Or what if Major league Baseball had a second apron like the NBA? Unveiling CapBuffet
Capbuffet has been live since the beginning of the year, I just didn't post about it.
A few months ago, amidst some other experiments, I built two tools that were part of a larger suite of ideas clanging in my brain. The first was "what if you could mix and match components of various league salary caps?" and the second was built around the same concept but for draft lotteries.
Tanking for better draft picks is a uniquely American sports tradition that could be rooted out if you changed the incentives, but the time-honored tradition of giving the best young players to the worst teams won't really go away. It makes sense on some level to give fans of bad teams hope, and to ensure that even the most boring markets in sports are able to force someone to hang out there for a few years.
The first tool I built last year was called Lottery Lab, as a way to test different models for the NBA Draft Lottery to combat tanking. Eventually, I added other league draft lotteries from the NWSL, MLB, and NHL to see what those would look like in other contexts.
On building experiments and not sharing them publicly
It's weird seeing how much stuff people are putting out and sharing across subreddits, blogs and elsewhere that doesn't have a real audience, that isn't going to be maintained and has so much messiness behind it.
It's made me less inclined to release things, but in the case of Cap Buffet, I built these tools at the beginning of the year and just sat on it. With all of the talk of a MLB lockout and salary cap, it made me want to revisit them and share it out. Lottery Lab was a separate tool and predates it, but when I decided to build the newer tool, I integrated them onto the same domain.
Data figures could always stand to be updated, but for now, I'm leaving it as-is, because I didn't really need to fuss with it, I just thought it's a fun idea and it was worth putting back into the world.