The NBA has a tanking problem. That’s not new, but it’s become especially prevalent this season. There are at least nine, maybe ten (depending on what the Bucks do) teams that are punting on the 2025-26 season. If the Bucks do decide to let Giannis rest up for an extended period of time, we’ll go through the last quarter of the season with the 20 playoff/play-in teams already set, while the other 10 teams race for the bottom. It’s very obvious why that’s not ideal. No league wants a third of its membership actively trying to lose games. You can’t put out a good product like that.
When you look at how we got here, it’s pretty easy to see what the problem is. It’s the lottery. The thing that was implemented to deter tanking is actually making it worse. And the “fix” that was put in a few years ago that flattened the odds at the top only exacerbated the problem. If the league wants to end or massively curb tanking, they simply need to end the lottery and award picks in the reverse order of standings.
The idea of a draft lottery is very myopic and doesn’t address the actual incentive to losing games. Part of the idea is that if teams aren’t guaranteed a top draft spot, they simply won’t try to get one. But that’s neglecting the simple fact that teams are still going to try to maximize their odds. The lottery isn’t deterring anything. The other facet of the lottery is that it punishes teams for tanking. You can bottom out and still not get a top pick. Nana nana boo boo. But what happens to the teams that are punished for tanking? They stay bad and have to try again. Hence the tanking problem.
Look no further than last year. The 2025 draft lottery should be the event that dooms the practice. The top three picks went to a 76ers team that was on a down year due to injuries, a Spurs team that already had back-to-back rookies of the year from top four picks in the previous two years, and a Mavericks team that was in the play-in. The four worst teams in the league picked fifth, sixth, fourth, and seventh. The elite talent at the top of the draft class went to teams that already had elite talent. Meanwhile, the actual worst teams had to settle for lower tier players that are significantly less likely to alter the course of a franchise. Those teams are simply going to have to go back to the lottery well and hope for better luck next year.
And that’s exactly where we are. The Hornets have been able to pull themselves into playoff contention because of better health. Every other team that dropped in the lottery last summer is currently fighting for ping pong balls again. Meanwhile, another segment of the league has decided to hit the reset button on their roster and has joined the freefall to the bottom of the standings. The lottery serving its purpose and stealing picks from all of the worst teams has effectively doubled the amount of teams that are going to be in it this season.
Simply removing the lottery and giving the best picks to the worst teams removes that problem. Teams are still going to tank for the top couple of picks when they’re positioned to do so, but it’s a lot more palatable when two or three teams are tanking instead of nine or ten. There is no incentive for a team that’s five or six spots from the bottom to try to lose as many games as possible because there’s no chance for a magical lottery to improve their picks. They can settle into whatever tier they’re in. And once a team gets to the bottom and lands that top pick, they’ll theoretically have an easier path out of the bottom, allowing new teams to bottom out and get their star.
That’s it. Get rid of the lottery, and the tanking problem becomes much less pronounced. If the league wants to do more than that, there are some other simple tweaks to the no-lottery solution.
The simplest addendum to the lack of lottery is to limit how frequently teams can pick in a certain range. For example, make it so that teams are not eligible to pick in the top five in back to back seasons. If a team picks top five one year and finishes in the bottom five again the next, the best pick they can get is sixth. That would disperse top picks around the league year after year and remove the incentive for multi-year tank schemes.
There’s other nuance you can add to that as well. If you set the cutoff at top five, you could punish teams for bottoming out by lowering their draft pick for finishing in the bottom five in back back seasons. Say you finish in the bottom five for a second straight season. However far away you are from fifth is how far in the other direction your pick goes. So if you finish bottom five one year and then dead last in the next season, your pick drops all the way to 10th. If you were second worst, your pick would be 9th, and so on.
There are all sorts of variations you can do with that concept. The league would just have to lock teams into their adjusted spots then fill in the draft order in reverse order of the standings. To me, that’s far simpler than things like locking lottery odds at a certain date or tracking wins from a certain point of the season. Just let the bad teams get the best picks, but don’t let them do it over and over again. \`
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