The NBA might be expediting a potential team-building disaster.
In the name of curbing tanking, the league has been desperately holding a litany of meetings with its 30 current owners and general managers (plus, in our Chicago Bulls’ case, whoever our acting GM is — presumably Pax?) to fast-track solutions.
One concept that had been gaining steam prior to a Tuesday GM Zoom was a lottery expansion from 14 to 18 teams, while simultaneously flattening odds and penalizing the absolute bottom feeders.
According to new reporting from ESPN’s Shams Charania and The Athletic‘s Sam Amick, that front-runner proposal has now undergone some mild tweaks.
The NBA presented its top front office minds with a “3-2-1” lottery ball approach, allocating the most lottery balls, three, to teams with the fourth-through-10th-worst records. Two lottery balls would be gifted to the three teams with the absolute worst records in the league and the play-in teams that fail to advance to the playoffs proper. But there’s a caveat: the three teams with the worst records wouldn’t fall past the No. 12 pick. The two clubs that lose the 7-8 play-in game would receive one lottery ball apiece.
League officials presented an updated draft lottery reform proposal to combat tanking, deemed the “3-2-1” system, which was obtained by @sam_amick. pic.twitter.com/zdI9Wj1N9Y
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) April 29, 2026Clubs would be prohibited from earning the No. 1 overall selection in back-to-back seasons, or from nabbing three straight picks in the top five. The adjusted rules would prevent teams from protecting draft picks in the Nos. 12-15 spots for… some reason.
In modern sports, frequently changing rules and making them as convoluted and tough to follow as possible isn’t exactly fan-friendly. Again, this is all being done, in theory, to address a problem that isn’t even much of a problem. The easiest fix, of course, would be ending the season maybe a month earlier and cutting out 10 games in the regular season schedule. That would shrink the window for naked tanking considerably. But ownership and players alike would be reticent to lose the cash.
Obvious Holes in the NBA’s New Plan
@ David Banks-Imagn ImagesAdam Silver is a smart guy. There’s no disputing that. And it’s become incredibly clear in recent years that his primary concern is appeasing ownership, not fans or players.
But there’s still no explaining why the NBA believes this new, unnecessarily complicated approach would be some kind of improvement over the current system.
At the end of the day, what will happen is that bad teams will try a bit harder at the end of the season to avoid falling into those bottom three records. The flip side of that, thanks to these flattened odds, is that even more teams will try to be worse.
Clubs that are floating around play-in tournament territory will now strive to lose games late, as everyone will now want to get into that magical range of teams with the fourth through 10th-worst records. Who cares about qualifying for the play-in tournament if missing out means you could get a shot at a generational talent? The more teams that have a chance at the top pick, the more tanking you’ll have in pursuit of that top pick. That feels incredibly obvious to this writer. Why can’t the NBA or its 30 owners see that?
This system will almost certainly keep bad teams bad for longer, as it will cut off access to the top mechanisms clubs now have for roster building. In theory, it should especially impede small-market squads from shoring up their personnel. As Rachel Nichols of Sports Illustrated observes, there’s a chance that the least-talented teams, who most need an opportunity at selecting the best young talent, will have an even more limited ability to improve.
Yahoo Sports’ Tom Haberstroh astutely notes that the idea of preventing teams from earning three straight top-five draft selections would have stopped recent small-market clubs like the San Antonio Spurs, Detroit Pistons, Cleveland Cavaliers, and the big-market Houston Rockets from building out their exciting young cores. Bill Simmons of The Ringer is in favor of curbing consecutive No. 1 picks or three straight top-five selections, but even he is opposed to such a complicated new approach to the draft.
Who exactly cares about this? Is stopping teams from phoning in the last month-and-a-half of a given season worth preventing quality basketball?
Sam Quinn of CBS Sports notes that the league’s latest CBA has effectively killed the kind of free agency team-building that so dominated the 2010’s, and has replaced it with costly trades. Putting the kibosh on retooling through the draft just restricts the other clear best approach.
The worst teams deserve a shot at bringing the league’s best players aboard. Making this overly-complicated path that effectively doesn’t do that as well is dangerous. If the current plan were to be instituted this year, the Orlando Magic and Phoenix Suns would have just as much of a chance at drafting AJ Dybantsa as the Utah Jazz and Sacramento Kings.
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