Revisiting the SWMP Rule

Back in 2019, we instituted Postseason 2.0, which primarily consisted of making all sixteen teams play all three weeks of the postseason, and then installing the somewhat controversial SWMP Rule, which prevented the top two Toilet Bowl seeds from winning the RD1.1 and RD1.2 picks for the next season.

With some recent rumblings about what we should do next, let’s take a look at some numbers.

[ Sheet: SWMP Rule stats ]

The main goals for me, speaking very personally, is to create engagement for all sixteen teams, to prevent tanking, and to encourage competitiveness across all of our games. Teams will certainly rise and fall, as this is a keeper league with a six player core, but over time it would seem that most everyone should be able to be competitive somehow through opportunity, effort, and of course, some luck.

As of now, some commissioners think we are unnecessarily punishing the lower tier teams, as they are the ones in most need of help. In addition, some of the teams affected by the SMWP Rule think it’s been a bit unfair that they can’t win the top overall picks. Or at least weird that the lower seeded teams want the higher seeds to win, in the case of #11-12 cheering on #9-10.

Regardless, we’ll look at all these issues. First, let’s look at some numbers and then we can have discussions, ideas, and look at revamping some stuff for next season and so on. My belief is that over a period of five years, you can at least get your team to somewhat respectability, or at least ping pong up and down the standings due to randomness.

The big question to answer is really a philosophical one: Who should the draft help? The teams that don't / can't win, or the teams that are trying but maybe too good to get the overall top picks?

SWMP Rule Results

Since the advent of the SWMP Rule era, we’ve had five seasons affected by it, not counting this 2025 season and the abbreviated 2020 season.

Here were the Toilet Bowl matchups from each of those years

Year: # Winner vs#  Loser

• 2019: #9 SBUK vs #14 SNAC
• 2021: #11 SQSQ vs #10 CHMK
• 2022: #11 CHMK vs #9 ILCN
• 2023: #10 CHMK vs #13 SPDE
• 2024: #9 SWMP vs #12 FUNK 

As you can see, either #9 or #10 have made the TB Finals every year, but we actually haven’t ever had both of the top seeds make the last game—which is good actually!

In fifteen Toilet Bowls—minus 2020 because of COVID, here are which seeds have won the whole thing:

• #9 seed (7, many)
• #10 (1, CHMK)
• #11 (3, BOMB, SQSQ, CHMK)
• #12 (1, FUNK)
• #13 (1, ABCX)
• #16 (1, FUNK)

So eight out of fifteen Toilet Bowls have been won by the top two seeds #9 and #10, five won by the middle four  #11-14 seeds, and only once by one of the worst two teams in the league.

The main purpose of the SWMP Rule was to not just gift teams that are likely too good for the Toilet Bowl a high pick. For example, SBUK in 2019 could’ve received Zion Williamson (instead of RJ Barrett) to add to a core of CJ McCollum, DeMar DeRozan, Joel Embiid, Kyrie Irving, and Rudy Gobert. Or say, adding Victor Wembanyama to the 2025 CHMK team.

Of course, the randomness of the draft has helped to even out who got the true franchise altering stars, as in hindsight, some of the RD1.1 and RD1.2 picks were not the "right" ones. See: Sheppard, Reed. Even SWMP’s double Toilet Bowl win in 2017-2018 only netted Markelle Fultz and DeAndre Ayton. So that randomness itself may be a reason to just eliminate the SWMP Rule.

The SWMP Rule has unequivocally helped give top tier picks to the middle class Toilet Bowl teams--there's always been a #11 seed or lower in the TB Finals--even if not directly to the worst few, defined as #12 seed or lower.

Bubble Teams Tanking

The second question now however, is how to prevent the playoff bubble teams from tanking. Of course, some owners will want to fight for every win, as SOUR does—and has just proven that a #8 can take out a #1 in this very playoffs. But, the temptation to tank to the Toilet Bowl when a seemingly franchise altering player is pretty great--I myself have been tempted by this. So I’d like a solution that addresses that problem.

Should we return to some sort of lottery system? Maybe have every Toilet Bowl team play for more ping pong balls or something? But still have a bit of randomness involved? Should say, seeds #7-8 get some freebie ping pong balls in the following draft, so they are not unduly punished for not being in the Toilet Bowl? Seeds that low rarely, if at all, ever win the Finals. Stat: The lowest seeded team to ever win a championship was #6, with 100 Acre Wood Pooh Bears taking a title back in 2013. Oh also 2011's Human Amoebas, who made the playoffs with a 9-10 record, and would've been the #10 seed overall but made the playoffs due to conference splits. So those were the two outliers in fifteen or so years.

Some other draft related ideas:

1) Return to a Toilet Bowl where we are playing for positions, be it straight RD1.1 - RD1.8 based on TB results, or something similar. This punishes the bad teams but is also the easiest. A bad team could upset their way to the top but usually the top picks would go toward the better Toilet Bowl teams. We could add a tiering element to this, such as #9-12 play for a certain level of pick and #13-16 play for a different (higher) tier.

2) A pure lottery system, with worse teams getting better odds, and not tying the Toilet Bowl to draft picks at all. Alternately, flip it and the teams that advance in the Toilet Bowl get higher odds to win higher picks. But generally, some sort of randomized system.

3) A farther out idea is to give every team the same chance at the first picks, say 12.5% for each of the eight Toilet Bowl teams. And from there, we could add on tournament style where each win afterwards steals some % of chance from your opponent, thus making the Toilet Bowl wins and losses still count for something.

4) One of my main goals is to solve for the issue where seeds #7-8 and #9-10 are not incentivized to hit the Toilet Bowl versus facing off an uphill playoffs battle. So perhaps we could even give #7-8 teams the same lottery chances as the #9-10 teams, thus eliminating any motivation to tank.

5) A brief in-season tournament between seeds #7-8-9-10 for lottery odds, which would again, try to eliminate the bubble team tanking. Whoever wins this in-season tourney gets the lottery balls in the next draft? So they can safely push for a playoff showing? Maybe far fetched.

6) Reset every five years completely, making it less relevant who gets the highest picks in every draft since we are only building for five years at a time. I am leaning toward suggesting this as an idea. Reset every five years, with that "Grand Re-Draft" pick order determined by win-loss records from the previous five seasons?

7) There was a suggestion of tying “good” management to allowing teams to pick high. Say if you don’t hit a certain Games Played threshold, or you are seen to be mismanaging or mismanaging for a long stretch. Interesting proposition...

Overall I would still like the idea of playing three postseason games for everyone, as that keeps the trade deadline steady and free agent available for all.

SWMP Rule Sheets Explanation

TB Winners: Look at winning percentage for the sixteen franchises one the past five years.

TB Winners Keepers: A list of all the keepers that the Toilet Bowl winner had going into the following season. Plus who was picked in the following draft—usually not by them due to the SWMP Rule. (Added SWMP’s 2017-2018 season in here for comparison.)

TB Regular Season Records: This one is a little messy but it’s just the regular season win-loss records for all of the TB winners and losers.  More useful for me, but you can take a look.

Five Years Win Percentage: Self-explanatory. Most of the teams are hovering around 0.400 - 0.600, but ABCX, TRUO, and UFOS are pretty awful.

Five Years Regular Season: Again, more for me. But we can see each team’s individual regular season records over the past five years. I was looking to see if people are bouncing up and down or consistently good/bad, etc.

Five Years Moves and Games Played: The top half is Moves per year—which include post draft moves I think, or something similarly. In many cases, the low teams made just like one or two waiver grabs, if even.

The Games Played chart displays GP and also the blue number in each column is the average for that season. Overall, eleven of our teams are average or better in GP, while we have four or so lagging teams: ABCX, FUNK, MELO, UFOS.

Note: I calculated all the averages taking out the top and worst ranked teams, because for example, TRUO is such an outlier in Moves that it’s easier to calculate with that team out. So the average is really the #2-15 teams.