NBA and Tanking: How the Draft Lottery Creates Meaningless Games

As we know, in response to the NBA betting scandal and the need to protect partnerships with sportsbooks, the league is considering regulatory changes aimed – among other things – at discouraging so-called tanking.

Tanking is the practice by which teams with no immediate ambitions intentionally lose games to secure better Draft positioning, thereby increasing their chances of landing top prospects. Setting aside Adam Silver’s specific ideas, it’s worth asking a broader question: how can this practice truly be stopped?

The real problem is the Draft Lottery

The core issue lies with the NBA Draft Lottery itself – more precisely, with its rules rather than its structure. Tanking exists because the Lottery exists in its current form.

Moving the date at which standings are frozen does not change the substance of the problem: losing on purpose still benefits teams with no short-term goals. In fact, pushing that cutoff earlier could result in motivation-less games immediately after the All-Star break, a scenario that would be difficult for the league to accept.

Moreover, it’s impossible to make a system based on random ball draws truly “fair.” At its core, the Lottery is pure luck, and no rule tweak can realistically turn it into an equitable mechanism.

Reform or abolish?

Another proposal involves limiting teams from picking in the top four for two consecutive years. While understandable in theory, it feels unfair when considering that San Antonio has already drafted two potentially generational players in Dylan Harper and Victor Wembanyama.

Introducing retroactive or selective restrictions risks making the system inconsistent. Past examples – such as Orlando drafting Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway – show how partial changes can create long-term imbalances. At that point, it may be more honest to abolish the Lottery altogether and rebuild the system from scratch, rather than endlessly tweaking rules that reproduce the same contradictions.

So what’s the solution?

One option is to leave everything as it is, openly acknowledging that tanking is an inevitable byproduct of keeping the Draft Lottery exciting.

If, however, the NBA wants to appear proactive in preventing manipulated outcomes, it could:

• Give all non-playoff teams the same odds in the Draft Lottery, or
• Abolish the Lottery entirely and treat rookie contracts like standard agreements negotiated between players and franchises.

Under this model, smaller or struggling teams would have a greater incentive to develop their talent rather than deliberately losing games to secure better draft picks.

These solutions may seem simple, but that’s precisely the point: remove the incentive to lose without overcomplicating the system. The real issue isn’t tanking itself – it’s the Lottery that creates it.