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What these fellows concocted is a "playoff'' in name only, run while everyone is playing out the string of the regular season. Essentially, it measures a team's performance from the time it is eliminated from a potential postseason berth until the end of the season; teams that win more, late in the schedule with few tangible rewards otherwise, benefit by moving up in draft order. Those who lose, particularly at a sorrier rate late in the year than they did early, get penalized.

"The NBA should consider implementing some reasonable facsimile of [this],'' Peter D. Harris, the Dartmouth alum and point man of the group, wrote in an e-mail. "It would give the lower-tier teams something to play for at the end of the season. It would give the fans of those teams something to cheer for. It would give the owners some extra revenue chances.''

All are Celtics fans, driven to the task (after hooking up on a Boston message board last fall) by Boston's slip to third in last year's lottery. No doubt, they might be happier now after seeing the results of getting jobbed in the lottery; every once in a while, you get Garnett and Ray Allen instead.

Like most brainstorms emanating from within ivy-covered walls, there is a scary part: This suggested fix includes a quadratic formula. And on a scale of migraines induced, it ranks somewhere between the NFL's quarterback rating system and the NBA's own salary-cap regulations.

It looks like this: S(Y) = 2.3Y - (1/70)Y² - W - 67

Here, Y is the game number in which a team suffers its 42nd loss. Why 42? That roughly is the number of defeats a team finishing eighth (in the playoffs) or ninth (out of the playoffs) might have. Applied across a lot of losing teams, over a lot of years, it seemed to provide a standard. As for W, that is the number of victories after a team hits 42 losses. The lowest S(Y) score wins.

Here is an example from last season: Boston lost for the 42nd time in game No. 55, then won 11 more times. Plugging in those numbers, the Celtics end up with a "draft position playoff'' value of 5.28. That is better than the other 13 lottery teams, including second-place Memphis (9.0), third-place Charlotte (13.57) and so on. And based on those 11 victories, Rivers and his crew weren't giving away as many games as some alleged.

Assigning odds to move up would still be left to the NBA. But the pre-lottery position order would have been as follows (a team's actual pre-lottery position is in parentheses):

1. Boston (2)
2. Memphis (1)
3. Charlotte (8)
4. Philadelphia (12)
5. Seattle (5)
6. Milwaukee (3)
7. Atlanta (4)
8. Portland (6)
9. Sacramento (10)
10. Minnesota (7)
11. New York (9)
12. New Orleans (13)
13. Indiana (11)
14. L.A. Clippers (14)

Is it a foolproof system? Hardly. Some teams are so bad or riddled by injuries, they might as well pack in what is left of a schedule to gauge the talents of younger players or save wear and tear on vets. Others lose even when trying their darnedest. The quirks of the NBA schedule can influence things, too, if an earnest lottery team faces some playoff-bound clubs still eyeballing a better berth. There's no provision, either, for lottery teams that don't lose at least 42 games.

Also, the astronomer readily admits that this approach would reward tanking in midseason. "When a team sees that it has 36 losses but is practically guaranteed to miss the playoffs (its record is 12-36, say), it's in that team's interest to get the next six losss very quickly,'' he wrote in an e-mail to one of his collaborators. And he noted that, for a team winning just once in every four tries, a speedy six-game losing streak would raise no one's eyebrows.

But the teams most likely to grasp their miserable fates so soon are most likely bad, period. And thus, they are deserving of some lottery position rhythm, since the whole best-prospects-to-the-worst-teams concept is the essence of the draft.

Keep in mind, most every other suggested system has its flaws. Simply giving all 14 lottery teams the same chance at the No. 1 pick (not weighting the odds by record) actually would increase the tanking by bubble teams, those who calculate that a first-round drubbing is less desirable than a shot at a franchise draftee.

Expecting some league snitches, uh, officials to monitor each suspected club as it plays out its final 20 games or so would be costly, tedious and open to interpretation. The chaos approach -- doing away with the draft entirely and letting rookies negotiate on the open market -- could put clubs in less enticing markets out of business completely.

That's why, until we're presented with a better system that we can so presumptuously present to the NBA, we're advocating this one. There's something fitting about this league of stars getting some help from an astronomer. And in case you didn't know, the word "star'' in German is ... (wait for it) ... "stern.''

Steve Aschburner covered the Minnesota Timberwolves and the NBA for 13 seasons for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has served as president or vice president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association since 2005. His new book, "The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: Minnesota Twins,'' can be ordered here.