In any given year, each manager makes roster choices: which players to target, how high to reach for sleepers, how to achieve statistical balance, whether to achieve statistical balance, etc. (At least, every manager should do this. Maybe you all just come in to the draft trying to get the "best" player in a given spot, with no prior thought as to what makes a guy "better." In that case, the keeper system wouldn't be your biggest hurdle to success anyway.) Every year, each manager gets some right and gets some wrong. This will happen with keepers, too. There will be real-NBA roster changes that influence playing time, rookies emerging early creating positional log jams, trades, injuries, etc., that we will all do our best to foresee, but will never be entirely successful. As an initial matter, this is the biggest reason the keeper system won't make things unfair: the only way you can believe that is by believing that everyone will always make the correct keeper choices and will always dodge bad luck.
That being said, the point of the keeper system is to help you big your team more effectively while building in continuity from year to year, to make this more fun. You're trying to get an advantage. But everyone is doing this, just as everyone does it every draft.
Another argument (implied, as neither Annan nor anyone else has elaborated, so I'm spitballing) for why keepers might throw things off is that it constrains the player pool every draft; many of the high-upside guys will already be locked in to rosters, so your opportunities to improve your team via the draft are limited. This was the thing I wanted to explore more, and the results are below.
As I said, this is all hypothetical, but I've run a mock draft for next year with keepers involved so we can see some examples of rosters and compare them to what we have this year (or at the very least get a sense of how it might work, and what level of talent will be available at any given pick). I assumed a system where the last place team gets to pick their draft spot, and so on in reverse order of finish. I used our current standings as the league finish and guessed at where people would want to draft (just as I guessed at who people would want to pick). Obviously, this isn't perfect. We'll all have different views of player values and target strategies. I spent a lot of time on this, but I didn't stress too much about making sure that everyone picked the absolute best player at their spot. First of all, there's no way to know that in the middle of this season; rosters will change, etc. Second, there are always guys that fall in drafts, guys who are always undervalued, guys who are always overvalued, etc. I used what I thought I knew about each owner's proclivities and did the best I could, but I didn't go back through and tinker. The point wasn't to get a perfect draft, just an example of who was available at any given pick, and what rosters might look like in the end. If there is a guy you would have rather picked, you can at least see if he might have been available, and where you could have drafted him.
The results (click the pic for a larger, readable image; keepers are marked in yellow):
(For clarity purposes, "Il Mago" is Bargnani and "Super White" is Dunleavy.)
I'm not going to dissect the relative quality of each team (maybe Chris wants to tackle that, or someone else, I don't know), but each roster looks pretty normal to me. Nutcrushers could be potentially dominant if both Stuckey and Jeff Green take the next step in their evolution as players, and Block O and I get a nice value out of our young guards Eric Gordon and Westbrook, respectively. But really, these rosters don't look tons different than if we drafted from scratch. I'd have to think any keeper after third round level would have been drafted earlier than their keeper spot (which is why you kept them), but everybody's got a couple of good values, so it evens out. And there are potentially multiple guys in each round who could outperform any of the keepers (e.g., Lou Williams, Kirk Hinrich, and Luke Ridnour have just as much of a chance to perform as Jeff Green or Eric Gordon -- it's not like we're comparing Gordon to Reggie Evans).
So, as I see it, the only reason to think that money and keepers are incompatible is not based on any practical disparity in competitive balance, but merely an intellectual distaste for it. But I view it as a poker game. At the first hand, the slate is clean. But every subsequent hand, the slate is messy; some stacks are bigger than others, the button passes, each hand involves different balances of power, strategy, and opportunity. And yet, even with all of that, it still comes down to the cards, and everyone is at the same level when it comes to chance. It doesn't matter your skill level: if you don't get cards at the right times (or if you run into people who DO have cards), you're going to lose. And sometimes someone who doesn't know at all what they're doing gets lucky. That's the game. You have control over many elements, but luck still plays a big factor. And money is on the line, each and every hand. You don't equalize the stacks every time the deal passes around the table, right? And, as I think is illustrated above with the arguments and mock draft, nobody will ever be so short stacked or so big stacked as to greatly throw off the game. Nobody's going to get blinded out.
(I know there are obvious retorts to and holes in my analogy, but it helped me put things in perspective. We're playing a complicated game. This isn't like blackjack or roulette.)
Discuss.
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