BuzzerBeater Forums

I think it could be a cool feature if a team could "buy" a better draft order pick. Or, buy an additional draft pick spot in a draft. For instance, teams would still receive the draft order for their 3 draft picks based on their record for the season. But, then I'm suggesting that prior to the draft, a market be created for buying and selling those spots in the draft. A team could sell it's specific draft order pick. For instance, the team with the first pick in the draft could sell that first pick to the highest bidder in their division. Some of the benefits are:

1) Teams that consistently finish towards the top of their league have a much tougher time getting good draft picks. And, while a team can always go and buy a rookie from the TL, I think it's so much more fun to have drafted and trained up your own home grown player (not to mention the advantage in merchandising revenue).

2) Many desirable trainees (especially in lower divisions) are underutilized by inactive/underactive managers. It's a shame to see MVP trainees go to waste when they're not trained.

3) In multi-year planning, some years you don't want/need any draft picks. For instance, maybe your team already has 2-3 great trainees, and you don't want/need any new trainees for the upcoming season. Or, the opposite: some years a team would love to have more than three draft picks. Maybe you need 2 new trainees, and so you'd love to have 4-5 draft picks to increase your likelihood of getting 2 trainees that are decent.

The downside is that I think that each draft pick market would have to be segregated to just your 16-team division in your country, because those are the only draftees you'd be able to scout. And, a 16-team market is very small and inefficient, so it'd lead to wildly high or low prices. Still, I think it'd be fun to be able to increase your chances of getting a good draft pick if that was important to you as a manager.

Thoughts?

Thanks to the link for that other suggestion. Like you mentioned, that other suggestion wasn't exactly like mine, and I couldn't really understand or support that other suggestion either.

What I'm suggesting is a free market where prices are determined by bidding, just like the normal player TL. I do realize there is a downside in that you'd have to restrict the market to just your 16 team division (otherwise you wouldn't have any scouting data on draftees). So, maybe that, along with difficulty with implementation, would make this idea infeasible or unsupportable.

I guess I'm just consistently disappointed with
1) the very low percentage of quality draftees in the draft - I'm not saying every draftee should be HOF, but I think more than 20% of draftees should actually be good enough to be utilized by teams. Other posters have suggested somehow slightly increasing the quality of draft prospects, which I support
2) of the quality draftees, many go to teams that won't end up utilizing them, because the manager may be inactive or underactive (especially in lower divisions). That's frustrating for everyone. I'm not sure that my suggestion solves that, but I think it at least helps it.

Anyway, thanks for the comment. I was interested to hear if others are frustrated by the same things as I am.

Very true about the cheating aspect. Anything that has the potential to increase the potential to cheat has to be abandoned. The more level the playing field, the better. So, maybe my suggestion as I've laid it out wouldn't work in BB. Although I still really like the ability for a team that finishes with a good record to somehow get a decent draft pick.

Maybe this instead: Provide two additional BONUS draft picks that are NOT assigned to a team, but instead those draft order picks can be purchased. For example, maybe 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 (or whatever the BBs deem is reasonable), 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.

I also agree about making the draft more exciting, and agreed with two of the ideas in the other recent Suggestion post.
(239376.1) 1) Giving 19 year olds higher skill points on average. 2) Providing a higher percentage of 3 and 4-ball potentials in the draft, and a lower percentage of 1-ball potential players.