Managing legitimacy and uncertainty in professional team sport: the NBA's draft lottery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the complexity of – and conflicts inherent in – managing sports leagues at both the league and franchise level. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on changes to the National Basketball Association's (NBA) amateur entry draft, which has attempted to balance the need to preserve league parity and reduce the incentive for teams to deliberately lose games in order to improve draft position. Findings The discussion reveals the conflict between league and team goals. In addition, using Oliver's strategic decisions as a framework, the findings also illustrate how sport league commissioners have to balance pressures from both the internal and external environments. Originality/value This paper expands our understanding of how leagues manage institutional pressures, and how these pressures impact the team, leagues, and the decision makers involved.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.073 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".