Column: Wild and Wylie

On Nov. 29, 2015, the Philadelphia 76ers lost their 28th consecutive game in the NBA. From March 27 to Dec. 1, the team did not win a single game as part of General Manager Sam Hinkie’s plan to purposely lose to acquire  top draft picks. From 2013 to 2016, the 76ers went 47-199, winning 19% of their games.

While the majority of NBA and 76ers fans were upset at the team for throwing away multiple seasons, the organization faced no consequences. In fact, they were rewarded by obtaining multiple high first-round draft picks, which they used to select generational talents like Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid. Seven years later, going into the 2019 season, the 76ers are the favorite to win the NBA finals, with a 26% chance of being crowned the 2020 league champions according to FiveThirtyEight.

When teams face no consequences and are in some cases rewarded for intentionally losing games, they are incentivized to be mediocre, if not terrible, and it eliminates the culture of competitiveness in major American sports leagues.

International soccer leagues found the solution to this problem a long time ago, and American leagues should consider implementing this system. The system is called promotion and relegation, and it depends on every sport having multiple leagues. At the conclusion of every season, the top three teams in the lower league are promoted to the league above them, and the worst three teams in the top league are relegated to the league below them.

Implementing this system would require structural changes to American sports, but the benefits would far outweigh any of the inconveniences.

The biggest change would be the need for a multi-league structure. As the system currently stands, the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA and MLS each have a monopoly over the players and TV rights for their respective sports. Creating a promotion and relegation system would require the creation of lower leagues, and the leagues would have to agree to coexist together. The owners of the top leagues would likely be against this, because relegation would lower the amount of revenue a team generates.

But the benefits would make the promotion and relegation system an experiment worth trying in American sports.

First, promotion and relegation will create more teams in smaller markets. In football, the 32 current NFL teams generally represent the largest cities and television markets in the country, but creating a lower league would allow many smaller markets, like Orlando, Raleigh and Salt Lake City to acquire their own football teams. Cities like Oakland, San Diego, and Saint Louis, who recently lost or are about to lose their NFL teams, would hopefully welcome a new, upstart team.

Second, it would keep talented players in America, rather than forcing them to leave for other countries if they can’t play for the top league. Football players would not leave for Canada, baseball players would not go to Japan and basketball players would not leave for China. Rather, they would stay in the U.S. and try to help a lower-level team succeed in America, maybe eventually earning a spot in the top league.

Lastly, the system forces teams to be competitive. As Merav Savir wrote for Sports Retriever, “There is no joy in watching a team lose purposely in order to get a better draft pick, and it ruins the last few weeks of the season. If promotion and relegation were introduced, it would mean that the teams have to fight until the very end to stay relevant.”

Owners would have to spend more money to keep their teams competitive and ambitious smaller teams could invest and pay top talent for a chance to be promoted. Football fans would not have to watch the Cleveland Browns go 1-31 over two seasons in the NFL, because after going winless, they would be forced to play in the lower league and fight their way back up.

In the proposed system, the 76ers could “Trust the Process” all they want, but not in the NBA. They would lose the primetime NBA games, and the television revenue that come with them. They would lose the right to play against teams trying to compete and win the NBA Championship. And hopefully, after building a competitive team, they would win their way back into the NBA, and compete for a championship when they have a team that deserves to play for it.