While us Knicks fans rejoiced during a Tuesday night beatdown of the Hawks that gave our ‘Bockers a 3-2 series lead, it was a pretty horrific day for the sport as a whole.
Around the same time on Tuesday afternoon, the NCAA revealed its plans to expand the NCAA Tournament to 76 teams (yuck), and the NBA’s preferred tanking fix, which will seemingly be instituted in 2027, was revealed. Both look like absolutely abysmal ideas.
But we are an NBA page, after all, so the tanking edict will be the one we focus
on. Even if this is the last of the Knicks’ concerns as they contend for a championship, its institutions may impact them down the road and will overall change the landscape of the league for as long as it remains in place.
The “3-2-1” plan is an absolute travesty to the game of basketball. It proposes a firm flattening of the lottery odds and punishes bottoming out to a severe degree. For those not read up on the issue, here’s a TLDR:
Lottery balls are drawn for ALL 16 TEAMS.
The bottom three teams in the NBA by record are in a “relegation zone” and lose a lottery ball. Those bottom three teams, who have a combined 42% chance of getting the top pick in 2026, combine for just a 16.2% chance in this system (5.4% each).
The other seven teams that miss the play-in tournament get three lottery balls and an even 8.1% chance of the top pick.
The four teams that miss the playoffs but make the play-in tournament have the same odds as the “relegation zone” teams. The No. 8 seeds in each conference (the loser of the 7-8 game) get one lottery ball and a 2.7% chance.
There are additionally other rules that restrict tanking:
- Back-to-back first overall picks are banned, as are three consecutive top-five selections
- Top 12-15 protected picks are no longer allowed to be traded
- League has the authority to levy additional punishment on tanking teams
There’s so much wrong with this, but here’s the worst part of it all.
A team can finish with the worst record in the NBA and it is physically possible for them to get the 12th overall pick.
12th. You can lose 70 games and pick 12th.
That’s the difference between LeBron James and Nick Collison. Between Dwight Howard and Robert Swift. Between Derrick Rose and Jason Thompson. Between Kyrie Irving and Alec Burks. Between KAT and Trey Lyles. Between Wemby and Dereck Lively II.
It’s the difference between a franchise player and a quality role player. A quality role player is valuable for a team with a foundation, but it means absolutely nothing for a team without talent.
The reason behind these changes is kindhearted. What happened the last two months of the season was an utter disgrace to basketball, with a third of the league voluntarily playing two-way players 35+ minutes a night to bottom out and get themselves the best possible odds at a stacked top four. It’s sound strategy, but unbearable to watch as a basketball fan.
The NBA had to change something, but there’s no easy fix and all this will do is punish the teams who actually need the talent.
Now that the system disincentivizes losing as many games as possible in favor of losing most games, the truly bad teams are going to sink all the way to the bottom. These teams aren’t shamelessly resting stars with minor ailments like Utah, Washington, or Indiana. They actually have no talent and badly need it.
You see this lottery spin? This is what’s best for the sport. We obviously don’t want to see our crosstown rivals have any promise, but when your most promising player is Egor Demin? You might deserve it. Sacramento’s most promising player is Maxime Raynaud. Chicago has Josh Giddey and a whole lot of poop. The Wizards, at least, have been irrelevant long enough that you could say they’ve paid their dues and deserve a good prospect.
Now imagine these teams getting booted out of the top 10 altogether. How are they supposed to build a good team?
The 2019 Knicks had Kevin Knox, Mitchell Robinson, and Dennis Smith Jr. They were as untalented of a basketball team as you could possibly fit into a salary cap sport, and yet, they fell in the draft lottery. Imagine they got booted out of the top 10 and had to pick PJ Washington or Cam Reddish instead of RJ Barrett, who at least helped start the turnaround before being flipped for OG Anunoby.
It doesn’t concern the Knicks right now, but it very well could soon. We aren’t foolish enough to believe this contention window will last forever, so the Knicks will soon backslide into the play-in or even the lottery, and although half of their upcoming picks are property of the Nets, the other half are still here.
In 2030, the Knicks could be bad again. Jalen Brunson will be 34, Karl-Anthony Towns will be 35, and nobody will be getting any younger. Especially when their 2029 and 2031 picks belong to someone else, they’d need a strong pick that year to help transition into the next era of Knicks basketball, and they could get completely shafted.
Conversely, the Knicks could be the 8-seed in 2029 and accidentally give Brooklyn the No. 1 pick. For a team that hasn’t had its draft pick move up in the lottery in over 40 years, that would be a ridiculous gut punch.
On that note, wouldn’t this also incentivize teams to tank for the 8-seed? Imagine a team like this year’s Orlando Magic or the 2023 Heat getting a chance at the No. 1 pick while also being able to go on a playoff run. And it’s not even a chance at the No. 1 pick they’d be playing for. Since all 16 teams are in the lottery, they’d have an 8.1% chance of a top 3 pick, 13.5% chance of a top 5 pick, and a 27% chance of a top 10 pick. Why would you ever want to win that 7-8 game?
This whole system is such an unbridled mess, and it does nothing to help the game. In fact, it just feeds into the lottery conspiracies. It’s a lot easier to “rig” a lottery when everyone has equal odds, rather than all these outlier 2% teams conveniently getting the top pick (Kyrie in Cleveland, D-Rose in Chicago, Flagg in Dallas).
This could destroy the integrity of the sport. Just look at how it works in other sports:
The NHL has pretty flat lottery odds, but they constrain the ability to get the No. 1 pick to the bottom 12 teams and limit how far the bottom few teams can fall (the worst team can fall to 3, the second-worst can fall to 4, etc). The NFL doesn’t have a lottery at all!
I despise the way MLB does it, but they at least have an excuse. There’s no salary cap, and there will be teams that spend as little money as possible and try to rebuild an extremely cheap team; therefore, they punish tanking revenue-sharing teams and teams that get lucky in the lottery by ensuring they cannot receive a top 5 pick in consecutive years. It’s led to the Rockies and White Sox, who’ve broken records for their futility the last two seasons, picking outside the top 10.
Tanking needed a fix in the NBA, but the way Adam Silver is doing it is completely wrong and completely and utterly dangerous.
