Re: Nobody Within NBA Making 'Serious Push To Eliminate Current Philosophy Of The Draft'

[RealGM Wiretap]

The NBA's worst teams are finding new ways to accrue losses as the end of the season as there is a potential generational prospect to be selected No. 1 and a more crowded than expected field of teams.

"These next few weeks," one NBA executive said, "could be the worst tanking stretch we've ever seen."

While teams tanking has become a blight on the league at the end of each season, nobody expects the NBA to move away from its draft system. Several teams at the bottom of the standings will start key players, but will not play those same players during clutch time of games.

"Philosophically, I'm not aware of anyone making a serious push to eliminate our current philosophy of the draft, which is to award top picks to teams that are most in need of talent," Evan Wasch, the NBA's executive vice president of strategy and analytics, told ESPN. "That is a fundamental tenet of our current draft system."

Multiple sources told ESPN that one way to reduce tanking would be to remove mid-lottery pick protections. Teams would be allowed to have a top-4 protected pick, a lottery protected pick, or unprotected. 

"Coming off this season, it would be reasonable to expect that we would re-engage with our competition committee," Wasch said. "And see if there's anything they might want to explore to tackle the issue."

Via Tim Bontemps, Kevin Pelton/ESPN

[Red8911]

The draft system needs to change. NBA is the best league in the world and we have half the league trying to tank/ lose games on purpose. Should honestly be illegal the way a bunch of these teams throw games.

They have fans rooting against their own teams in order to get a higher pick. Terrible system. Teams records should not have any affect on draft position. Tanking is not good for the sport, league or for the fans.

[beefman]

The draft system needs to change. NBA is the best league in the world and we have half the league trying to tank/ lose games on purpose. Should honestly be illegal the way a bunch of these teams throw games.

They have fans rooting against their own teams in order to get a higher pick. Terrible system. Teams records should not have any affect on draft position. Tanking is not good for the sport, league or for the fans.

simple solution: create a relegation system. less viewership and revenue and you'll start seeing teams avoiding the bottom

[St Knick]

awarding picks to the most talent-starved teams is a good goal, on the surface.
but how do you prevent teams from "throwing" games at end of season to ensure their position?

spitballing some scenarios:
what if the the first 2/3 of the season, your W/L recording counts towards your lottery position, just as it does currently... but then for the last 1/3 of the season, *IF YOU HAVE A LOSING RECORD AT THAT TIME* (or out of playoffs currently, something like that), you get to add a L to your total when you Win (and a W to your total when you lose). Essentially, we flip the incentives for final 1/3 of season. basically, incentivize the bad teams (as defined by first 2/3 of season) to try to Win in the final third of the year.
naturally, this may lead to teams tanking more up-front (first 2/3 of season), but will lead to better March/April games to end the year. this probably helps the cause, by spreading the tank over the course of the year, (and concentrating tankable games earlier in year, when some teams may not be ready to pull the plug yet) but maybe other ways teams engineer to take advantage (Which they will under any system where easily attainable Losses can be had by simply sabotaging your own efforts). You'll probably still achieve the main goal (best lotto odds going to "bad" teams, as defined by W/L record through 2/3 of season).

i think there is something to the above.

case study for simialr concept: in the NFL, I've seen late season games between 2 of the worst teams in the league, and its the worst football you'll ever see. i always thought, if you can identify 2 tanking teams palying each other... you could incentivize them to win by giving them an "L" for lotto/draft standing purposes for an actual victory.

another variant of my first example: as soon as a team is mathematically eliminated from the palyoffs, their Wins start counting as Losses for lotto purposes (and Losses count as W's; inverted). Once your out, your still incentivized to win.

There will always be ways to game the system, buti think the above example is more efficient in the sense of keeping more total games competitive, and less games where teams are hunting for L's.

[St Knick]

other ideas:
Expand the lottery to all 30 teams; make the odds linearly decrease with each record, all the way to the best team.
All 30 teams have skin in the lotto game.
The worst team's advantage relative to better teams (For lotto purposes) is now smaller => reward for falling in standings is lessened.
You also make the jump in odds less (currently 100% is spread over 14 team who do not make playoffs, an average of 0.7% per slot. now its spread over 30 teams, makeing it more like 0.3% per slot; less incentive).

Avoids the hard line between the "8 seeds" who make playoffs the the 9 seeds who miss it (see 2023 Dallas Mavericks, who tanked despite being in playoff position in order to avoid sending their top-10 protected pick to the knicks).

DOWNSIDES: you'll see the occasional playoff team jump the odds into the top 4 (you can revisit the top 4 drawing structure too).
UPSIDES: might be cool to see playoff teams occasionally get a game changer.

Anyways, the current system ain't working, something's got to change. LAte season games are mostly garbage, with roughly a third (or more!) of the league not trying to win. with 2 teams in every game, we're talking OVER HALF of the late season games involve one (ir not two) tanking teams, totally undermining the sport! why pay to go to these games? why watch? plus you get inflation of Wins on the other side, totally corrupting historical stats.

[HotelVitale]

other ideas:
Expand the lottery to all 30 teams; make the odds linearly decrease with each record, all the way to the best team.
All 30 teams have skin in the lotto game.
The worst team's advantage relative to better teams (For lotto purposes) is now smaller => reward for falling in standings is lessened.
You also make the jump in odds less (currently 100% is spread over 14 team who do not make playoffs, an average of 0.7% per slot. now its spread over 30 teams, makeing it more like 0.3% per slot; less incentive).

Avoids the hard line between the "8 seeds" who make playoffs the the 9 seeds who miss it (see 2023 Dallas Mavericks, who tanked despite being in playoff position in order to avoid sending their top-10 protected pick to the knicks).

DOWNSIDES: you'll see the occasional playoff team jump the odds into the top 4 (you can revisit the top 4 drawing structure too).
UPSIDES: might be cool to see playoff teams occasionally get a game changer.

Anyways, the current system ain't working, something's got to change. LAte season games are mostly garbage, with roughly a third (or more!) of the league not trying to win. with 2 teams in every game, we're talking OVER HALF of the late season games involve one (ir not two) tanking teams, totally undermining the sport! why pay to go to these games? why watch? plus you get inflation of Wins on the other side, totally corrupting historical stats.

I don’t really think anything will work too much more than what’s happening right now if still incentivizes losing. The last lotto odds greatly reduced the impact of tanking and the benefit of being really bad, and the play in has also been somewhat successful at getting mid teams not to pull the plug and tank.

But at some pt if your season is shot it just makes sense to take whatever you can get that sets up your future better, even if it’s really small. Like the Raptors now don’t owe any picks and probably aren’t going to get any higher than 6th worst no matter what, and they also want to win soon and don’t want to be embarrassing given their young stars and high payroll etc. But they’re already out of the PO and don’t have anything else to pursue this season, so you may as well just let the young guys cook and lose. That’s still going to happen in the last month of the season if there’s anything to be gained from it.

[Oldham]

Wasch mistates the NBA's current "philosophy" of the draft. It's got almost nothing to do with who is "most in need of" talent, it's based mostly on losing and then, at the top, on luck (with ping pong balls). Losing can be attributed to a relative lack of talent ONLY if all teams are equally leveraging the talent they do have into wins. In the NBA, half the league is de-leveraging the talent they do have into losses. Not to mention foregoing possible additions of readily available talent. The result is the list of teams picking at the top of every draft are also on the list of the teams with the most talent. E.g., we're to believe that San Antonio remains in 2025 a team in need of talent? After 5 straight lottery seasons, including being gifted Wemby and Castle in the last two? Teams don't tank to close the talent gap (they wouldn't need to), they do it to corner the market on the precious little impact talent that comes into the league each year. Why other teams tolerate it, IDK, but as long as they do, and losing is rewarded with draft position, there will be tanking.

[Invictus88]

For funsies:
1. Shrink the lottery down to 10 teams
2. Make it so that the teams who participate in the lottery this year can't be in the top 10 the following year.

Picks 1-10: Lottery order of 10 lowest record lottery-eligible teams
Picks 11-30: Ordered according to win-loss record of non-lottery eligible teams.

- A lot fewer teams will have reasons to tank due to lack of lottery eligibility.
- Still enables teams with lack of talent to gain at a faster rate than championship contenders. But the rate is slower.

[hyberx]

The play in format works, where border line teams are pushing hard to get over it even toward the end of the regular season. That's where the prize is. Same for the draft, where your prize is more ping pong balls, then you could expect teams to "work" toward that goal, by tanking.

[the_process]

The draft system needs to change. NBA is the best league in the world and we have half the league trying to tank/ lose games on purpose. Should honestly be illegal the way a bunch of these teams throw games.

They have fans rooting against their own teams in order to get a higher pick. Terrible system. Teams records should not have any affect on draft position. Tanking is not good for the sport, league or for the fans.

It's not even close to half. It's really seven teams tanking. Out of 30. And one of them is because they got mauled by the injury bug.

Dallas and San Antonio are beat up as well, not tanking.

Portland, Chicago, and Miami are also not tanking; they are simply mediocre teams.

[winforlose]

The solution is very simple. Have a committee study the result of the season for each team. If it is determined they tanked in 2025/26, they lose their 2026 first and second round draft picks. Start it next season with the understanding that this kind of penalty will be enforced and will escalate to potentially losing multiple firsts if repeated violations occur. Or if that is too extreme then tanking teams no longer qualify for the lottery and the worst record can at best be 5th.

P.S if a draft pick is owed then the penalty should count against the next available pick, and the teams should be fined a set amount of cap space (or just lose their MLE,) in that year. The point is to severely punish teams for tanking such that they actually try and the truly worst teams get the better lottery odds.

[Future Coach]

simple solution: create a relegation system. less viewership and revenue and you'll start seeing teams avoiding the bottom

Relegation is a decent long-term solution, but it is a long ways off. The league would need to expand considerably (likely would involve absorbing other leagues around the world) for this to be possible. Such expansion would allow the NBA to better move to broader schedule that allows for a proper Champions League style mid-season tournament, which is a goal of the NBA.


In the more immediate, a solution could be fairly easily implemented. When the NBA determines that a team is tanking, which they already have a fine in place for (though it needs to be applied far more often), not only should the NBA fine the team, but the NBA should also remove some of their draft lottery balls and replace them with blank substitutes, so the team effectively has less odds to land a top draft pick. If a blank substitute is selected during the lottery draw, the NBA should simply roll the cage around again until they get a ball with a team on it. Then the team penalized for tanking will effectively have worse odds (making the effort to tank worthless), while all odds of all other teams remains unchanged. So at a high level, if the NBA determines that a team has tanked X # of games, then their draft odds get reduced by Y%.

This could be quickly and easily implemented without any major changes to the overall draft system, and should rather immediately eliminate tanking (if the NBA actually enforces it).

[WinterSoldier]

Nothing needs to be done at all, leave it up to the franchises how they want to strategize for their team. This is a non problem. If the NBA wanted to fix anything then fix the contracts and caps so that drafting isn't the only method for every team other than 5 markets to acquire talent.

[Indeed]

simple solution: create a relegation system. less viewership and revenue and you'll start seeing teams avoiding the bottom

Relegation is a decent long-term solution, but it is a long ways off. The league would need to expand considerably (likely would involve absorbing other leagues around the world) for this to be possible. Such expansion would allow the NBA to better move to broader schedule that allows for a proper Champions League style mid-season tournament, which is a goal of the NBA.


In the more immediate, a solution could be fairly easily implemented. When the NBA determines that a team is tanking, which they already have a fine in place for (though it needs to be applied far more often), not only should the NBA fine the team, but the NBA should also remove some of their draft lottery balls and replace them with blank substitutes, so the team effectively has less odds to land a top draft pick. If a blank substitute is selected during the lottery draw, the NBA should simply roll the cage around again until they get a ball with a team on it. Then the team penalized for tanking will effectively have worse odds (making the effort to tank worthless), while all odds of all other teams remains unchanged. So at a high level, if the NBA determines that a team has tanked X # of games, then their draft odds get reduced by Y%.

This could be quickly and easily implemented without any major changes to the overall draft system, and should rather immediately eliminate tanking (if the NBA actually enforces it).

You can't prove a team is tanking. And removing draft lottery ball just counter the purpose of having the weakest team having better prospect.

The only way is to punish the owner and players with reducing their income.
For example, you get no revenue sharing from tax teams.

Long term will require minor league, much like every major sports. Owners are cheap on not spending money for development, that should change. Other leagues might have delegation to punish that, but I don't see this can happen for NBA teams which is city dedicated.

[Future Coach]

Nothing needs to be done at all, leave it up to the franchises how they want to strategize for their team. This is a non problem. If the NBA wanted to fix anything then fix the contracts and caps so that drafting isn't the only method for every team other than 5 markets to acquire talent.

It is a problem when the NBA has deals with gambling agencies surrounding the integrity of the competition and information coming from teams prior to games surrounding player availability being legit and transparent. It also sucks for fans who purchase tickets hoping to see a star player from another team who comes to their city once or twice a year. That aspect has always sucked for fans, but the added presence of NBA-endorsed gambling creates a whole host of other issues (with likely greater financial penalities) that the NBA needs to resolve, or entirely remove themselves from (which won't happen).

[Future Coach]

simple solution: create a relegation system. less viewership and revenue and you'll start seeing teams avoiding the bottom

Relegation is a decent long-term solution, but it is a long ways off. The league would need to expand considerably (likely would involve absorbing other leagues around the world) for this to be possible. Such expansion would allow the NBA to better move to broader schedule that allows for a proper Champions League style mid-season tournament, which is a goal of the NBA.


In the more immediate, a solution could be fairly easily implemented. When the NBA determines that a team is tanking, which they already have a fine in place for (though it needs to be applied far more often), not only should the NBA fine the team, but the NBA should also remove some of their draft lottery balls and replace them with blank substitutes, so the team effectively has less odds to land a top draft pick. If a blank substitute is selected during the lottery draw, the NBA should simply roll the cage around again until they get a ball with a team on it. Then the team penalized for tanking will effectively have worse odds (making the effort to tank worthless), while all odds of all other teams remains unchanged. So at a high level, if the NBA determines that a team has tanked X # of games, then their draft odds get reduced by Y%.

This could be quickly and easily implemented without any major changes to the overall draft system, and should rather immediately eliminate tanking (if the NBA actually enforces it).

You can't prove a team is tanking. And removing draft lottery ball just counter the purpose of having the weakest team having better prospect.

The only way is to punish the owner and players with reducing their income.
For example, you get no revenue sharing from tax teams.

Long term will require minor league, much like every major sports. Owners are cheap on not spending money for development, that should change. Other leagues might have delegation to punish that, but I don't see this can happen for NBA teams which is city dedicated.

The NBA already has a mechanism in place to prove a team is tanking. I would agree that it isn't functioning nearly as effectively as it should be, but the NBA already claims to be making that assessment. And they fine the team for each instance.

And reducing the draft lottery odds would counter the team with the worst record from having the better prospect, but only if that team is determined to have tanked X # of games. If that hasn't been determined, then their odds remain untouched. And if a team is truly the "weakest" then they wouldn't have to tank games anyways.

[Indeed]

For funsies:
1. Shrink the lottery down to 10 teams
2. Make it so that the teams who participate in the lottery this year can't be in the top 10 the following year.

Picks 1-10: Lottery order of 10 lowest record lottery-eligible teams
Picks 11-30: Ordered according to win-loss record of non-lottery eligible teams.

- A lot fewer teams will have reasons to tank due to lack of lottery eligibility.
- Still enables teams with lack of talent to gain at a faster rate than championship contenders. But the rate is slower.

There will a lot less team if they don't tank consecutive years.
How many teams repeated and not actively improving from FA or trades?

[Indeed]

Relegation is a decent long-term solution, but it is a long ways off. The league would need to expand considerably (likely would involve absorbing other leagues around the world) for this to be possible. Such expansion would allow the NBA to better move to broader schedule that allows for a proper Champions League style mid-season tournament, which is a goal of the NBA.


In the more immediate, a solution could be fairly easily implemented. When the NBA determines that a team is tanking, which they already have a fine in place for (though it needs to be applied far more often), not only should the NBA fine the team, but the NBA should also remove some of their draft lottery balls and replace them with blank substitutes, so the team effectively has less odds to land a top draft pick. If a blank substitute is selected during the lottery draw, the NBA should simply roll the cage around again until they get a ball with a team on it. Then the team penalized for tanking will effectively have worse odds (making the effort to tank worthless), while all odds of all other teams remains unchanged. So at a high level, if the NBA determines that a team has tanked X # of games, then their draft odds get reduced by Y%.

This could be quickly and easily implemented without any major changes to the overall draft system, and should rather immediately eliminate tanking (if the NBA actually enforces it).

You can't prove a team is tanking. And removing draft lottery ball just counter the purpose of having the weakest team having better prospect.

The only way is to punish the owner and players with reducing their income.
For example, you get no revenue sharing from tax teams.

Long term will require minor league, much like every major sports. Owners are cheap on not spending money for development, that should change. Other leagues might have delegation to punish that, but I don't see this can happen for NBA teams which is city dedicated.

The NBA already has a mechanism in place to prove a team is tanking. I would agree that it isn't functioning nearly as effectively as it should be, but the NBA already claims to be making that assessment. And they fine the team for each instance.

And reducing the draft lottery odds would counter the team with the worst record from having the better prospect, but only if that team is determined to have tanked X # of games. If that hasn't been determined, then their odds remain untouched. And if a team is truly the "weakest" then they wouldn't have to tank games anyways.

How can you fine a team that sells all the good players? Can you block a trade that they sell a player for draft pick? You just can't prove a team is tanking.

You can reduce their chance if they are in the lottery for consecutive years based on their previous picks. For example, Washington got a top 3 pick last year, they should not be in the top 3 pick again this year. However, reducing their chance of a team that sold all their good players won't change the fact that they are bad and actually need talent.

[Indeed]

The draft system needs to change. NBA is the best league in the world and we have half the league trying to tank/ lose games on purpose. Should honestly be illegal the way a bunch of these teams throw games.

They have fans rooting against their own teams in order to get a higher pick. Terrible system. Teams records should not have any affect on draft position. Tanking is not good for the sport, league or for the fans.

It's not even close to half. It's really seven teams tanking. Out of 30. And one of them is because they got mauled by the injury bug.

Dallas and San Antonio are beat up as well, not tanking.

Portland, Chicago, and Miami are also not tanking; they are simply mediocre teams.

Indeed, and the problem is more repeated offender, teams tanking multiple years.
For example, Washington got a top 3 pick last year, and they are still in the bottom of the league.
This shows
1) NBA team is using their major team for development, instead of having minor league / development league for that purpose. Every major sports would have their minor league, just the NBA.
2) No penalty for repeated tanking teams, particularly, teams already acquired a top 3 pick. Shouldn't they be lower their chance and discourage it?

Afterall, nothing would change if it does not affect income of the owner. Less revenue sharing from tax team may encourage teams to get off being the bottom team sooner.

[ontnut]

Just stop giving the best lottery odds to the bottom 3 teams. Stop incentivizing losing.