Predicting how each of the NBA’s proposed Draft Lottery reforms could backfire

Tanking is a not a new phenomenon in the NBA. It’s been happening in some fashion since the 1980s, but it was typically fairly well contained. Two or three of the league’s worst teams would do it most years, try to secure a top draft pick, and then, after getting one or two of them, would pivot back into trying to win. It was hardly ideal, but it was manageable.

The perception of tanking as some sort of league-wide crisis took hold in the 2010s, when Sam Hinkie tore the Philadelphia 76ers down to the studs in the most concerted, long-term tanking effort the NBA had ever seen. It got so bad the opposing owners reportedly lobbied the league to intervene. The NBA first attempted to pass lottery reform after Hinkie’s first season in Philadelphia, but failed thanks to the timely intervention of Sam Presti, who reportedly worked behind the scenes to combat the proposed measures. The league successfully made changes a few years later, starting with the 2019 lottery.

The idea was straightforward: If the lottery format was altered to offer less benefit to the worst teams in the league, those teams wouldn’t feel as inclined to put out an intentionally terrible product. Odds for the three worst teams in the league would be an even 14%, meaning teams would no longer have as much of a reason to fight for the absolute worst record, and that 14% figure was itself reduced from the previous high of 25%. Meanwhile, the lottery drawing itself increased from three teams to four, meaning the worst team could slip as low as No. 5. The idea, again, was to create a system in which a team had less to gain by being awful.

The NBA badly miscalculated on two fronts. The worst teams may have had less to gain by being awful … but they had more to lose by not being awful. The third-worst team may not gain lottery odds by having the worst record instead, but their floor became the No. 7 overall pick. No team wants to waste an entire season only to pick seventh. This made tanking more of a defensive strategy than an offensive strategy. Teams needed to protect against their worst-case outcomes, not just maximize their odds at the best ones.

Meanwhile, those lottery odds that the worst teams lost had to go somewhere. They went into the middle. Suddenly, a team that might have organically been the eighth- or ninth-worst team in the NBA recognized how much it had to gain by suddenly being the fifth- or sixth-worst team. Awful teams are an inevitability. There are 30 teams in the league. Someone has to be the worst of them. The NBA tried to make those teams better when the reality was that they were always going to be miserable. But in the process, the NBA invited another handful of teams to join them at the bottom.

And that leads us to today. Nine of the 10 teams that will miss the postseason could be credibly accused of tanking. That’s 30% of the league putting forth an inferior product. Maybe that does represent a crisis, but it’s a crisis of the NBA’s own making. The pre-reform lottery never inspired nearly one-third of the league to race to the bottom. There are always unintended consequences.

Yet the NBA is doubling down on lottery reform. On Friday, ESPN shared three detailed proposals that the NBA is considering. They are borderline draconian for the league’s worst teams, creating systems that all but abandon the draft’s intended purpose as a talent-balancing mechanism.

The need for such a mechanism has never been greater. The last few collective bargaining agreements have relaxed the rules regarding contract extensions, which has drastically reduced the amount of talent available in free agency. The absence of free agency has driven trade valuations entirely out of whack. We live in a world in which non-All-Stars are now regularly traded for multiple first-round picks. Bad teams do not have nearly as many affordable paths to improvement as they once did. 

Drafting is the one component of roster-building still somewhat in their control. The top 10 teams in the NBA by record this season have a combined 14 homegrown top-five picks on their rosters, with several others having been essential trade assets that got them where they are now.

Yet drafting, at least for the worst teams in the NBA, is about to get a whole lot harder, and as the 2019 reforms showed, it is probably going to get harder in ways the league doesn’t necessarily foresee or protect against. So with three fleshed-out proposals now on the table, let’s try to figure out what those unintended consequences are going to be in the hopes that the NBA also notices these defects and preemptively steers away from some of these icebergs.

Proposal 1

The NBA’s first proposal would expand the lottery from 14 participants to 18 participants. All 18 teams that either missed the postseason or participated in the Play-In Tournament would be eligible. The 10 teams that miss the postseason altogether would each receive identical 8% chances at the No. 1 pick. The remaining 20% would be spread among the eight play-in teams. The most drastic change, though, would come in the actual drawing. Instead of drawing four selections and slotting the remaining teams in order of record, this proposal would draw for all 18 picks in the lottery, meaning the worst team in the NBA could theoretically pick as low as No. 18.

Our first unintended consequence is pretty straightforward. We’re simply moving the tank line. Teams would no longer have a reason to try to have the absolute worst record. There would no longer be a distinction between, say, No. 1 and No. 5. It’s not unreasonable to assume this will make the worst teams slightly more watchable. However, we’ve suddenly given teams in the play-in mix a reason to intentionally fall out of the postseason. Don’t assume that a desire to play postseason basketball would prevent teams from tanking. The Dallas Mavericks tanked while mathematically alive for the No. 10 seed in 2023. Front offices understand that the odds of a deep playoff run from the Play-In Tournament are slim, so their best long-term course would likely be maximizing their lottery odds.

Our second unintended consequence would be extending the length of rebuilds. In an 18-team lottery, a few bad teams getting perpetually unlucky would be inevitable. Imagine a world in which the Wizards got no top-10 picks out of the past three seasons. Where would they be? Probably still hoping for a top-10 pick. The NBA would effectively be trading teams being very bad for a shorter period of time for teams being slightly less bad for a much longer period of time, and the teams they would be inflicting these lengthy rebuilds on would essentially be random. As flawed as the existing system is, it gives fans of bad teams hope. What would fans of the 2025-26 Sacramento Kings have to get excited about in this scenario?

Lastly, there’s the matter of what to do with a team like the 2023 Miami Heat. They participated in the 2023 Play-In Tournament, but made the NBA Finals. In this scenario, we’d have a reigning finalist in the lottery with its own selection. Does anyone want that? 

Proposal 2

The second concept would increase the lottery from 14 teams all the way to 22: the 10 teams to miss the postseason, the eight that make the Play-In Tournament and four that lose in the first round of the playoffs. The odds would be based on each team’s record over the prior two seasons, not just the most recent one. Additionally, losses beyond a certain threshold would no longer be beneficial. For example, if the NBA set a 20-win minimum, a 15-win team would have five wins added to its total. Precise odds and pick floors for this proposal are not yet clear.

An intended consequence of this change would seemingly be making it harder for contending teams dealing with injuries to take a so-called “gap” year like the Pacers are without Tyrese Haliburton. I think most fans would actually call this a good idea. The draft is, again, a balancing mechanism. The idea is to make bad teams better. The Pacers are not a bad team, they’re a temporarily bad team that doesn’t need to be artificially improved. But there’s a flip side here. Just as a team can go from very good one year to very bad the next, a team can also go from very bad one year to very good the next. 

Imagine a young team spending a few years accumulating talent before making its leap into the playoffs, like the Pistons last season. They put up a fight in the first round, but remember, they won only 14 games in the 2023-24 season. Even if you bump that total up to 20, their two-year average from 2024 and 2025 would be just 32 wins. This system would position a team like that to potentially get one more stroke of lottery luck right as it’s already ascending, once again allocating talent not to a team that needs it, but who already has enough of it to make the playoffs.

Speaking of which, first-round favorites may not lose series frequently, but it does happen. Five No. 1 seeds have lost in the first round since the playoff field expanded to 16 teams, and seven No. 2 seeds have also lost. It’s one thing to have play-in teams win the lottery. It’s another for, say, the Celtics to do so because Jaylen Brown sprained his ankle in Game 3 of a seven-game series. That drastically alters the balance of power throughout the league for years to come. 

This doesn’t just have to apply to top seeds. Sometimes a conference is loaded and injuries mean that the standings don’t reflect team quality. It’s plausible that the Nuggets and Lakers face off in the first round this season. I don’t think anyone believes either of those teams should be in the lottery, but one of them would have to be in this system.

And then of course, there’s just the reality that if you tell teams they need to tank for two years to maximize their lottery odds, they’re probably just going to tank for two years, or more, and reap the benefit over multiple lotteries. Isn’t that part of the problem the NBA is setting out to solve? The incentive for losing still exists, it’s just spread over a longer time period.

Proposal 3

The third concept is by far the most complicated. It essentially calls for two separate lotteries. The first one would draw for only the top five picks. The same 18 teams from the first proposal would be involved, and the five worst teams would have even odds, with odds descending for everyone else thereafter. After the top five picks are drawn, a second drawing would be held for the remaining 13 teams. Any bottom-five team that did not land a top-five selection could pick no later than 10th.

Once again, we’re just moving the tank point. Now, the line is No. 5. The difference between No. 1 and No. 4 would be nonexistent, but the difference between No. 5 and No. 6 would be enormous. Similarly to the 2019 reforms, that isn’t just a matter of offense, but one of defense. The fifth-worst team has a floor of No. 10. The sixth-worst team would have, at least based on the present reporting, a floor of No. 18. There has never been such a big disparity between two defined, consecutive slots as the one this format would create. It’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be tanking in the middle.

Of the three proposals, this is the one that has been met with the most head-scratching from fans. They’re confused, and that confusion makes it harder for fans to follow the draft process. The NBA draws a pretty significant amount of interest and online engagement through the rumor mill and roster-building speculation. As we’ve seen with the aprons, fans don’t like not being able to understand the rules. I’m not sure a bottom-line impact can be measured here, but it’s worth noting.

The universal side effects and unfixable problems

There’s an easy response to a lot of the “teams would still tank, just differently” fear embedded in some of these proposals. The Athletic’s Joe Vardon reported on Friday that under any of these systems, the commissioner could also have the power to move a team’s first-round pick to the end of the lottery, the end of the first round or even strip a team of its pick entirely if he still believed it was tanking. 

The trouble here is that there is no objective definition of tanking. You know it when you see it. So the NBA would either have to invent strict, measurable criteria for tanking, or it would have to ask its fans to trust it to enforce subjective rules consistently. I just don’t think either is possible. There is no consistent way to determine whether a loss was intentional, and there is no way to convince fans that the existence of a system that carries the theoretical potential for impropriety will never actually lead to impropriety. The moment a draft-reliant small-market team is stripped of a pick, a chunk of that fanbase loses faith in the system. The moment a big-market team avoids a punishment for actions fans believe warrant one, fans of more teams start to lose faith in the system.

We have, to this point, discussed only the removal of incentives for losing. We have not, however, discussed the addition of incentives for winning. Why does this matter? I would argue the single most pervasive form of tanking that exists in the NBA is shutting players down late in a season due to injuries they might otherwise have been able to play through. This is what ultimately degrades the product. Teams have good players. They just don’t use them. Ideally, an anti-tanking measure should revolve around keeping players like this on the floor.

None of these proposed solutions actually do that because losing games is not the only or perhaps even the primary purpose for sitting these players out. The real reason this happens is that teams in the lottery no longer have anything to gain by winning games, therefore they have nothing to gain by risking the health of their best players in games that fundamentally have no stakes. Putting a star on the court in these meaningless games risks an injury that could carry over into next season’s meaningful ones. In order to keep these players on the floor, there has to be an incentive to win, not just the removal of incentives to lose. Right away, my suspicion is that one of the unintended consequences of any change that does not address this issue will ultimately lead to a system in which that issue persists, and ultimately leads to another crack at reform a few years down the line. As extreme as these measures are, they’re still ultimately half-measures in that they address losing but not winning.

Another topic we haven’t addressed: trades. For starters, a number of existing trades will now have been negotiated based on rules that neither team knew were coming. Take Portland’s Damian Lillard trade. The majority of the value gained in sending a franchise icon to Milwaukee came through Bucks draft picks. The entire premise was based on Milwaukee declining, potentially without Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the Blazers reaping the rewards. Well, those picks are about to be worth less than Portland likely assumed during the negotiation. Meanwhile, teams have stocked up on unprotected first-round picks and swaps from teams that weren’t necessarily slated for the high lottery are probably doing backflips right now.

What these changes are broadly going to do is squeeze the trade value of most first picks towards the middle. Seemingly good picks are worse. Seemingly bad picks are better. Who this probably affects the most are teams trading away stars, as Portland did. Those teams can now no longer acquire picks deep into the future hoping to cash in on their aging star’s eventual decline. Perhaps this changes what teams seek in those sorts of trades, likely by eyeing players instead of draft picks. But the thing about draft picks is, until a team trades them, at least everyone has them. You’re out of luck if your expiring contract star demands a move somewhere specific and that team doesn’t have young players to send you. Meanwhile, mid-first-round picks being less valuable probably slows down the role player trade market, especially at the deadline, by a fair bit. Nobody’s giving up the 20th pick in a 22-team lottery for a solid backup to shore up their rotation in February.

We’re talking about hypothetical consequences for blank-slate teams following rules that haven’t even been approved yet. We haven’t yet considered how these rules are going to fit into the unique circumstances of the NBA landscape today. To put it simply, I believe these rules are going to entrench the top handful of current teams at the top of the standings far longer than they would otherwise be there. I think lottery reform could wind up being the thing that ensures dynasties for the Thunder, Spurs or both.

The Thunder only tanked for two years, but they got Chet Holmgren and Alex Caruso out of doing so, and bigger picture, they were able to accumulate a historic amount of asset-value and young talent out of impossible-to-replicate circumstances. As has been widely discussed, they are as well-positioned to win both now and later as any NBA team ever has been. If they have a peer, it’s the Spurs. They benefitted more directly from lottery luck, earning three consecutive top-four picks. Look around at the other teams in poll position moving forward. The Pistons made four straight top-five picks. The Rockets tanked for three and then got a fourth through a traded pick. The Celtics got two consecutive No. 3 picks from the same team through a trade.

As we’ve covered, free agency is a less powerful tool for team-building than it’s been in decades, and that in turn has made it seller’s market for trades. The harder you make it for a team to stack top draft picks over multiple years, the harder you make it for genuine competition to rise up and challenge the Thunder and the Spurs, because how on Earth is anyone else supposed to rack up the sheer amount of talent and flexibility that those teams have? Maybe teams like the Rockets or Pistons and Celtics could get grandfathered in from having previously benefitted from the old system and managed their assets responsibly afterward, but new, rising contenders are starting from a massive, systemic disadvantage. Victor Wembanyama got to start his career with Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper. Is AJ Dybantsa or Cameron Boozer going to be that lucky? Probably not.

NBA rule changes tend to be reactionary. The supermax was a response to Kevin Durant leaving the Thunder. The second apron was a response to teams like the Warriors and Clippers spending like drunken sailors. We’ve even seen reactionary lottery reform before. Teams were so mad when Orlando won back-to-back lotteries in 1992 and 1993 that the league had to steepen the odds, making the format even more favorable to the worst teams. Yet I fear that in reacting to years of self-inflicted tanking, the NBA is inadvertently making the teams that benefited from all of that tanking significantly stronger. Those teams got to pull the tanking ladder up from behind them. It’s the next set of teams that is going to suffer. That seems like the likeliest unintended consequence of this to me, and it will apply no matter what proposal the NBA lands on.