Man, I disagree. The league is a farce when nearly a third of the teams are actively trying to lose.

They just need to quantify anti-competitive practices in some way such as the Jazz not playing the stars, sitting healthy players, etc.

Fines don't matter. These teams tanking are generally cheaper rosters that don't pay tax. Jazz would absolutely pay $25M in fines this year to guarantee a top 6 pick and ensure the Thunder don't get it.

The only thing that is going to work is to decrease lottery odds for teams that are "tanking unethically." Kings just outright suck. But the Jazz have three stars that should be playing.

Decreasing lottery odds, adding wins to final record, or changing their seeding (push back X number of slots in order after lottery is complete) is the only way to change it.

I really think decreasing salary cap (again i know it's not a cap but it's acts like one) for the following season would scare teams to high heaven. Ping pong balls are valuable, but salary cap is the most valuable commodity in this iteration of the NBA these days.

Players wouldn't go for that because it directly affects them and the cap is directly tied to total basketball related income.

Someone on reddit had this wild idea:

Teams finish in whatever order. Worst team picks a different team (cannot pick yourself) for the following year and gets their draft pick.

So wizards are worst, then they pick the Kings.
Jazz 2nd worst, they pick the Pellies.
Pacers are 3rd worst, they pick the Clippers, etc.

If Kings finish last, the Wiz get the 1st pick in 2027.

The following year, you control the other team's pick, not your own. So the entire NBA is in a position like the Clippers or Suns where they can't tank, because they own a different team's pick, not their own.

Guitarsoup said:

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Players wouldn't go for that because it directly affects them and the cap is directly tied to total basketball related income.

Someone on reddit had this wild idea:

Teams finish in whatever order. Worst team picks a different team (cannot pick yourself) for the following year and gets their draft pick.

So wizards are worst, then they pick the Kings.
Jazz 2nd worst, they pick the Pellies.
Pacers are 3rd worst, they pick the Clippers, etc.

If Kings finish last, the Wiz get the 1st pick in 2027.

The following year, you control the other team's pick, not your own. So the entire NBA is in a position like the Clippers or Suns where they can't tank, because they own a different team's pick, not their own.

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I think the best answer is to include 18 teams in the lottery and to flatten the odds in two groups. All teams that miss the playoffs have flat odds, 10 teams all at 5 percent odds of a top 3 pick. Then for the 8 teams that comprise seeds 7-10 in the play in tourney you give them each 6.5ish percent odds at a top 3 pick.

With this way, there is zero reason to tank at all, and in fact you reward teams (slightly) for getting into the playoffs at the back of the bracket. This sets them up at least hypothetically for the idea of pushing for the playoffs, working too improve your team and then being rewarded with a top pick to help augment your building team.

Bad teams will still get top picks pretty regularly, but the odds of that happening are no longer tied to how many games they lose. And the best odds go to those teams that fight to get into the play-in tournament. This would make the last few weeks super interesting as teams fought for those spots. It would also seem to be very unlikely that a team in the 5 or 6 spot would intentionally let itself fall into the play-in rather than secure a full playoff spot because even those 6.5 percent odds are not lucrative enough to justify that kind of move.

In any case, just an idea that popped onto my head.

Results in a playoff team taking 50% of the top 3 picks in a 2 year span on average. The goal is to disincentivize ranking, not punish bad teams.

Depends on how you view the league. I'm going to guess you don't know much about the NBA.

Last year 6 teams with losing records were in the play-in. In general there have been 2-4 teams per year with losing records. These aren't good teams, but they are teams that played competitive basketball most of the year which is what the league wants to incentivize.

The teams not making the play-in are not that much worse than those teams, they however are the ones deciding to not play competitive basketball. My idea isn't about punishing bad teams, it's about rewarding teams that try to win.

Yeah I'm with you. I think all the major proposed changes are flawed. They do need to take away ping pong balls though when the Jazz do what they did.

In the end, these teams are chasing ping pong balls. Hit them where it hurts if they are going to be brazenly anti-competitive.

The reason it's a big deal is that it affects every single part of the league's business model. The way they build the schedule with national TV matchups they want and need competitive matchups that highlight the talent of the league to help grow fan bases. When 10 teams are sitting super stars and inventing injuries that doesn't just impact those 10 teams but also everyone they play during the season.

Also tanking and "process" based rebuilds reinforces this idea that fans only need to show up when it's time to win again which builds front runner fan bases that disappear quickly when times are bad.

The answer is simple, just incentivize bad teams to at least try to win. In an apron world there will always be good players available from teams looking to shed salary. No excuses not to try and add good players to your team and WIN.

I understand WHY it's a problem but any proposed solution will only create different problems and will likely lead to perpetual purgatory for legitimately bad teams.

It'll never happen, but I think if you want to stop tanking simply lift the rookie wage scale. Make the #1 pick negotiate the max salary a team would be willing to pay under their cap structure. You think the Jazz would want to get the #1 if they knew it would cost them $45m/yr? Maybe, maybe not. If Peterson won't sign for less than a "max deal" then the Jazz take Boozer. Or Wilson. Or whoever.

Don't assume things.

The problem you have is probabilities. A team at the fringes of a .500 season or better (most of the play in teams) is not in the same realm as a team winning 18 games. They're 20 games worse. In many seasons you're giving a team with wins in the teens only a 50% better chance of a top pick as you are a team contending for a 50 win season.

Your system gives the field an 85% chance to get a top 3 pick over the worst 3 teams in the league. That means in roughly 50% of drafts the 3 worst teams in the league are picking outside the top 3. In ~25% of the drafts you have a team with a winning record picking in the top 3. In most drafts you're getting fewer than 3 guys that are going to be potential franchise defining players. Lots of those don't pan out.

You cannot flatten odds to that degree. It results in a far more frequent occurrence of the 90's Mavericks. Creating franchises that look like that often is WAY worse for the league than tanking. You obliterate fan bases.

Again, the goal is not to punish bad teams for being bad, nor is it to punish teams for tanking, it's to create a scenario where tanking is not desirable.

In a typical season you have 3-4 god awful teams (mid-20 wins or worse), 3-4 bad teams (25-32 wins), 3-4 mediocre teams (32-37 wins) and 3-4 fringe .500 wins (38-44). A team can tank their way into a step lower tranche, but they're typically not moving two. So you flatten odds between adjacent tranches and increase the separation between teams by expanding the review period to multiple years (is this team ACTUALLY bad or are they just temporarily unfortunate), reducing the impact of an individual win/expanding the gaps between teams than the win gap in an individual season normally would.

There are teams that will have circumstances like the Cavs post LeBron or Mavericks after Luka (if they didn't get lucky with Flagg), Lakers after Kobe, Bulls after Butler where their actual circumstances are worse than their draft odds, but that lasts one year (for the former fringe playoff teams) or two years (for the former playoff teams) before they return to odds of top picks reflecting their circumstances, but those teams are normally in circumstances where they're going to need to shed salary of aged veteran role players/acquire cheaper role players anyway and they can use that season to maneuver for cap space.

Vessel said:

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Yeah I'm with you. I think all the major proposed changes are flawed. They do need to take away ping pong balls though when the Jazz do what they did.

In the end, these teams are chasing ping pong balls. Hit them where it hurts if they are going to be brazenly anti-competitive.

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The second paragraph is where I'm at. Nothing matters except the draft position. They have to identify and codify anti competitive play with a way to hurt the draft pick chances or position.

Everything else is too complicated.

Teams have to run with who they got and if they want to rebuild, they need to trade away players they probably like to suck enough to get good picks.

I don't think the Spurs WANTED to trade Derrick White for a 1st and a swap, but they had to do that or they were stuck in the doldrums of bad picks like the bulls have been for twenty years

Part of what I think is impacting how you think about this is recency bias with both Flagg and Wemby being CLEAR generational talents at 1 that seem to confirm the idea of tanking leading to winning.

But remember the draft has given us Anthony Bennett, Zac Risacher, Kwame Brown, DeAndre Ayton, Markelle Fultz, Ben Simmons, Andrea Bargnani, Greg Oden etc. that did nothing to transform their franchise after being taken 1/1.

If you remove the false logic that bad teams that pick at the top of the draft will turn into good teams then it becomes a lot easier to live with flat odds. OKC tanked, but weirdly only the Chet pick at 2 is a high pick that has paid off for them. Their success has been about depth building with mid lottery picks. The Pistons really only have one high lottery pick (Cade). The Warriors rode Curry (7th) and Thompson (13th) to a dynasty.

The Spurs dynasty found two HoFs late in drafts that helped build that team into a long term winner. Dirk was a mid lottery pick. Giannis was picked 15th. Jokic was a 2nd round pick. I could go on forever, but the point is that outside of a few generational players, the 1/1 pick has not guaranteed you access to a super star

All true but that doesn't stop teams from trying to get the 1/1 because they think they'll get pick the best guy.

But at the same time, teams have a pretty good idea of which drafts have a cornerstone going #1. We knew this year would be good a while back, we knew Flagg was going to be good. We knew Wemby was going to be good. We knew 2024 sucked.

Some years (this year, last year, 2023, 2019) tanking is much worse than other years (2024, 2020, 2010, etc.)

Adam Silver’s full response to tanking: pic.twitter.com/zxw6aET8vK

— Rob Perez (@WorldWideWob) February 14, 2026

"Every possible remedy is on the table" including removing draft picks

Incentives are misaligned.

Things are worse this year than previous years.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7046875/2026/02/14/adam-silver-nba-all-star-game-tanking-draft/

Silver said simply policing the league's teams for tanking is not the best way to solve the issue.

"I don't think that's the way to manage the system long term," Silver said, adding, "it will lead to very unhealthy relationships between us and our teams."

You need to stop assuming that I'm an idiot and realize that the problem is the probabilities, not whether I know anything about the NBA (I do). The fact that it's not a guarantee that a top pick will turn into an All-NBA type player is undercutting to the idea it's not a big deal to flatten the odds, not a supporter to it. The probability of a player turning into an All-NBA player falls as the draft progresses, the fact that Jokic was drafted in the second round is as interesting as Tom Brady being drafted in the 6th, but it's irrelevant to the norm position of top players being drafted.

In the NBA a top 3 pick has about a 40% chance of turning into an at least one time All-NBA player, can you say that about the 7-10 picks? No. Presume that 1-3 has a 40% chance (it's somewhere around there) and 4-10 has a 15% (generously) chance. That under your system the worst team in the league picks in the top 3 in 1 in 8 seasons and outside it in 7 in 8 seasons. That leaves you with an average time to draft an All-NBA player at around 4 years. On average. Meaning there will be ~50% of teams that take longer than that, and several teams pushing a decade waiting for any exciting players to rally around.

When you think "All-NBA" player. Don't think Luka Doncic, Anthony Davis, Lebron James. Think Karl Anthony Towns. 4-5 years to get a KAT or Trae Young. The NBA draft is an at bat in the MLB. You need to give bad teams multiple swings to get a hit.

Mikel Brown doing what he can to make that 7 spot more palatable. Good recent 2 games from him.

Of the top 25 guys in ppg this year, only 7 of them were drafted in the top 3. This also omits Dame (hurt all year) and Giannis who hasn't played enough games to qualify.

That tells me that about 75% of the top scorers in the NBA came from outside that top 3. I don't deny that it's nice to have a top three pick, but it's not at all a guarantee. In case you think I'm cherry picking, with rebounds per game, it's only 5 of the top 25. For assists it's 4 of the top 25.

Basically, I just fundamentally disagree that flattening the odds negatively impacts anyone's ability to add talent over the long term. Good scouting and player development still reigns supreme. When you look at drafts over the years there is just a ton of noise in the data. Tons of busts.

Even those "process" Sixers really only ended up with ONE pick worth a dang out of their tankfest. Outside of Embiid they missed on every pick starting in 2013.

Michael Carter Williams 11th pick
Embiid 3rd pick
Jahlil Okafor 3rd pick
Ben Simmons 1st pick
Markelle Fultz 1st pick

Over that same period they could have drafted the following guys with picks in the mid to late lottery.


2013 Giannis 15th pick
2014 Jokic 42nd (sixers had 2 2nd round picks before 42)
2015 Booker 13th
2016 Murray 7th
2017 Donovan Mitchell 13th

AggieEP said:

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Of the top 25 guys in ppg this year, only 7 of them were drafted in the top 3. This also omits Dame (hurt all year) and Giannis who hasn't played enough games to qualify.

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That's 5% of the draft making up 28% of the top 25 scorers. That's what you call overrepresentation. In other words, top 3 picks improve probability of getting a good player.

Quote:

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Basically, I just fundamentally disagree that flattening the odds negatively impacts anyone's ability to add talent over the long term. Good scouting and player development still reigns supreme. When you look at drafts over the years there is just a ton of noise in the data. Tons of busts.

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People fundamentally disagree with the Earth being round, but facts are facts and it is a statistical fact that flattening odds reduces a bad team's ability to acquire talent. Exacerbated by the fact that most bad teams are going to be small market teams and their primary opportunity to go from bad team to competitive team is the draft.

Why is it a statistical fact? Because though there are some good players drafted later in the draft it is a perfect correlation between average performance of a player and their draft position as you progress through the draft (that means on the average a #1 pick is better than a #2 pick).

It is also a statistical fact that flattening the odds reduces the average expected draft position of the worst teams in the league.

Those facts combine to result in bad teams drafting worse players on the average with severely flattened odds.

Were talking across each other here. I said it's obviously great to draft in the top 3. It gets you the chance to draft one of the top players in the draft. No argument.

But the other part of my argument is that there are always good players available elsewhere in the draft as well. This isn't an earth round vs flat thing, this is a fact. And this fact undermines your secondary claim that flattening the odds will doom bad teams to eternal purgatory.

The Warriors built a dynasty without picking in the top 3
The Thunder have built a good team only picking once in the top 3. The Nuggets built a great team without a top 3 pick. The Pistons only have one top 3 guy. The Celtics are winning this year with only one top 3 guy. The Knicks acquired their whole team via trades so even though KAT was a 1/1 the Knicks didn't need heightened odds to get him.

The best example (we'll see if they actually win next year) is the Wizards. Despite heightened odds and a lot of tanking they've only pulled in one top 3 pick (Sarr) in the last few drafts. But, they've hit big on Kyshawn George (24) and both Tre Johnson (6) and Bilal Coulibali (7) seem to at least be rotational players. Meanwhile they also acquired Trae and AD to build what looks like a pretty interesting roster. I'm sure they would have loved a bunch of top 3 picks, but even in the current system lottery luck plays a role and it's on the teams to draft the right guys and trade/sign the rest to augment the roster. Under my rules, they would also be playing both Trae and AD now and trying to win to improve their lottery odds, instead they are now intentionally not playing guys who make 100 million dollars combined.

All of this though brings us back to why we are even discussing this, and it's the tanking. The soul sucking sport ruining process of intentionally losing. To me the only way to organically solve the problem is to incentivize competitiveness. Right now those 14% odds incentivize a race to the bottom. Rip those away and I think we'd see tanking disappear quickly.

This is philosophical because you always want the best pick, but I don't think having the top pick in most drafts is a positive. People are okay to look stupid if they went along with the consensus. If you skip on the consensus and he's a star, you are essentially a fool. I've always thought that unless you have a LeBron, Wemby, Coop (ball dominant, very athletic prodigy), you trade for proven players and more assets. Still miss on guys like Zion, and you probably let a lot of talent get passed you (guys like Luka even), but at least you derisk from the perpetual bust-cycle.

I have often thought of that as well. Draft night you have teams enamored with certain guys and it is a bit easier to fleece someone for proven assets/future assets.

I think this draft is deep this year, but I'm not sure that I think Dybantsa, Peterson or Boozer are franchise changers at the top. For various reasons I think they all have some limitations (Peterson's being that he rarely seems to want to play and Dybantsa's being that he feels a bit like a high volume scorer archerype) If I ended up with 1/1 this year I might shop it and move back if I was offered another first plus an already proven NBA player.

The data I've seen is that ASG appearances versus draft position makes 2 things very clear. (1) Outside of R1, it's like the lottery. (2) There is deep value 6-15. I think high-30%s of ASGA came from Top 5 and low-30%s of ASGA came from 6-15. It's similar for All-NBA. Top 5 dominates MVP candidates, but that number is very skewed by players I'd take with the above framework. I think it's easier to acquire and build around 2x 6-15 picks than constantly tanking and going for boom-or-bust Top 5 picks.

Starting to come to the same conclusion as you regarding Peterson and Dybantsa. Just major red flags popping up all around for those guys. The Peterson stuff is particularly scary. His stat line yesterday is worrisome. Part of it could be that they've just been hyped up so much, so they were always going to fall short of the expectations.

Boozer is an incredible basketball player, he's just a tweener with not-elite athleticism.

There will be a lot of pressure on the top 3 teams to not pass on those guys and then those guys will have lots of pressure on them early.

Anytime I hear "player x's camp" I get pretty worried as well. And with both Peterson and Dybantsa it's been clear all along that they are making business decisions WRT where they play and how they play. The asinine reality of the top player in the country playing at a private LDS school tells you something about what drives his thinking.

IMO the easiest way to know if a guy is going to really pan out is to find out if they love basketball and love the grind of getting better and earning their spot on the rotation. Guys who come into the league thinking that their games are already fully refined almost never live up to what we thought they could do.

The best kind of team first guys are often found in the 6-15 range because they know they have something to prove. I'd even say that Cooper Flagg fits this mold also because as a white wing he knew people are always going to question his ability to hang with 'elite athletes.' He plays with great passion on a nightly basis and doesn't look like your typical coddled American AAU baller out there.

Boozer will be interesting to me because we have seen some successful players that fit his mold, but the more likely outcome is usually a bit more like Marcus Morris rather than prime Kevin Love (which would be my top end comp if I wanted to sell myself on him).

Peterson, while I think easily the best talent in the draft, I worry about big time from a mentality perspective. You just don't love ball that much if you are doing what he's doing this year. Period. Point blank. I'd have SERIOUS reservations about him in the NBA.

Dybantsa also gives me some red flags about how much he cares and loves ball, but not to the same level as Peterson. Dybantsa feels a tad bit immature imo while I just straight up don't know how much Peterson cares.

It would make me nervous drafting both imo. In a weird way I kinda hope the Mavs end up drafting 4-6 so they don't have to make those choices at the top of the draft, and I think Flemings and Wagler are better fits on this team and have great ceilings as well. Weird to say.

We're not talking passed each other. We are disagreeing on where to focus attention. I'm telling you data, you're telling me anecdote. Anecdote is not how you design a system, you design it off of data.

Did you know that given the Warriors picks between 2009 and 2012 that they had a ~1 in 125 chance of pulling 3 All-NBA players, and that undersells the outcome because Draymond, Klay and Steph are all multi-time All-NBA players? A single team would have to wait several centuries to expect to replicate that good fortune. (But xx team did it! Yeah, there's 30 teams in the league, instead of 1 opportunity there's 30 different opportunities per year).

The top pick in the draft converts to an All-NBA player 58% of the time. An all-star 73% of the time. The 4th pick converts to an All-NBA player ~20% of the time and an All-Star ~30% of the time.

The 3rd pick in the draft has a ~35% chance at All-NBA and a ~50% chance at All-Star. The 6th pick in the draft has a ~12% chance at an All-NBA and a ~20% chance at being an All-Star.

Flattening the odds makes worst team in the league the 4th pick 95% of the time, reducing their "good player" chance by 3x from what it would be without a lottery/flattened odds, and the 3rd worst team a 3x reduced chance moving from 3rd to 6th in 7 out of 8 years (85% of years picking 6th).

When I say it extends the period that bad teams are bad, I mean it literally extends it. Not that it's impossible to escape. It takes longer to acquire talent. You don't design a system based upon rarities like Golden State or Denver. Golden State could've drafted Brandon Jennings instead of Steph, Alec Burks instead of Klay and Quincy Acy instead of Draymond.

35% of all All-NBA draft picks since 1976 were top 3 picks. Half of them came in the top 5 picks. Most of the NBA Draft most years are players that are out of the league by the end of their rookie deal. It is low probabilities after you get passed the top 10, very low after the top 20.


The justification for it is that a bunch of bad teams that we knew were going to be bad, are intentionally bad, while mostly playing on RSN's and local channels for their domestic markets for a fanbase that is literally rooting for them to be bad and the non-bad teams that play them get to rest their players in games that were otherwise not going to be that competitive even if everyone played. They're going to rest their players regardless, better to do it against a bad team than a good one.

I agree it is a bad look from a competitive fire standpoint, but from an actual impact on the NBA and the teams that presently matter? Not much. Know what's worse? Having multiple teams winning 15-25 games for 10 years straight. It also further advantages large market teams over small market teams by reducing the small market teams' ability to improve beyond the 30-40 win threshold.

There's a reason no professional sports league in the U.S. operates their draft that way.

As recompense for continuing to argue here's the data for All-NBA and All-Star chance per pick since 1976. By pick 5 All-NBA odds have fallen dramatically. By pick 16 you're holding out hope for a starter. By pick 25 you might as well turn the draft off, because less than 1 of the remaining guys is going to be someone that people remember 5 years after they retire.

Number: Pick number
AN = All-NBA
AS = All-Star
AN+AS = Chance at being at least an all-star.

.

My only issue with this very probability-forward take is that it doesn't normalize for draft talent pool, popular NBA strategy, and individual team leadership. If you look from 2011-2020, only 5 #1 picks have an All-Pro. Only 2 have more than 2.

The reason I mention those 3 items because drafts like 2013 (AB went #1) sometimes happen. NBA strategy was broken for years with a hard lean towards length and athleticism - with almost no care for basketball skill - which has corrected in the last 5-6 years. And team leadership, to your example, because I don't think the GSW is as crazy as it sounds mathematically. Outside Draymond, the luck is the players not going sooner (like Minn drafting twice before GSW and not taking Curry), but the SF tech and money boom, and attracting Myers and West into the front office were not just any team leadership.

That post is a response to the claim it's a good idea to flatten draft odds. That some teams have better management is an argument against flattening draft odds, bad management will cluster at the bottom of the league and forcing them into lower statistical odds is creating more hurdles for them. Well managed teams don't need the help of a 1 in 20 lottery ticket to a top 3 pick.

Stratification of competence is a reality of society, it happens everywhere, saying "get better management" isn't going to result in better management for every team, some of them are going to suck at it, they'll fire them, hire someone new, and they too are probabilistically going to suck as well. The odds of the GSW doing that may be higher (if it is, it's marginal for a low odds scenario like that), but those are the odds of an average team drafting in the positions they drafted (#7 Curry,#6 Udoh, #11 Klay, #7 Barnes, #30 Festus) with 3 2nd round picks. That players fall and luck occurs is baked into the 45 draft history (of what I checked 2021-2025 is not old enough to expect much in the way of All-Star/All-NBA).

5 All-NBA players in 11 drafts is within the range of variance. If you expand to 2008 it's 7 All-NBA players in 13 drafts, which is the historical average.

As far as trading the #1. You're either picking in a year where there's 1-2 consensus guys, in which case you should pick the guy or picking in an Anthony Bennett year where there's no definitive player worthy of a #1 (they were right), which isn't going to get you a massive bidding war for the pick/high asset return, because they have the same "meh" attitude to the options as you do. You can try, but it's probably gonna be tough. Picking in a year like this year is when you can consider trading the #1 pick.

The draft positions where it's best to be shifting picks around is the 5-10 range, because the historical reality is those picks are all providing the same chance at an All-Star player and if you're not sold on someone and another team is you can extract some value to get more picks.

That doesn't check out to me because that variance in your argument's favor includes Ben Simmon's 1 All-NBA, KAT's 2, DRose's 1, and John Wall's 1. You can't use a proxy for a great player being 1-2 All-NBA seasons. Over that span, Blake Griffen, Kyrie, and AD are the only #1s with 3+. Over that span the #1 pick only has 25% chance of having multiple All-Pro seasons and even less if the goal is 3+. Meanwhile, picks that are grouped 6-10 and 11-15 have essentially as many All-Pro seasons.

Edit: As many as players picked 1-5.

I agree that you'd need to up the threshold to multiple all-nba selections to really have an idea on where the data says you get franchise altering players.


Another interesting data point that I think is relevant to this conversation is that of the past 25 NBA champions, only 7 of those teams had even one top 3 pick that they drafted themselves on the roster and only 1 (or 2 depending on how we count Lebron's return to Cleveland) had multiple top 3 picks that they selected and developed. In this period 12 different franchises have won titles.

2025 OKC with Chet
2024 Boston with Tatum and Brown
2016 Cavs with Kyrie (and kind of LeBron)
2014, 2007, 2005, 2003 Spurs with Duncan

When I told that other poster we were talking across each other this is what I meant. I'm interested in winning, not just getting all NBA selections. And the hard data on winning does not show that tanking to get top 3 picks leads to championships. In fact the better strategy has been letting crappy teams draft and develop top players and then trading for them or signing them in free agency.