As the 2025-26 NBA regular season winds down, one of the biggest questions before the world’s biggest basketball league is how to combat the swell of tanking that has come to typify springtime ball in recent years. Bereft of chances to succeed in the playoffs, multiple teams resort to semi-covert “tanking”. Sitting key players, emphasizing talent development over production, reporting mysterious and persistent injuries…however they accomplish the feat, it amounts to intentional losing.
The goal, of
course, is to secure better position in the annual NBA Draft Lottery, a drawing among all non-playoffs participants to determine order of selection in the next NBA Draft. Teams with worse records have higher odds of being promoted to elite spots in the draft order and securing the next franchise-transforming player.
Post All-Star Break tanking used to be a commonly-accepted, mostly-ignored phenomenon, drawing sidelong glances but not serious rebuke. A couple teams per season engaged in the practice. Results were mixed.
In recent years, the practice has become more pervasive, with seemingly 1/3 of the league trying to dive for the bottom rungs in the standings. As a result, the losing has started earlier, sometimes as soon as January, leaving four and a half months of misery and skewed results in its wake.
Waking up to this reality, and corresponding damage to league credibility, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has vowed to combat the practice. Last week, Shams Charania of ESPN revealed three proposed “anti-tanking” measures, all aimed at reworking the draft lottery system to wean franchises off their dependence on losing.
Changes to the lottery system also affect all the participants in it. Right now the Portland Trail Blazers are a part of that group, leading to several questions in the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag about the topic, including this one:
Hi Dave,
It seems that smoothing out the lottery odds would be a benefit to us, given our situation as well as the future [Milwaukee] Bucks picks. Neither team is poised to tank hard and fall into the bottom 5 of the league, even in a post-Giannis-trade world. So wouldn’t having a few more percentage points between us and them be a net gain for us in a “smooth” draft a few years down the road?
Looking at the big picture across the NBA landscape, what are the broad implications over the next decade of a smoothed draft lottery? I imagine we’d see a few more middle-of-the-road teams or “one piece away” teams get a lucky bump that helps them take a leap forward. Will the unluckiest teams be plunged into purgatory? Could we see an uptick in star rookie production because some future stars are going to better teams with stronger supporting casts? Overall, do you predict more parity, or less?
-J
I’m going to be honest with you, J. These proposed changes are typical, pretty much what was expected from a league that’s been chasing its tail over these issues in reactionary fashion since the lottery system began. The whole thing has me face-palming with a cement block in hand.
Before we get to the details, let me give you the 10,000-foot version.
Cyclical Problems
You can tell the aim of the proposed changes by their umbrella label: “anti-tanking measures”. This is one side of a two-sided cycle that the NBA has been playing Whack-a-Mole with since then-Commissioner David Stern first drew the (according to conspiracy theories, frozen) New York Knicks envelope in 1985.
The progression goes like this:
Step 1
Accusations of tanking arise. This was the reason for the lottery system being instituted in the first place.
Back in 1984, people accused the Houston Rockets of intentionally losing to secure the first-overall pick and generational center (H)akeem Olajuwon. In ‘85, the NBA threw all non-playoffs teams into a fishbowl and the lottery system began, randomizing the draft order so nobody could game the system.
Step 2
To prevent tanking, the league makes the chances of winning the lottery as even as possible for all participants.
“Smoothing” the odds of gaining higher picks makes it less crucial for a franchise to finish at the bottom of the standings, as the chances are close to equal whether you’re the worst team or the sixth-worst. In the first lottery, all teams participating had a completely coequal chance.
Step 3
Inevitably, wonky results ensue.
The Knicks getting (next generational center) Patrick Ewing in that first lottery drawing had people raising eyebrows. The Orlando Magic got Shaquille O’Neal AND Chris Webber/Penny Hardaway by winning the first-overall pick in consecutive years. The San Antonio Spurs dipped down into the lottery for a single year because of a David Robinson injury and came up with Tim Duncan. The Spurs recently got Victor Wembanyama AND Stephon Castle AND Dylan Harper. Last year the less-than-deserving Dallas Mavericks leaped 102 spots on a 0.0001 chance to draft Cooper Flagg right after trading away Luka Doncic for an injured center, a bag of magic beans, and two spare buttons in a move not even a GM’s mother could love.
Some of this is random. A couple of these occurrences happened despite profoundly unequal lottery odds. But the league can’t fix randomness. Also, bad-random is more likely to occur when odds are relatively equal. So…
Step 4
To fix the wonky results and make sure teams in need get a fair chance at the best players, the NBA re-adjusts the odds and procedures, weighting them more towards the worst teams.
The worst four teams in the league by record currently have a 14% chance of getting the first-overall pick. The 14th-best team has a 0.5% chance.
But wait…if you’re going to lose, it’s way better to finish in the Bottom 4 than finish 14th, right? Here we go.
Step 5
Return to Step 1 and read through again. That’s the cycle.
Guess what? We’re beginning again at the top of the cycle, right here in 2026. If the league is just messing with the lottery odds and order in their latest proposals, nothing is new. It’s not going to turn out any different than it always has. The fixes will cause a corresponding, and opposite, problem. Ten years from now they’ll need to address that problem so they’ll swing back the other way.
When this happens with your automobile—the fix for one problem just causing another—you know it’s time to get a new car. But the Commissioner and Company keep taking this vehicle back to the shop again and again, chasing the same issues in similar ways.
Why Not Just Kill Tanking?
When these discussions come up, a familiar strain of conversation arises. If the integrity of the game is the most important thing, why not just eliminate tanking altogether by [pick your solution here]:
- Putting every team in the league in a lottery?
- Awarding draft picks on a recurring cycle regardless of record, eliminating the draft altogether?
- Relegating lesser teams to a whole other sub-league to punish them for losing?
Long-time readers have heard me talk about this before, so I’ll be brief, but it’s important. I never hear this talked about in national discussions on the draft, so maybe someone needs to clue in Justin Termine, Brian Scalabrine, Rob Perez, Antonio Daniels, Frank Isola, Sam Mitchell, Eddie Johnson, and all the Sirius/XM Radio NBA hosts, plus the experts from Amazon’s discussion panel, Stephen A Smith and the ESPN crew, and etc.
You cannot balance the league by fixing the NBA Draft alone because the league is not balanced outside of the draft. One of the main purposes of the draft is compensating for the imbalances that plague the system already. Taking away the draft’s favoritism towards losing teams doesn’t make them win. It leaves the other systemic forces that are stacked against them unchecked.
Every time you hear someone suggest equalizing the draft process entirely for all teams, eliminating the draft altogether, or punishing teams that lose until they just starting winning, the following should be asked:
- In all the times LeBron James has moved, has there EVER been a suggestion that he might go to the Utah Jazz, Charlotte Hornets, or Milwaukee Bucks? Is that even fathomable? Even when the Bucks were champions, even if the Jazz and Hornets could max him out contractually? If not, the teams that LeBron and other huge superstars will agree to play for have a massive advantage over teams that have no chance.
- We know about the Knicks, Clippers, and Lakers having financial advantages for players because of their massive potential for local revenue sources (commercials and other opportunities). But read this list: San Antonio Spurs, Dallas Mavericks, Houston Rockets, Miami Heat, Orlando Magic. Four of those five have punched WAY above their weight class in overall success, particularly in obtaining free agents and/or keeping their incumbent players. You know what else they have in common? No state income tax. That amounts to a 5% or so bonus to salary over heavily-taxed locations. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but go ask your investment professional today: you can have X return on investment or X return plus 5%. Which will they take and/or recommend? People make entire, multi-million dollar careers based on getting small percentages over the average with their investment strategies. NBA players don’t have to do that, even! They just have to play for the right teams and BOOM…they’re a financial genius.
- Back to those marquee teams: there’s a reason the Lakers get valued at $10 billion in a sale and the Trail Blazers at $4 billion. It’s not quality of product or wins, it’s market. James Dolan, Steve Ballmer, and any corporation that owns the Lakers can spend more freely than owners in Minnesota can because of current revenue streams and future sale value. Nothing in the universe is going to take away that edge. It’s literally what those owners paid a premium for.
These issues range from semi-difficult to impossible to solve. But that hardly matters because the league isn’t looking to solve any of them. They’re just accepted as part of the competitive landscape even though they’re not merit-based or competitive at all.
But now, in a sudden fit of selective justice, we’ve decided that the one mechanism that actually counteracts these imbalances needs to be fixed, if not eliminated. Even if we succeeded in that, it wouldn’t level the playing field. We’d just cement an unbalanced floor tilt in place.
What’s Being Proposed?
The reported draft reform proposals deal with three basic factors.
Who gets to participate?
Currently 14 teams participate in the NBA Draft Lottery system: all the franchises who don’t make that year’s final playoffs bracket. That accounts for all 10 teams that don’t participate in the postseason in any form, plus the 4 teams that lose in the Play-In Tournament and don’t move on to the playoffs.
All three proposals expand that number. Two of them move the bar to 18, including all teams in the Play-In Tournament regardless of whether they win or lose there. One proposal expands the number to 22: the original 14 that don’t make the playoffs (either because they didn’t qualify for the Play-In or they lost there) plus all 8 teams that lose in the first round of the playoffs.
Expanding the number of teams in the lottery drawing takes power away from losing. The more successful franchises get a chance at those high picks, the less incentive there is to become a losing franchise. You can have your cake (winning) and eat it too (get a high pick). Losing used to get you in an exclusive club vying for those high picks. Now just anyone can join.
The disadvantage of adding teams is obvious. It lessens the chances for teams in need—those who are legitimately losing—to get the prime picks that would help them. Over time it will likely lead to more of the wonky results referenced above, because more teams have a shot at a high pick every year.
What Are the Odds?
This is the traditional method of changing lottery incentives, the one mentioned above. Should odds for high picks be graduated, with worse teams having greater chances, or should they be smoothed out and equalized, so nobody has incentive to get lower in the standings?
In the report, only one option detailed odds specifically. That proposal—one of the 18-team options—gives the 10 worst teams in the league 80% of the chances for promotion (8% each) then divides the remaining 20% among the remaining 8 teams (presumably 2.5% for each). Most teams get equal chances.
The second 18-team option mimics the current system, in that the worst five teams in the standings get equal odds for promotion and the chances graduate downward for teams after that. Bad teams get better chances.
The advantages and disadvantages of these choices are the same as always. Graduated odds incentivize losing more. Smoothed odds take away help and threaten to create a semi-permanent underclass among disadvantaged teams with no clear way out.
How Many Draft Picks Do You Draw For?
The third major factor is how many draft positions are actually determined by lottery drawing. The current answer is four, with Pick 5 and onward being decided in reverse order of record. The worst team in the league will pick no lower than fifth.
The 22-team option keeps the current “Top Picks Random, Everyone Else in Reverse Order” system in place.
One of the 18-team options draws for all 18 picks. That’s the one with the equal 8%/(probably) 2.5% odds system. A team could finish 1st or 14th. It all depends on the bounce of the ping pong balls.
The second 18-team option—the one with 5 equal odds then graduating downward—draws for the first 5 picks as a separate group, then draws for the next 13 picks after in their own group.
The more picks you draw for randomly in the system, the less power losing has. The only 1-to-1 correlation between losing and draft position comes when the draft order stops being lottery and starts being determined by reverse order of standings.
The 22-team option that draws for only the first four picks guarantees the league’s biggest loser no worse than the 5th overall pick. Losing still gets you something in this system. The 18-team option with 5 equal odds contains a special rule that the 5 worst teams by records can fall no lower than 10th in the order. Losing helps, but not as much. The 18-team option with equal odds would presumably allow any team to fall anywhere regardless of record. Losing gets you far less in this setup.
Once again we find the corresponding flaw in each system, though. Results that are more random might rob losing of its power, but they also leads to results that are more random. If human beings lived a million years and players played for thousands of them in a career, the odds would settle into a nice, predictable order that, over time, would yield fair-ish results. But the NBA Draft only happens once a year. The oldest teams in the league are only 80 years old. Lottery systems as a whole have only been around for 40. With that many picks being decided by that few samples, we’re going to see big spikes of randomness that will never, ever be made up for in our lifetimes, let alone the career spans of the players involved. The line between randomness helping and randomness ruling is thin.
Balances
A couple balancing factors have been baked into the proposals to mitigate the randomness:
- The 18-team option with the 5 worst teams favored has that provision that none of the Bottom 5 can fall below 10th overall.
- The 22-team version weighs a teams record over two years, not just one. This helps avoid the league’s good teams dipping down into Lottery Land for a year, securing a great pick with their favorable odds, and then laughing all the way to the bank for the next generation.
- The 22-team version also provides a minimum “floor” for wins. If a team wins fewer than 20 games in a season, they’ll be credited with 20 for the purposes of gauging records for lottery odds. Winning just 8 games won’t get you any better chances than winning 20 would. This takes away the reward for tank-maxing.
Evaluation
Through the balancing factors we just detailed, the league is pretty much admitting that its solutions don’t solve all the problems inherent in the lottery system. All three proposals keep the cycle going, bringing in a corresponding cost with every advantage. The league isn’t instituting a more just system, it’s just deciding who to favor, hoping to receive less of a PR hit for the injustice.
Specifically, in 2026, the NBA is deciding that it’s worse to have bad teams losing intentionally in a system where they get rewarded than it is to have bad teams lose involuntarily in a system where they don’t.
They’re probably right about that too. It’s far worse to have the world complaining about regular-season games being of a low quality as a whole than it is for fans in Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Minnesota, and Portland to claim that they can never get the breaks that other teams do. The public-relations, wide-view answer to that complaint is, “You’re not supposed to. Only you care.”
In acceding to this, the NBA is missing a huge opportunity to actually fix the system, making it both helpful and harder to scam. They seem to view the connection between losing and reward as the primary, maybe the only, variable to play with. They appear to be saying, “The only ways to stop people from losing in order to gain a reward are to remove the reward entirely or to distribute the reward so far and so randomly that basically anyone can get it.”
Imagine this scenario. A man is hungry. You have a sandwich. You are wary of the sandwich going to the wrong person or being misused, but you still want to feed the man. Are the only two solutions these?
- Eliminate the free sandwich. A sandwich being misused is worse than anything. Only people who pay for sandwiches should get them, ever.
- Distribute the sandwich more randomly. Say the first person who shows up gets the sandwich, whether or not that person has food already.
Seriously? That’s what you come up with? And how are you failing to notice that both solutions end up with the sandwich in the same place: in the hands of people who already have the time, energy, resources, and opportunity to get one?
But yeah, we’ve just described 99% of the conversation from the league and media experts surrounding it regarding the lottery.
Obviously there are other choices. It’s possible to address a need while keeping in place mechanisms to make sure the gift isn’t terribly misused or misplaced.
Over the years we’ve already suggested several ideas that are probably superior to these proposals, things that allow the worst teams to get help while breaking the straight-line connection between losing and lottery position. They include:
- Weighting records by three years, not just one or two, making tanking a multi-year sacrifice and a hard choice for GM’s.
- Eliminating the potential for repeated high-pick wins in a short timeframe no matter what the team record is.
- Giving the greatest promotion odds to teams in the low-middle section of the lottery pool while reducing or eliminating the chances of the 3-4 absolute worst teams. This helps franchises that lose while providing anti-incentive for losing too much and all the reason in the world to get better if you’re truly in the basement.
- Starting non-playoffs teams with a fixed number of ping-pong balls then adding or subtracting based on wins during the season (positive), past lottery promotion (negative), or other performance metrics besides bald victories.
- Creating tiers in the lottery in which drawings take place, but no team can fall outside of its tier in a given year. (Coupled with weighting records over multiple seasons and non-repeat rules for the highest tier.)
- Putting all teams at the 7th seed or below into a postseason tournament which would not only decide the 7th and 8th seeds in each conference, but influence lottery odds for that year, with success in the tournament equaling enhanced odds but not overwhelming ones.
All of these methods keep the connection between the draft and teams in need, but they introduce elements that alter the direct correlation between immediate losing and immediate reward: having to lose for a longer period of time before getting rewarded, limiting the number of jackpots and/or the range of positioning losing gets you, rewarding losing but taking away the reward if you lose too much, adding other factors to losing (bonuses for wins, tournament wins, or anything you choose) so good play provides a countermeasure to the loss-based economy.
The point is, if we can offer possible off-ramps from the cycle, the professionals who think about this day and night can surely do so. All they have to do is make the luck factor of the lottery the final determination of position for those high picks, but up until that point multiple things go into the equation so losing doesn’t automatically get you from Point A to Point B. If you don’t want a see-saw battle between naked randomness and intentional losing to determine the fate of your league and its franchises, introduce other elements into the system that either limit or don’t center around those two factors!
How Do The New Proposals Affect the Blazers?
The tail end of the original question was how the proposed lottery changes might affect the Blazers. The short answer is, “It depends on whether they’re on the enhanced side of the new system or the nerfed one.”
These changes all make it less likely that super-bad teams will get high picks. If the Blazers are a super-bad team or own picks from super-bad teams, these changes will hurt. Correspondingly, the changes make it more likely that random, bad-to-decent teams will get rewarded whether they need it or not. If the Blazers hold that kind of pick—their own or somebody else’s—then these changes will benefit them.
Either way, we won’t know until we see the actual changes and the record involved.
Final Note: Whither First-Rounders?
If one of these changes is adopted, it’ll also have an effect on the value of first-round picks in trade from now on. Gone will be the hyper-valuable picks that lousy teams might have used to bring in high-level talent or future prospects. Granted, not many teams were trading away their best picks anyway, but they had the option.
If I think a Wizards pick has a 14% chance at the first overall spot, a 52% chance at Top 4, and a 100% chance at Top 5, I’m valuing that pick highly. If it has an 8% chance—the same as 9 other teams—and could fall all the way to 10th or below, I’m not prizing that pick nearly so much.
Conversely, if a mid-level Mavericks pick gives me that same 8% chance as anybody else, I’m valuing that first-rounder more that I would in the current system…not ultra-high, but it has considerably more weight than if it had a 96% chance of ending up 13th.
The loss of value from the potentially highest reaches of the lottery is far steeper than the gain in value from the lowest, though. Those ultra-high picks are so transformative that lessening the chances of getting them affects pick value more than any other factor. Demoting the frontrunners to a huge middle pack hurts more than promoting the back of the line to that same huge pack helps. If you think you have a good chance at winning Powerball you’re going to be mad if someone tells you it’s the same as anyone else’s. If you think you have no chance, you’ll be happy when someone tells you it’s the same as anyone else’s. But your happy won’t be nearly as big as the first person’s mad.
Overall I’d expect changes like this to reduce the desirability of draft picks in trades. Teams will be able to get good players in exchange for picks, but it’s less likely that they’ll be getting big talent or young potential.
Whew! That was a lot! Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!
