The NBA presented three comprehensive anti-tanking concepts to its board of governors Wednesday as part of this week’s meetings in New York, with modifications expected to each before a formal vote in May, sources told ESPN’s Shams Charania.
Each of the three concepts would be radical departures from the current setup. They have one thing in common: bringing teams that make the playoffs into the lottery process. From there, they change dramatically.
In the first proposal, sources told Charania, 18 teams — the bottom 10 that miss the play-in tournament, and the eight that qualify for it — all will be part of the draft lottery.
The bottom 10 teams will all have an equal 8% chance of moving up in the lottery, with the remaining 20% of the odds being split among the eight play-in teams in descending order from 11th through 18th.
All 18 spots would be drawn as part of the lottery in that format.
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In the second proposal, sources told Charania, 22 teams — the bottom 10 teams that miss the play-in tournament, the eight that qualify for it and the four playoff teams that lose in the first round — will all be included in the lottery, and will be ranked according to their record across two seasons. The last part, weighting teams by their record across the prior two seasons, is how the WNBA weights its lottery system.
Under that system, each team would need to reach a minimum win total floor in each season, to mitigate the need to lose every game possible. For example, if the minimum floor for an individual season was 20 wins, a team that went 14-68 would be 20-62 for lottery purposes. And if a team wins 40 games one season and 20 games the next season, it would go in as 30 wins for the lottery.
In this system, the top four spots would be drawn as part of the lottery, as is currently.
The third proposal is a “five-by-five” method, sources told Charania. In this one, the same 18 teams from the first concept — the bottom 10 that miss the play-in, plus the eight that make it — would be entered into the lottery. The teams with the five worst records would then all have the same odds, with them descending from there, and there would be a lottery drawing for each of the top five picks in the draft.
After those five picks are selected, there would be another lottery drawing for the remaining 13 teams. If any of the teams with the five worst records didn’t land one of those top five spots — like last season, when the teams with the first (the Utah Jazz), second (Washington Wizards) and fourth (New Orleans Pelicans) worst records all moved back to fifth, sixth and seventh, respectively — the lowest they could wind up in the second lottery drawing would be 10th, preventing a bad team from falling too far down the draft board.
Over the next several weeks, owners are expected to discuss the detailed concepts with their respective team leadership groups in basketball operations to better digest the potential impacts and unintended consequences. Governors, presidents and general managers are expected to continue an open dialogue with the league office on the concepts and modifications to them ahead of May’s vote.
The NBA began brainstorming changes to combat tanking dating back to December. The new concepts don’t include ideas from then, such as limiting pick protections in trades and freezing lottery odds at a certain date.
At his news conference at the conclusion of this week’s meetings in Manhattan on Wednesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver made it clear that things are going to change after the league has endured significant criticism this season about teams desperately chasing after one of the top spots in what’s considered to be an extremely deep 2026 NBA draft class, and that the incentive structure for teams was “clearly” going to change for next season.
“I do think ultimately this is a decision that needs to be made at the ownership level,” Silver said. “It has business implications, has basketball implications, has integrity, integrity, implications for the league.
“So it’s one that we take very seriously, and we are going to fix it. Full stop.”
To that end, the fact the NBA is holding a special board of governors meeting in May is a sign of how important the league believes it is to get a handle on the problem. There are standard meetings at the end of the regular season in late March or early April, the beginning of the new season in either September or October, and in July in Las Vegas during summer league every year. Holding a separate meeting to get this done is a highly unusual occurrence.
Still, Silver said Wednesday that there isn’t an obvious solution to the problem — and even suggested more changes could come in future collective bargaining discussions with the National Basketball Players Association, though the current CBA runs through the end of the decade.
“There is an aspect of team-building that is called a genuine rebuild, a rebuild with integrity,” Silver said. ”The problem we’re having these days is it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild.
“There’s such a subtlety to this when incentives don’t match, when we’re now into it with coaches’ decisions on lineups and when players come in and out of the game, injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other, pain levels of players that my sense is when I say fix now, yes, we need to do something more extreme than we did with those incremental changes the last four times [we’ve made changes].”
