The NBA, namely Adam Silver, has been on an anti-tanking tirade lately. The league sent out fines and discussed solutions. Now, they’re prepared to enact some of those solutions, though it’s currently unclear what those will end up being. Some of them are pretty wild and out there.
NBA to enact new anti-tanking rules
NBA commissioner Adam Silver believes tanking is ruining basketball. As a result, he has and is and will continue to go to great lengths to try to combat it. He’s already tweaked the draft lottery. This year, he has levied fines against the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers.
That’s not enough. He plans to make more league-wide changes to prevent tanking in 2026-27, according to ESPN reporter Shams Charania. After a lot of discussion, Silver alerted all 30 GMs to this change, so it’s coming.
There have been a wide variety of changes talked about. Silver even said he considered removing the draft entirely. Prospects would be free agents and could sign wherever. That is not currently on the table, and it would probably derail the entire sport and remove any semblance of parity.
Per Charania, these are the potential solutions being officially put forth:
- First-round draft picks can be protected only for top-four or top-14-plus selections
- Lottery odds lock in at the trade deadline or another date
- Teams would no longer be able to pick in the top four two straight seasons and/or after two straight bottom-three finishes by record
- Teams would not be able to pick in the top four the year after making the conference finals, like the Pacers this season
- Lottery odds would be established based on two-year records instead of one
- Lottery extended to include all play-in teams, even those who make the playoffs
- Flatten odds for all lottery teams, so every team has a one-in-14 chance of winning the first pick
Silver believes the issue is worse than ever before, hence the wide array of potential changes.
Why Adam Silver’s proposed ideas wouldn’t work
Tanking is probably an outsized issue only in Adam Silver’s mind. Most NBA fans do not care if their team is tanking, because it generally means they’re focused on one day putting together a winning team. Would a fan rather support the Chicago Bulls or the Utah Jazz? Most would say the Jazz.
The lottery protection changes wouldn’t be terrible, as they would only affect teams tanking to avoid the protections. That is a different form of tanking as opposed to trying to lose to get a better player yourself. Avoiding a trade you agreed to is different.
Locking in the lottery odds at a certain date also isn’t horrible, but it means that part of the season is truly meaningless. It also changes how teams would trade. Would a team blow it up at the deadline if their odds were already locked? They might not be willing to start over if it wouldn’t even help in the immediate future.
Not being able to pick in the top four twice in a row is not at all fair, especially because teams don’t control their lottery placement. The NBA determines it with the ping pong balls. Take the Dallas Mavericks, for example. They’re clearly not tanking and lucked into the first pick last year. Would they then be banned from a top-four pick this year even though they’re clearly bad? That would be unfair.
The conference finals issue rarely ever comes up, and in the most recent example, it’s not a tanking issue. Would the Indiana Pacers be 15-41 now if Tyrese Haliburton were healthy? That injury was not a choice, and their being bad now is not, either.
Allowing the last four playoff teams to have a shot at the first pick wouldn’t be the worst possible idea, because the odds would presumably be low. But still, sometimes teams have injuries and limp into the postseason by way of the Play-In, and that would be unfair for teams who lost or didn’t make the playoffs.
Flattening the lottery odds would be an utter disaster, and it would ruin the NBA. Having a team that narrowly missed out on the playoffs get the first pick over the worst teams routinely would be horrible. The bad teams would never have a shot at becoming good if they weren’t given the modest boost in the draft they currently are.
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