Gold Plan (sports)
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The Gold Plan is a proposal to change how sports drafts work to discourage tanking and provide an incentive for teams already eliminated from the playoffs to try to win. First proposed in 2012 by then-PhD student Adam Gold, the plan works by having the draft order be determined by the number of points a team earns after being eliminated from qualifying for the playoffs. It is currently in use by the Professional Women's Hockey League.
Drafts are used in most North American major sports leagues to allocate new players to teams in a way that gives the worst teams the opportunity to pick first. Teams will tank to get a better draft pick and therefore the opportunity to get better players. While leagues like the NHL and NBA have a draft lottery to partially counteract this problem, it still encourages tanking by increasing the odds of getting a better pick by tanking.[1] In 2012, Gold said that after NHL teams are eliminated, their winning percentage goes down by 16%.[2]