If the NBA is serious about looking at everything to end tanking … it’s about time

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Full speed ahead, NBA. The draft is no longer sacrosanct.

Commissioner Adam Silver’s news conference Saturday, followed by strong reporting from our Joe Vardon Saturday night, indicates that the idea of, finally, moving on from the draft as the sole onboarding mechanism for college players into the league – a decision that would, finally, at long last, address the scourge of tanking – is at least not being laughed out of the league’s offices at Olympic Tower in New York. Right now, that will suffice.

Just put it on the table.

Because that means the NBA really understands it has to look at everything to get rampant, leaguewide tampering out of the game, including the previously unapproachable question of whether the lottery and draft have outlived their usefulness. Or perhaps better: whether the lottery in particular can in any way be meaningfully reformed, years into the NBA’s attempts to flatten the odds to make tanking less palatable for teams.

The league fined the Jazz $500,000 and the Pacers $100,000 last week for separate decisions involving either taking players deemed healthy enough to continue to play out of games (Utah), or holding them out of a game altogether (Indiana). Jazz and Pacers fans howled at what they viewed as selective enforcement of the rules. Kings, Wizards and Nets fans, knowing their teams have been involved in similar shenanigans before the All-Star break, battened down their respective hatches in anticipation of what the league would do next.

But with NBA franchises worth more than ever, increasingly run by billionaires and hedge-funds titans, buttressed by investments from foreign entities, there’s likely no fine big enough to discourage a team determined to give itself the best lottery odds in a stacked draft like the 2026 draft is believed to be by most draftniks. It’s why I asked Silver at his news conference if there was any discussion of also taking future draft picks away from teams that the league determines engage in over-the-top tanking.

“There is talk about every possible remedy now to stop this behavior,” he said.

At this point, why not look at everything? Perhaps there’s a magic bullet out there that can thread the needle and get more teams to really try to compete, while preserving the current lottery and draft system. The last few years would indicate otherwise. You couldn’t possibly get through all of the proposed solutions and fixes for the lottery published online in the last few days. (And remember: the other team is the one destroying the league with its awful tanking. My team did it ethically.)

But if there’s no lottery, or draft, there’s no tanking. Period. The whole rationale for an organization to choose to make it as hard as possible for its own team to win games night in and out would vanish, overnight, because the incentive to intentionally lose to get a great young prospect would be gone. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be bad teams, poorly-run front offices, lousy coaching or injuries to key players. Half of the 2,460 games played every season would still be won, the other half lost. And the worst teams would lose a lot more.

But eliminating the lottery and the draft would force teams to stand on their own two feet.

Let’s call this what it is. The lottery and draft are corporate welfare for sports teams. It enables teams to bring in young, occasionally difference-making – and, relative to older players in most leagues, cheap – talent. Teams don’t do anything to earn the talents of those players; they are simply given to them.

Not to single out the Mavericks, but a year ago, Dallas made one of the most controversial, and universally excoriated, trades in sports history, sending Luka Dončić to the Lakers. That the Mavericks got a future first-round pick, five-time All-NBA forward Anthony Davis and other players mattered not a whit to the Mavericks’ fan base, which adored Dončić, felt betrayed and unloaded its collective scorn and enmity at then-general manager Nico Harrison. Few trades have been as condemned as this; few franchises seemed as forlorn going forward as Dallas appeared to be.

And then, 1.8 percent later … we’re back!

No one begrudges the Mavs’ luck in getting Cooper Flagg, but they didn’t do anything to earn the right to sign Flagg. His NBA rights were just awarded to them. That has repercussions for the rest of the league, because the Mavericks had just been in the finals a year earlier. To be sure, Dončić was the key reason why, but he wasn’t the only reason. Meanwhile, much worse-off teams that could have used Flagg’s arrival to give hope and pump needed revenue into their teams sat, slack-jawed, knowing they would have to tank all over again the following season.

I’m not saying Dallas shouldn’t have a wildly promising young player like Flagg around which to rebuild, or that the Spurs shouldn’t enjoy the spoils of Victor Wembanyama’s incredible talent. I’m saying they and all the league’s other teams should have to actually work to get them, just like Flagg and other lottery picks worked their whole lives to become good enough to get into the best basketball league in the world.

College football and basketball have National Signing Day every year, and Power 4 schools get a lot of blue-chippers, but so do lots of other programs. Everyone doesn’t go play football at UCLA or Miami because of their location, or hoop only at North Carolina or Duke because of their history.

If a college or international player eligible to come into the NBA could choose from among all 30 teams, those 30 teams would have to earn their labor.

Ownership would have to have a proven track record for hiring competent people at all levels of the org chart, to not balk at paying their stars, to be willing to go into the luxury tax when the team is a true championship contender, to pay the freight for state-of-the-art practice facilities and infrastructure at team arenas that maximizes both player wellness and safety.

And perhaps most importantly: owners would have to show they have relationships with the game’s biggest, most powerful agents and agencies, and with the shoe companies, so that the Nikes and New Balances of the world feel comfortable with their newest stars in that city.

Management would have to show it can consistently put together good teams, year after year, and that it can identify good coaching and development staffs that make players better. Coaches would have to prove they know what they’re doing, that they can hold both players and themselves accountable, that they can work with the skill sets of every player to get the most out of them.

In other words, put up or shut up, Jazz and Wizards and Nets. But the same would apply to the Lakers and Clippers and Bulls and 76ers and Knicks.

Yes, it would be harder for some markets to attract great players. Maybe Charlotte and Utah and Toronto would lose out on some guys. Yes, Nike and Under Armour might want some of their big names in New York or L.A.

But again, and I don’t know why this doesn’t sink in, there are 450 players in the NBA, a number than includes a few dozen players playing on two-way contracts. With 53-man rosters, there are 1,696 active roster spots in the NFL. There are between 780 (using the current limit of 26 players allowed per team between April and August) and 1,200 (if you use 40-man rosters) players on Major League Baseball rosters every year.

The relative scarcity of NBA roster spots, along with the crushing second apron of the salary cap, means it would be impossible for any one team to hoard all the good young talent, just as it’s impossible for any one team to acquire or keep all the league’s veteran superstars. The Dodgers can spend the rest of baseball into oblivion because MLB doesn’t have a salary cap, only a competitive balance tax, and because baseball doesn’t have a salary floor. That’s why the Dodgers can have a projected 2026 payroll, including the CBT, of $410.7 million, while the Miami Marlins’ projected ’26 payroll is $83.1 million.

They are, essentially, playing two different sports.

Meanwhile, in the NBA, with a cap and a floor and a first and second apron, Oklahoma City has a superstar. Indiana has a superstar. Milwaukee has a superstar. Minnesota has a superstar. Cleveland has a superstar. San Antonio has a superstar. Detroit has a superstar. Some were taken in drafts, others were acquired via trades. But they all have them, and most have kept them for several years, through good seasons and bad ones. And most importantly: when those superstars are healthy, almost all of those teams are competitive.

Any one of those stars could have demanded a trade to a top-three market. None have. Some might, some day. But there’s not a yearly exodus of top talent from the league’s smaller markets to its bigger ones.

Also: I promise you that the top NBA player agencies do not want all of their top guys going to the same place, where they’d have to fight one another for minutes and shots. If there was no draft this year, Darryn Peterson and A.J. Dybantsa and Cameron Boozer would not all wind up on the Celtics, because the Celtics already have two superstars in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, who are rightly paid at the top of the market, and great role players like Derrick White and Payton Pritchard. Maybe Dybantsa would be interested in Boston because he’s from nearby Brockton. But maybe not. A lot of guys don’t like coming back home to play in the Association, for numerous reasons.

Silver faced multiple questions Saturday about tanking and its growing, calcifying impact on more and more of his teams. To be sure, the projected strength of this draft class is the chief catalyst for so many teams opting to go paws up with so much of the regular season remaining. Whatever the reason, having almost a third of the league not trying to win is beyond an anchor on the NBA, way post corrosive.

“My sense is, talking to GMs and coaches around the league, that there’s probably even more parity than is reflected in our records,” Silver said. “That goes to the incentive issue. It’s not clear to me, for example, that the 30th-performing team is that much measurably worse than the 22nd-performing team, particularly if you have incentive to perform poorly to get a better draft pick.”

True, perhaps. But context matters. The Pacers would not be tanking this year if Tyrese Haliburton hadn’t ruptured his Achilles’ in Game 7 of the finals last June, which means they probably would have spent into the luxury tax to keep center Myles Turner. Assuming no further catastrophic injuries this season, they’d likely be back near the top of the standings in the East, and they wouldn’t have moved Bennedict Mathurin to the Clippers for Ivica Zubac – who wouldn’t have been a target if Turner was still on the team.

So, there’s no guarantee of outcome, only one of opportunity. Nor is there any single proposal to repair the broken lottery system that will make everyone happy. But we’re at the point where radical solutions might be the only thing left to try.