Tanking has been a hot-button topic this year in the NBA, and the league may be ready to make changes in an effort to curb it. While speaking on Friday at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced that there will be changes to the draft lottery system as early as next season.
“We are going to make substantial changes for next year,” Silver said via The Athletic. “I think where I’m on the fence — on one extreme, you could completely divorce the draft from teams’ records. Just argue we could take all 30 teams regardless of the outcome, that would completely disincentivize tanking. You could win the Finals, you know, and get the first pick. But then there’s gradations of that.”
That would be an extreme change, and one that wouldn’t go over well with team governors, as a team that won the NBA Finals could very well end up with the No. 1 pick all in just a few weeks’ time. But Silver said the changes are likely to be smaller.
“Not to exactly forecast where we’re going, but I think I’m sort — I am an incrementalist,” Silver said. “I think we got to be a little bit careful, you know, about how huge a change we make at once. I’m not ruling anything out, but I am paying attention to that. And then there’s something significantly more than, I would say, just tinkering with the existing system.”
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Silver isn’t tipping his hand on what the league plans to do, and it’s not exactly an easy fix to disincentivize tanking at all. But it’s clear that the league wants to do something about it, as the topic has been louder this season than in most years. The league handed out a $500,000 fine to the Utah Jazz for holding out their top players in a competitive fourth quarter and a $100,000 fine to the Indiana Pacers for resting healthy players.
We’ve seen several teams rule out players for the remainder of the season at a rate we never have before, all in hopes of increasing their odds of landing a top pick in this summer’s draft. Silver mentioned that a potential change could be similar to what the WNBA does — combining the last two seasons’ records to determine lottery odds. Changes could also be made to pick protections, as that also has a huge impact on how competitive a team chooses to be down the stretch of a season.
“Where you have sort of arbitrary lines of protected draft picks, creating huge incentives, you know, to be the sixth-worst record instead of the fifth,” Silver said. “So there are a bunch of things we’re looking at now. We have to address it.”
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Silver also noted the difference between teams that are in legitimate rebuilds and prioritizing their younger players compared to more egregious examples of tanking, like the ones the league punished the Jazz and Pacers for this season.
“I just lastly end by saying, I do think, and this is the tension, there are legitimate rebuilds where you have young teams, they’re genuinely trying to win games,” Silver said. “They’re out there trying to win night in, night out. There are also situations where you have teams … this used to be more toward the end of the season … where you want to see the young players playing under game circumstances and those wins aren’t as important. I don’t view that as the kind of tanking we’re experiencing right now. So incentives are off.”
There have been reports about several possible solutions that the league could make, from freezing the lottery odds at the trade deadline to disallowing a team from picking in the top four of the draft in consecutive years. However, many of the proposed solutions come with drawbacks or issues that won’t perfectly fix this issue the way the league probably wants.
The truth is, as long as the NBA Draft exists, tanking will also exist. There’s been some talk about abolishing the draft altogether, but it’s difficult to see that getting approved by all parties involved.
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