the important point is how to detect if a team is tanking or not..
Exactly, and I think salaries must be one tool in detecting that. What should be considered is some sort of past average total salary of the team vs. current total salary of the team. I haven't spent a second thinking about a robust solution to the problem, but as long as it is about total salaries (spending) vs. total income (basically crowd + merchandise), the salaries are really the key here. Combine whatever metric that is derived from the salaries with some sort of sanity check based on in-game performance and no one should be punished undeservingly.
it looks like a good solution to me..
now we need the devil's advocate to find a leak here..
Still reading through the thread here, but I think basing the tank-detection on salaries is not a good idea.
As another poster pointed out, some players are twice as good as others even when they have the same salary.
Why not just detect tanking based on average margin of victory? If you lose every game by 60 points, fans aren't going to keep coming. Make it exponential so that an average margin of victory of -15 points is almost the same as -10, but -50 points is noticeably worse (for attendance) than -45.
But then it's not a perfect solution, because what happens if you sell your 4 best players all of a sudden? Fans need to know right away that you are forfeiting.
And reading this thread I was thinking, isn't it a little bit ironic that there is a draft like the NBA, while at the same time, there is promotion and demotion like in European countries for example?
If getting the 1st overall pick means you go to play in the D-League next season, would the Cavaliers still be tanking? And would the Thunder be where they are today?
I think there is something fundamentally wrong with mixing the two aspects, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
"Air is beautiful, yet you cannot see it. It's soft, yet you cannot touch it. Air is a little like my brain." - Jean-Claude Van Damme