Currently, the Washington Wizards are one of the worst teams in the NBA standings. It is no secret that they are trying to get a high pick in the 2026 NBA Draft.
Meanwhile, the NBA itself is looking to deter teams from tanking for long periods of time. One possible idea of it is by creating a tournament among lottery teams where the winner of the tournament gets the top pick in the draft.
TrillBroDude, SB Nation’s NBA “Feed” administrator, [originally wrote a post last week](/post/mxLdcNhNmv73) which had some good feedback. In particular, Gaboshyn had a solid comment which I will quote an excerpt below.
> As far as I can tell, the NBA is discussing these three actions:
It’s clear that the NBA wants to curb tanking to the extent possible. And here’s my take on a tournament, draft protections, etc.
* **On a tournament:** The worst team in the NBA will be among the least talented as well. I don’t see a tournament being fair to those teams who will likely have a lower pick and get punished for being bad AND not have the talented enough to win either.
* **Draft pick protections on trades:** This is a fair move to make.
* **Prohibiting back-to-back Top 4 picks:** I think Top 4 may be a bit too restrictive. But I can see teams being prohibited from a Top 2 pick for consecutive years.
* **Locking lottery positions early:** Locking the positions by a certain date sounds good in theory, but then teams that are looking to tank will tank even harder in the first several months of the season. Not sure the records of such teams will improve very much after Mar. 1 or whatever arbitrary date they settle on.
I liked the responses from the Feed post and provided some more thoughts. Anyway, do you have more opinions on this? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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