[Basel A]

Originally Posted by JonathanZur1836

Regardless of what the technicalities are in the rules or rankings, I don't think that there should be a situation, in FRC or the Olympics, where losing actually gives you a better chance of winning in the end. To me, that defeats the purpose of sport and competition (not because winning is essential, but simply because of the idea of losing on purpose), especially in leagues like FRC or the Olympics, where the winners should win fair and square.

Take the NBA playoffs for instance, the way it works is that the top 8 teams from each conference move onto the playoffs; the 1st place team plays the 8th place team in the first round, the 2nd plays the 7th, and so on. At least from the point of view of statistics, the better your record, the higher your chance of winning. It is a simple system in which winning is always advantageous, and "throwing a game" always works against you in the end.

In your example of a single year's NBA playoffs, you are right to say that there's an incentive to be the top seed or generally a higher seed. However, when a team wants to win NBA Championships, they cannot think only about the short term. A team that's good enough to be the 7th or 8th seed in the playoffs, but will likely be bounced in the first round, is much better off throwing their games, not making the playoffs, and getting a high draft pick.

It simply is not easy to make a set of rules that both encourages improvement from the worst teams (for the sake of parity) and doesn't incentivise being bad.