NBA lottery reform: Five biggest questions about league’s new anti-tanking proposal

After months of debate and consultation, the NBA has seemingly landed on a lottery reform proposal. Approval will have to wait until the May 28 Board of Governors meeting, but the basics of the proposal the league hopes will end tanking are as follows:

• A “3-2-1” lottery odds approach in which a total of 37 lottery balls are allocated to 16 teams. The bottom three teams would each receive two (5.4% chance at the No. 1 pick), teams 4-10 would receive three (8.1%), the No. 9 and No. 10 seeds in each conference would each receive two, and the loser of the No. 7 vs. No. 8 Play-In game would receive one.
• The teams with the three worst records could pick no lower than No. 12. Everyone else in the lottery could pick anywhere from No. 1 to No. 16.
• Teams could not pick No. 1 in consecutive years, or in the top five in three consecutive drafts.
• Teams could not protect slots 12-15 in traded picks.
• The commissioner would have increased powers to punish perceived tanking, including altering lottery odds or changing where a team picks.
• The structural changes would last only through the 2029 NBA Draft, at which point the Board of Governors would be able to reconsider alternatives.

We’ve covered the specifics of the change in more depth here, but below, we’re going to try to measure the consequences of these changes. What are the possible problems that could arise? These are the five lingering questions from the proposal that came to light on Tuesday.

1. Does this end tanking… or just change it?

When the NBA changed the lottery format in 2017, it did so hoping to put an end to tanking. Instead, it increased it. By flattening the odds for the top pick, they increased the odds that someone from the middle of the lottery could jump up. That incentivized tanking from teams that might otherwise not have. Meanwhile, even if the worst teams had less of a chance of getting a top pick, increasing the lottery drawing from three teams to four gave them a lower floor. Tanking minimized how far down the order they could fall, and with the worst team dropping as far as No. 5, they were incentivized to lose as a defensive measure. The NBA, in short, didn’t seem to appreciate the full consequences of what it was doing.

Is that where we are again? This system would indeed reduce some of the most grievous tanking offenses teams are currently committing. For the first time in the history of the NBA Draft, there would be an incentive to win rather than lose as the three worst teams are actively penalized. As teams 4-10 all have the same odds, there is no incentive for those teams to jockey for position internally. At the absolute bottom of the standings, there is going to be less tanking.

But the new odds structure actually increases the odds that every team with the seventh-worst through the 16th-worst team gets a top pick, and without a floor, increased odds arguably matter more than ever because teams are capable of moving up in smaller increments (say, from No. 15 to No. 14, or No. 12 to No. 7). Basically, there are more ways the lottery can help teams in certain positions than in the old system, in which the better teams had a slight chance at a huge jump, but no chance at a smaller one.

Additionally, this alteration creates three pretty significant cliffs, one-slot gaps with absolutely enormous differences that greatly incentivize situational tanking:

• The best team to miss the postseason gets an 8.1% chance at the No. 1 pick. The worst play-in team sees a 50% reduction in top pick odds down to 5.4%. This incentivizes teams to miss the Play-In Tournament.
• The No. 9 and No. 10 seeds have double the odds at the No. 1 pick as the loser of the No. 7 vs. No. 8 game. There will be teams who don’t want to tank out of the postseason entirely, but understand they can split the baby by both falling to No. 9 or No. 10 and still trying to win their way in from there, as the reporting for now suggests that there is no penalty for making the playoffs on the lottery odds these teams will receive.
• The loser of the No. 7 vs. No. 8 play-in game can pick anywhere from No. 16 up to No. 1. The winner is stuck at No. 17 or later. Sure, the winner is guaranteed a playoff spot, but the loser still has a chance to win their way in through another home game, and besides, the end result for those teams is generally similar: a very low-odds chance of beating a top seed, even if No. 1 tends to be a bit more imposing than No. 2. If a first-round loss is the assumption anyway, there will inevitably be teams that understand their best long-term bet is losing this play-in game.

Put all of this together and we’re likely going to see circumstantial tanking. There will be teams who determine it is in their best long-term future to tank their way out of the Play-In Tournament, and perhaps more distressingly, there is a chance teams would prefer to lose once they’re in it. Now, that tanking likely wouldn’t be as ugly as some of the months-long efforts we’ve seen from more recent tankers, but postseason games are much higher profile, and even if the coaches and players in the games won’t intentionally lose, organizations could certainly tilt the odds in their favor through strategic medical decisions. 

Before you suggest that teams would simply never tank with postseason position at stake, remember that the 2023 Dallas Mavericks literally did it and were punished for it. Some teams wouldn’t do this out of principle. Others understand that there’s not much to be gained from an early postseason exit and will therefore prioritize maximizing their chances at landing a long-term difference-maker in the draft.

Whether you find this form of tanking more or less distasteful than the type we’ve grown used to is a matter of opinion. What’s inevitable is that there will be bad basketball late in seasons. Some teams are simply going to be organically bad. You can remove the incentive for them to get intentionally worse, but that incentive has to get redistributed somewhere in any draft system that is at all tied to record. Until the NBA considers severing that relationship entirely, some amount of tanking is going to be inevitable. It’s up to the NBA to determine which types, and how much of it, it is willing to tolerate.

2. Are the repeated success rules fair?

The NBA has never created direct guardrails against repeated lottery success. Expansion teams are typically assigned a specific slot, and the two Canadian teams of the 1990s, the Raptors and Grizzlies, were barred from picking No. 1 until their fifth draft, but otherwise, any team has been able to make any pick in any draft. That is about to change, at least based on the reporting we now have. Teams will be barred from picking No. 1 in consecutive drafts, or from picking in the top five of three consecutive drafts. There is one glaringly obvious problem with this approach: it treats unequal picks equally.

A team picking No. 1 in one draft and No. 2 in the next has benefited significantly more from the lottery system than a team picking No. 5 in back-to-back drafts has. Yet they’re punished equally, by being locked out of the top five of the third draft. If the goal were purely fairness, success-related penalties would scale. There would be some penalty for picking No. 1, a smaller one for picking No. 2, and so on in that fashion until all amounts of lottery success the league wants to avoid repeating have been addressed. 

But fairness isn’t the only goal here. The NBA wants a relatively digestible system. It’s easier for fans to understand “you can’t pick in the top five three years in a row” than to introduce some sort of complex luck-based punishment system, especially since doing so would drastically alter odds in a given lottery.

On this front, what exactly is the mechanism for preventing consecutive No. 1 picks, or three straight top-five picks? When the Raptors and Grizzlies were barred from picking No. 1, they still participated in the lottery. In fact, the Raptors won the lottery in 1996. They just weren’t allowed to pick No. 1, so they were shunted down to No. 2. Is that how this would work? Or would an illegal team getting drawn simply trigger a re-draw? Considering the lack of a floor for most teams, the latter seems more appropriate, especially since the idea here is to minimize how much success teams can have in the lottery across a short period.

And then there’s the more nebulous matter of value among draft classes. Take the 2024 NBA Draft. It was widely considered among the weakest in history. The Hawks won that lottery. Now, they didn’t control their 2025 pick, so this wouldn’t have come up for them, but imagine some team was particularly interested in trying to draft Cooper Flagg in 2025. It seems a bit unfair that getting stuck with the No. 1 pick in the Zaccharie Risacher draft would knock them out of the running for him. Would teams be able to decline certain picks to avoid triggering repeat-success penalties? The answer here will almost certainly be no, purely for the sake of simplicity, but it’s an interesting consideration.

3. What happens to traded picks?

The purpose of the relegation zone is to avert tanking to the absolute bottom of the standings. But sometimes, the worst teams don’t control their own picks. When a team trades for someone else’s pick and that pick turns out to be high, that’s a sign that the team that traded for that pick is smart, not tanking. Why exactly is that getting punished?

What about those repeated success rules? If a team picks No. 1 in one draft, but owes out its pick in the next, can the team that owns their pick use it to win the No. 1 selection? The same question applies to the three-straight top-five picks rule. Does it transfer? There’s an argument to be made that it shouldn’t. If the idea of the draft is to allocate the best incoming talent to the worst teams, traded picks landing top prospects doesn’t exactly accomplish that goal. Yet as a matter of fairness, it’s simply wrong to punish teams for being smart enough to trade with poorly run teams.

All of this will need to be solved in the final proposal and will loom large next season, as an inordinate number of 2027 draft picks belong to teams besides their original owner. Meanwhile, teams that strategically traded for picks years in advance are now getting punished by these changes. Take the Portland Trail Blazers. The bulk of their return on the 2023 Damian Lillard came in the form of Milwaukee Bucks draft picks. Those picks are arguably less valuable today than they were under the old system, and if the Bucks are so bad after potentially trading Giannis Antetokounmpo that they finish with a bottom-three record, the Blazers could get punished further by receiving reduced odds.

4. Is the floor too extreme?

As we’ve covered, the teams with the three worst records could pick no lower than No. 12, but everybody else could fall as far as No. 16. This creates scenarios in which organically bad teams fall all the way to the middle of the first round, making it that much harder for them to honestly improve. The Athletic has already reported that some GMs believe the three worst teams should pick no lower than 10th. Even that would be historic for the NBA. In no lottery format in league history has the worst team ever been able to pick lower than ninth, and in most, the floor has been far higher.

Inevitably, there is going to be a team that’s bad throughout this three-year window, but consistently gets unlucky in the lottery and winds up falling. This is one of the great fears of the format change: that without a system that ensures some draft reward for the worst teams, a sort of permanent underclass will develop. Teams will get to the bottom and be stuck there without the draft as a form of hope for escape. 

In theory, these teams could try to improve through free agency or trade, but I’ve covered the difficulties of doing so in more detail here. In short: the last few collective bargaining agreements have collectively made it too easy for veteran players to sign contract extensions with their existing teams, reducing the pool of valuable free agents and therefore driving up the price of difference-makers, even sub-star-level difference-makers, through trade. In other words, the NBA accidentally created a system in which the draft was more important than ever, and are now introducing measures to make the draft more random than it’s ever been. This takes us to our last major question…

5. What happens in 2029?

Throughout the lottery reform process, the NBA has heard an ocean of voices screaming about unintended consequences. It was therefore wise of them to conceive this proposal with an escape hatch. There will reportedly be a “sunset” provision within the proposal that only keeps these rules in place through the 2029 NBA Draft. If the NBA determines this isn’t working, changes can come relatively swiftly.

The timing here is no accident. The current collective bargaining agreement runs through the 2029-30 season, but contains an opt-out clause that could end it after the 2028-29 season. In other words, the NBA and the NBPA have a chance to align more permanent lottery reform with other, structural changes to the player movement ecosystem. Doing so requires mutual benefit and negotiation, so that’s no given, but perhaps by 2029, both sides will recognize the broader consequences of the minimization of free agency and will seek to address it. Perhaps this system only makes sense with other changes built into the trade or free agency rules. It will take years to figure that out, but the timing here is encouraging. There is no commitment to a potentially broken structure.

But that raises the question of what comes next if this doesn’t work. The NBA has flattened the odds as much as it reasonably can. If doing so doesn’t achieve the desired result, and it didn’t in 2017, then the league needs to acknowledge that flattening simply does not work. Could the league re-steepen the odds? In theory. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, as Orlando’s win in 1993 with just a single lottery ball compelled the league to do so. 

I wouldn’t rule this out, especially if we get an outlier outcome of some sort in the coming years (say, the Thunder winning the No. 1 choice through a pick it acquired in a trade years ago). But given the understanding of incentive structures teams now have, it’s hard to imagine this wouldn’t end in a different flavor of tanking.

So if this doesn’t work, that probably forces the NBA to consider more drastic alternatives, such as systems that divorce record and draft order altogether. Mike Zarren’s wheel has been known to the public for more than a decade. Perhaps it gets a closer look. Maybe rookie free agency becomes a possibility, or some other system we haven’t even conceived yet.

The 2029 lottery will be the 45th in league history. The only consistent thing about it in that entire span is how unsatisfied teams, fans and other stakeholders have been with the format. That’s why the rules keep changing. History would therefore suggest we should be ready for more changes in 2029, and what those changes might look like will depend on how well these reforms work or don’t work.