NBA Draft Lottery Revolution: Three Proposals to Eliminate Tanking

The NBA is ready to change the rules of the game. During this week’s Board of Governors meetings in New York, the league three concrete and radical proposals to fight tanking – the practice where franchises deliberately lose games to improve their Draft Lottery odds.

A formal vote is expected in May during a special governors meeting, an event that already signals how seriously the league views the issue.

Tanking Has Become Unsustainable

The 2025-26 season has pushed the tanking debate to a breaking point. With a prospect class widely considered exceptionally deep and talented, several teams have openly shaped their decisions – rotations, injury management, minutes distribution – around worsening their record.

A dynamic that has put the credibility of the entire competition under pressure.

Commissioner Adam Silver didn’t mince words:

The problem is that today it’s almost impossible to distinguish between a true rebuilding process and pure tanking. When incentives don’t align, when it comes to decisions about lineups, injuries, players’ pain thresholds… the system no longer works

Adam Silver

And even more bluntly: “We’ll fix it. Period”

The Three Proposals on the Table

All three proposals share a disruptive element compared to the current system: including playoff teams in the Draft Lottery. From there, however, the mechanics diverge significantly.

1st Proposal – The 18-Team Mega Lottery

The first option expands the Lottery pool to 18 franchises: the 10 worst teams in the league (those excluded from the Play-In Tournament) and the 8 teams that participated in the Play-In. All 18 positions would be drawn.

The 10 worst teams would each have an equal 8% chance of moving up, while the remaining 20% of odds would be distributed in descending order among the 8 Play-In teams (from 11th to 18th place). A system designed to reduce the competitive advantage of losing as many games as possible.

In summary:

• The 10 teams outside the play-in enter
• Plus the 8 teams that made the play-in

The bottom 10 each have an 8% chance to move up, while the remaining 20% is distributed among the other eight teams

In short: the extreme advantage of losing the most games disappears.

2nd Proposal – The 22-Team Lottery with Two-Year Evaluation

The second proposal is the most complex. An even larger group – 22 teams – would enter the Lottery, including the 4 teams eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. However, rankings would not be based solely on the current season: each franchise would be evaluated over a two-year span, a system directly inspired by the WNBA.

To prevent teams from losing every single game, a minimum win threshold would be introduced for each season. If the floor were, for example, 20 wins, a team that won only 14 would be treated as if it had won 20 for Lottery purposes. A team with 40 wins one year and 20 the next would enter the draw as if it had 30. Only the top four picks would be drawn, as is currently the case.

In summary:

• Included: 10 teams outside play-in, 8 from play-in, 4 first-round playoff exits
• Rankings based on results over the past two seasons

Additionally:

• A minimum win threshold is introduced
• Even extreme losing records would be “adjusted”

Example:

• A 14-win season would count as 20
• A 40 + 20 combination becomes an average of 30 wins

The goal is clear: make deliberate losing over a single season ineffective.

3rd Proposal – The “Five-by-Five” Method

The third option, nicknamed “five-by-five,” reintroduces the 18 teams from Proposal 1 but adds a double draw. The 5 worst teams would have equal odds of landing one of the top 5 picks, with probabilities decreasing for the others. After the top 5 picks are drawn, a second lottery would determine the remaining 13.

The most interesting twist: any of the bottom five teams that fail to land a top-5 pick cannot fall below the 10th position in the second draw. A safety net designed to protect the weakest teams from a double penalty – like last season, when the teams with the worst (Utah Jazz), second-worst (Washington Wizards), and fourth-worst (New Orleans Pelicans) records dropped to the fifth, sixth, and seventh picks respectively.

In summary:

• Same 18 teams as 1st Proposal
• The 5 worst teams all have equal odds
• Top 5 picks drawn separately

Then:

• A new lottery for the remaining 13 teams
• The worst teams cannot fall below the 10th pick

In practice: less incentive to tank, but also less risk for truly weak teams.

An Open Decision-Making Process

None of the three proposals is final. In the coming months, owners, presidents, and general managers are expected to engage in open dialogue with league offices to evaluate impacts and potential unintended consequences.

Silver has already hinted that further structural changes could also come during negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the players’ union (NBPA), even though the current deal runs through the end of the decade.

What’s certain is that the special May meeting – rare in the NBA’s institutional calendar, which typically includes only three standard meetings per year – is already a clear signal: the league considers this reform an absolute priority.

There is something called a genuine rebuild, a rebuilding process done with integrity. The problem is that today we can no longer distinguish it from tanking

Adam Silver

According to the commissioner, the response can no longer be incremental. After four partial interventions in recent years, the time has come for a radical shift. This time, the game is truly changing.