about something like this, put your ideas below. If I'm stupid, have a nice day.

[7express]

No divisions, no league. Every team plays each other 4 times twice @ home, twice on the road, so each team has a fair shake at the schedule. There are 15 teams, so 60 games in a season. Top 10 make the playoffs, top 6 get a bye to the quarterfinals, #10 plays #7, #9 plays #8 in a best of 3 format to advance. Quaterfinals are best of 5, semifinals & finals are best of 7.

15 teams:
Portland, ME
New York City
Pittsburgh, PA
Charlotte, NC
Little Rock, AR
Toronto, Canada
Chicago, IL
Dallas/Fort Worth
Los Angeles
San Diego
Seattle, WA
Des Moines, IA
Vancouver, Canada
Boston
Buffalo, NY.

We will make this like European soccer and take relegation/promotion in. There will be a tier 2 league. The bottom 2 teams in the top league will be relegated, the 2 teams that will be promoted will be 1) whichever team wins the regular season championship 2) if the regular season champion also wins the championship, the runner up in regular season will be second team promoted; if not team who wins championship will be promoted. This league also has 15 teams, and has the same playoff format (top 10 in, top 6 bye's). These 15 teams to start in "league 2" are:
Moncton, Canada
Long Island, NY
Calgary, Canada
Denver, CO
San Bernardino/Riverside, CA
Detroit, MI
Milwaukee, WI
Baltimore/Washington/Northern VA
Hartford, CT
Portland, OR
Sioux Falls, SD
Wichita, KS
Houston, TX
Oklahoma City
Philadelphia

[3243]

This sounds like fun. Here are my teams and some features about my league:

EASTERN DIVISION

Baltimore
Buffalo
Cincinnati
Kansas City
Louisville
St. Louis
Tampa Bay
Virginia



WESTERN DIVISION

Albuquerque
Anaheim
Austin
Boise
Fresno
Las Vegas
San Jose
Seattle

Each team plays the other seven teams in its division six times each (three home, three away) plus two games against each team in the opposite division (one home, one away) for a total of 58 regular-season games. The regular season lasts from October through April.

The top four teams in each division qualify for the playoffs. The first round (1st place vs. 4th place, 2nd vs. 3rd) series are five games each. The two series winners within each division face each other for a seven-game divisional championship series. The two divisional champions play each other for a seven-game league championship.

Each player gets a base $100,000 annual salary for playing the regular season. That comes out to about $1724.14 per game. Each player on the teams that qualify for the playoffs will get a $50,000 bonus. Each player on the four teams that make it to the divisional finals get a $100,000 bonus for doing so. Each player on the two teams that make the legue finals receives a bonus of $250,000. And each member of the league champion team gets a ring plus a one million dollar bonus check. This financial incentive is intended to encourage competition.

[eddiehaskell]

^ at first I liked your idea, but then I started thinking how would you stop a super team from being created? Imagine if the NBA adopted that format next year...essentially you'd have Lebron, Curry, Westbrook, Durant, etc all teaming up to make an unbeatable superteam. If they are all compensated equally, individual numbers no longer matter so you might have say Westbrook as the 2nd string PG and Chris Paul 3rd string. They would go undefeated and win 10 straight championships. When a player is no longer top 2-3 at his position, management replaces them. As you get to the 4th, 5th, 6th+ best teams, the roster is chocked full of scrubs that have zero chance of winning.

[3243]

I'm tired and in need of sleep right now, so I'll have to think about what you said. One thing that comes to the top of my head right now is perhaps awarding an extra first-round draft pick to the teams that do not make the playoffs...which would then encourage teams that are not in playoff contention late in the year (or earlier) to tank so that they can get an extra first-round pick, assuming that each team ordnarily gets, say, one first-round pick, one second-round pick, and one third-round pick, dependent upon their previous season's record, same as in other sports leagues.

My idea was to encourage team achievements over individual success. Now the only way I can think of to prevent the scenario you mentioned would be to limit or even not have free agency, meaning that teams would only be able to build through the draft and by trades, which would certainly keep would-be superteams in check.

As I said, I'll have to think about this some more.