It’s February 25th, 2026, almost a full week after the NBA returned from the 2026 All-Star Break, also a week since Commissioner Adam Silver announced that the league would adopt as-yet-unspecified anti-tanking measures next season. If national broadcasts and newsletters are any indication, tanking is still the top topic of discussion right now. It’s unusual for a single subject to last days at the height of the league’s collective consciousness, let alone a week.
Two weeks ago, anticipating the issue,
we discussed the tanking problem and a fix to the NBA Draft lottery system that would mitigate it. In the interim, I’ve come to realized that the proposed solution wasn’t strong enough. Today we’re going to redo it in a slightly different form.
If you need a full discussion of why most of the easily-conceived solutions won’t work—including just flattening out the lottery odds or including all 30 teams in the lottery—click through the link to the prior article and read through. We won’t rehearse that here. Instead we’ll frame the problem like this:
- The draft still needs to give meaningful aid to lower-echelon teams because for many, if not most, it’s their only way of improvement. Solutions that take away this potential advantage (like the Wheel) don’t account for all the other ways in which teams can be disadvantaged outside of the draft system. You balance the one mechanism that aids bad teams without balancing out the ones that keep elite teams in power over them.
- Raising the odds of getting a high pick at the winning-team end of the lottery scale (including odds-flattening) makes participation in the NBA playoffs less desirable and must be avoided for the integrity of the game. It also makes serious imbalance more likely. Should a team that narrowly-missed the playoffs this year have an equal chance at a generational superstar as a team that hasn’t made the playoffs in the last five years?
- Raising the odds at the losing-team end of the lottery scale (including eliminating the lottery and just drafting in reverse order of wins) incentivizes losing and appears to be eroding the integrity of the game.
- Every shifting of odds from high to low or back carries a corresponding, opposite cost. When you tilt the balance towards one side, the other side loses an equal amount. This doesn’t fix the problem, it just changes who suffers because of it.
Any solution that depends on one of these approaches—which is basically all of the systemic solutions proposed so far—will ultimately fail, simply swinging the pendulum to another, equally-undesirable place.
The actual solution needs to mirror what you’d do to calm any wildly-vacillating see-saw scales: put the weight in the middle.
In the prior post, I suggested a bell curve of sorts for lottery odds, putting emphasis on teams that succeeded at least a little, but still weren’t good. This incentivizes franchises to avoid the bottom rungs of the ladder, as the odds for teams finishing last would be worse than the odds for middling-bad teams.
If you want to put teeth into the system, though, there’s another option. Adopt for the lottery a concept that has existed in football/soccer for a long time: relegation.
Oversimplified Explanation: In some regions of the world, there are more football teams than there are spaces in the top leagues. Those regions have an “A” league, so to speak, and then a “B” league and so on. If a team in the “A” league finishes low or last in a given year, they are relegated to the “B” league. The top “B” league teams join the “A” league in return. Basically, if you play too poorly, you don’t get the chance anymore for a while.
We want to borrow an aspect of that system for our lottery odds. It works like this:
- The top four picks in each draft are determined by lottery drawing, similar to the current system.
- The shape of the lottery odds also looks similar to the current system. Teams who barely missed the playoffs don’t have a good chance at all to win a top pick. Teams who lose more have better odds, as they need more help. EXCEPT…
- The bottom three teams in the league that year (you could say bottom two if you prefer) have ZERO percent chance to get promoted and get a top-four pick. They are relegated out of that year’s lottery drawing entirely.
- However, once the top four lottery picks have been drawn, the remainder of the teams—including the bottom three who lost their odds—are seeded in the draft order from most losses to least, just as happens now. The worst team by record that year is guaranteed to get the fifth pick, the second-worst the sixth, and the third-worst the seventh.
You’re going to get really good odds of getting a top-four pick if you end up the fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-worst team in the league. You’re not going to get a top-four pick if you’re in the bottom-three, but you will draft fifth through seventh.
The big problem with the system right now is that, even though losing doesn’t guarantee you a high lottery pick, it automatically gives you better odds of one. There’s no doubt that losing is “better” for the long-term future of a bad team than winning. Teams gain nothing by finishing higher in the standings. They’re not going to get one bit more attractive to free agents finishing sixth-worst instead of third-worst. They’re not going to become a prize destination for star trade prospects. But they are going to nerf their lottery odds by winning. So there’s no reason not to lose. They don’t even need to ask! They already know that every loss in January will absolutely pay off in greater odds come May.
When a loss is 100% guaranteed to be beneficial, you can expect the people in charge of bringing their teams benefit to lose. Through odds “relegation”, you take away that certainty. That’s all you need to make winning a viable and conceivable option again.
It’s easy to race to become the worst team in the league. But how do you plan, in December or January, to be the fourth-worst team in May and not the third-worst? You can’t. It depends on the records and performance of other teams. Even if you do try to scheme the system, if you want to be safe, you need to win some games in order to end up in the right spot. Your opponents do too, which makes winning contested and more valuable, as it should be.
Even if you know you’re the absolute worst team in the league organically, both you and your fans better root for as many wins as you can get, as early as you can get them. You don’t want to be stuck at the end of the year way behind in the standings, needing a string of miracle wins. You want to get ahead of, and stay ahead of, at least three other teams all year.
This system doesn’t remove critical help (and hope) for struggling teams, though.
- Obviously those middling-bad teams get boosted. They’ve shown some ability to win. Maybe a high-lottery star will help the cause. That’s better for the star being drafted. It’s also better for those teams and their fans, who can be proud that they fought to a middle position, at least. The process isn’t so damn cynical. “Yay! We lost! Woohoo!!!”
- Even if you do end up in the bottom three, you’re going to draft in the mid-lottery. That’s enough to give you forward progress while trying to earn a slightly higher spot next year. If you rise a lot…success! If you only rise a little, you’ll at least be in the premium lottery-odds middling spots next draft. If you don’t rise at all, maybe you should look at what you’re doing as an organization.
In this system, losing is permissible. After all, somebody is going to do it! But it’s not as determinative as it is in the current lottery-odds structure. You do kind of want to lose if you’re a bad team, but you can’t lose too much or you’re going to get snakebit.
Keep the odds miniscule for the winningest teams in the lottery. Make the odds zero for the losing-est. Give the worst of the middle teams a better-weighted chance than the best of the middle teams. That’s it. You’re not going to eliminate intentional losing. (Nothing will, short of adopting a system that will imbalance the league in a completely different way.) You will mitigate tanking, delay it, and probably create incentive for many teams to win games in spring instead of rushing headlong into losing them.
The NBA doesn’t have to lose the lottery system to protect the integrity of the game. It just needs to shift the odds in the one way it hasn’t tried yet, stopping the ever-moving see-saw and finding balance in the middle. Throw in a couple of safeguards against a team winning high-lottery picks in consecutive years and you’re good to go. And the rest of us can finally start talking about actual games between February and April instead of shaking our heads over how ludicrous the losing has become.
