Yep, that will definitely fix it this time.
More changes to combat tanking are coming to the NBA next season, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania. Trying to combat year-over, they’ll be cracking down on what protections you can put on a traded pick, how many consecutive years in a row you can land a top-4 pick, and another flattening of the lottery odds. Here are the specifics.
The Sixers hope that these changes won’t really impact them any time soon, but given their history, it felt worth touching on.
Preventing teams from tanking for multiple seasons is clearly what the league is trying to crack down on. That’s why teams will no longer be able to pick in the top-4 in consecutive years, especially if they’ve been a bottom three team in consecutive years.
The league so desperately doesn’t want teams to do what the Washington Wizards and Utah Jazz have over the past few years, yet they are doing the opposite of addressing that problem. One of the biggest reasons why those two teams in particular have punted season after season is because the lottery continues to give them nothing to show for it.
Of the past five drives, those two teams have only gotten a top-5 pick, when the Wizards won the number two overall pick in the 2024 draft, the weakest draft by any measure of the last decade. Now the odds have only gotten worse for the bottom of the league.
The flattened lottery odds that were introduced back in 2019 were so harmful to both of those franchises that they said screw it and abandoned that plan altogether. Instead the Wizards and Jazz both made pre-agency trades to acquire Trae Young, Anthony Davis, and Jaren Jackson Jr., respectively.
Another measure they’ve taken to prevent this from happening year over year is lottery odds being allocated on two-year records.
Each season is its own story with its own wrinkles. Using a two-season record to determine one year’s drafting doesn’t account for any of the outliers. What about last year’s Sixers team, thrust into the top of the lottery because of an injury riddled season?
That same logic went into the rule that teams can’t pick in the top-4 after making the conference finals the year prior. Again, there’s a great example, one happening right now, that shows the flaws in this idea.
Of course that would be the Indiana Pacers. No one said it better than the god of Pacers coverage, Caitlin Cooper, who tweeted that it takes something pretty bad happening for a team to make it to a top-4 pick after making the conference finals, why should they be penalized twice?
Most of these changes fall apart when given a second thought. It only makes sense when you realize the league isn’t trying to cater to the Pacers fan still watching them in March, but rather the fan who is willing to gamble on the Pacers in March.
The integration of sports betting has long been a priority for this league’s administration, and when Ben Golliver reported that angry sportsbooks were part of this renewed anti-tanking push, it felt like the quiet part was being said out loud.
That is really the only reason this has become the talk of the league. It’s not like tanking is some great offense to fanbases they can’t stand going through. Most well adjusted fans would rather their team try to build something meaningful rather than be the Chicago Bulls.
Tanking isn’t a real problem, but it will cause the league real issues as long as they continue to panic about it.
