Houston also got 4 consecutive top 4 picks.

They got Wemby a supporting cast now they will handicap everyone else

The NBA draft lottery is fake. The real draft positions are decided by a slap boxing match between front offices Execs, owners, and coaches in a basement office at Ernst & Young’s corporate headquarters. 

The real problem is… Gregg Popovich has hands.

At least its the Spurs and you know they’re not just blowing Picks.

Its not like Sacramento drafting Thomas Robinson, Ben Maclemore, Nik Stauskas, Willie Cauley-Stein, and Marquese Chriss with 5 consecutive top 8 picks lol.

Also with Luka Doncic, Trae Young, Jalen Jackson Jr., available, they take Marvin Bagley Jr.

Sochan at PG “experiment” should also be considered in tanking talks.

I mean, yes? The league usually makes these big changes in response to something. The cap smoothing and supermax came after KD already joined the Warriors. The 2nd apron came after they didn’t balk at paying the tax even after losing KD. This rule is coming because it would stop teams that draft a LeBron/Wemby caliber player from tanking and becoming unstoppable, while also stopping teams like Boston or OKC from getting consecutive top 4 picks from another team while making deep playoff runs or even winning titles.

they won’t be able to prevent us from getting another top lottery this year too…

hawks just this time pls 👉🏼👈🏼 you don’t want to let the thunder dominate the league innit ? 🥺

Luckies fuckin franchise in history. Every time there’s a generational bug they’re going to luck into them.

Spurs have been the league darlings for decades, somehow always getting the first pick when a generational big comes available. Corrupt league

Not as bad as Cleveland

I can already see the lottery results for next year. 1. Dallas, 2. OKC, 3. Sacramento, 4. Utah. The west almost always floods the lottery winners

There were four 60 loss teams. All four fell.

I’ll die on the hill that the anti-tanking lottery changes over the past two decades actually makes tanking worse. All it does is shift the math on when it’s optimal to tank, incentivizing teams to be kind of bad instead of awful, and encourages fringe playoff teams to try for the lottery instead of pushing for the playoffs. At the same time it punishes legitimately rebuilding teams, locking them into a cycle of just missing the top prospects that they need to rebuild.

Lol what? Just because teams jumped up for 2 years it never goes to the actual bad teams?

Spurs were the worst in the conference when they got wemby.

Magic worst in the conference for Paolo. 

Pistons, worst in the conference, Cade

Wolves, 2nd worst in conference, Ant

Pels, 2nd worst in the conference(7th worst in the league) Zion

All of these were bad teams when they got the top pick. i know this sub has the attention span of a goldfish but come on lol

I mean reducing the lottery % for the worst teams (as well as the play in tournament) is why tanking is a lot more limited today than like 8 years ago when after the all star break like 8-10 teams were at least kinda tanking each year

They dont want teams to be purposely bad because less people go to games as a result, making them less revenue

I think it’s a reaction to the Spurs, Hawks, and Mavs three years in a row. Spurs go from like 8th best odds to drafting first. Hawks go from 14 all the way to first. Mavs go from 12th all the way to first. Doesn’t help that Spurs got 3 top 4 picks in a row and at least two of the players are the best from their class.

Well the current setup is “the worst teams in the nba (that are in a decent market) will get all the generational prospects”

Yeah, as a fan of a bad team this is what bothers me about “anti-tanking” measures. Even if every single team tried their absolute hardest, there still needs to be a worst team in the league. And a second worst. And so on. And when you look at everyone’s rosters, it’s pretty clear who those teams are.

Even if you’re the worst team in the league and then get lucky with the number one pick, you’re not necessarily going to be way better the next year. Rebuilds take time. Preventing a team from drafting in the top 4 to years in a row is just going to keep teams being perennially bad for longer.

Yeah I’d rather prevent a team from being bad 5 years in a row than prevent them for tanking for half a season or even a full season and this is just gonna make bad teams bad longer. They may have a few more wins nominally, but they’ll still be bad

The NHL does a good job with their lottery. Only the top 2 picks are randomized (the NBA has historically had “3 person” drafts at the top) and you can only move up 10 spots if you win the lottery. So the teams that were play in teams likely couldn’t get number 1 overall, but they can jump. I know that would have hurt the Hawks getting number one in 2024. Additionally a team can only jump twice (I believe) in a 5 year period. That wouldn’t stop the worst team in the league from retaining the top pick (1 -> 1 or 2 ->2 aren’t jumps), but it would level the playing field to prevent what has been seen from Cleveland in the mid 2010’s and the Spurs more recently. It would also help teams like Detroit who routinely dropped from ¹⁄₂ to 5 in 3-4 consecutive years from 2019-2023 (Bar Cade)

Limiting protections and simplifying them is a good idea so that people don’t need to deeply study a five year long odyssey of a pick being traded around with three different levels of protections and two swap options.

And to limit it basically which is important. The last month of the season is a horrific look for the league and a big part of it is that you have multiple teams running g league lineups to lose more

I think if there’s going to be tanking, then you just limit the amount of games where tanking is beneficial. Lottery odds get set midway through the season, so instead of a full season of tanking you get a half season of tanking

There will always be some tanking with a draft, sure.

But it’s worth trying to reduce tanking, even if you can’t bring it to zero.

I would argue the need for a draft is gone now with the aprons. the NBA has max contracts, roster limits, revenue sharing, free agency, and extremely punishing salary cap rules. all of these are in the interest of competitive balance, and I would argue are much more effective at creating parity than gifting high picks to West teams who barely miss out on the playoffs lol.

Do people really think the best rookies in the country are going to take less money to sit on the end of the Lakers bench every year? They aren’t. And if they do that means a whole lot of really good vets will always be available in free agency, and the whole league can sign them because there will never be an incentive to lose. There are only 30 roster spots on the Knicks and Lakers, I promise Cleveland and Memphis will still be able to sign players!

Limiting protections will impact tanking though. As an example, the Mavs a couple years ago with the whole Lively situation. If that pick was Top 4 protected, they would not have been able to tank as blatantly as they did.

Another example is that if the Jazz’s pick to the Thunder this year wasn’t Top 8 protected, they wouldn’t be forced to hard tank later this season.

A final one is last year with the Sixers, where when it was clear that they would not do better than the Play-In, they hard tanked to retain their pick and got Edgecombe as a result.

It wouldn’t stop tanking, but it would limit some of the tanking that does happen, and for the tanking that does happen in similar instances, to retain a lottery protected FRP as an example, it would be not as intense. For Top 4 protected FRPs, it’s so unlikely to retain it with a mid-to-late season tank that it’s probably not worth tanking for it.

This would be a good change overall.

Yeah I actually really like the “no top 4 picks in a row” idea. As you said, it won’t stop tanking, but at least it will stop the same teams from tanking every year. Teams can’t just commit to endless rebuilds where they go years without even trying to put a respectable product on the floor.

NHL I believe has it where a team cant win X picks in X period

No consecutive top 4 picks seem counterintuitive with Stepien Rule.

Exactly. These people have no idea what will actually fix their league

honestly i feel like this just makes the small market teams even worse

You don’t think it’s bad that teams like the Jazz and Thunder just sat half their roster for the last couple months of the season some years?

Exactly. I’m tired of them harping onto this “issue” all the time. It’s not a coincidence that the “tanking” teams, have some of the worst looking rosters in the nba. They’re not “tanking”, they just suck because they lack talent.

Theres not much tanking. Theres 3 or 4 bad teams

Unless you genuinely think the nba committed massive felony level crimes the nba didn’t screw over bad teams by the mavs winning the lottery. That was random chance 

I think with the NFL there’s just so many more players and positions that you just have a balance between that and salary cap. Then add in non-guaranteed contracts. These guys are always playing hard because they can be cut at any time.

This is exactly the issue for small market teams who have to build through the draft.

For reference, I think Utahs biggest FA signing ever was Carlos Boozer.

Maybe with the media in the hands of NBC/Amazon they’ll help change the narrative of anywhere that isn’t NYC/LA/Miami/SF being the equivalent of Siberia. Look how ESPN shit all over Memphis last year

It kinda blows my mind people wouldn’t want to go to Toronto, other than the weather you have a literal nation of support behind you.

Just as an example, Utah hasn’t made a single trade to improve their roster going four years. That’s just shitty. There will be terrible teams, but damn try to give a shit

You have nothing to worry about, the Wizards will keep picking 5-10 every year anyway.

Don’t worry it could always be the MLB who doesn’t let teams pick in the lottery 3 years in a row in a sport in which some prospects take 4 years to make it to the bigs. The white Sox lost the 5th most games since 1901 and picked 10th

this seems fair but then the NBA cant rig it when they want to

It’s so fucking annoying man, the league keeps looking for new ways to screw over teams that are legitimately bad and punish small market teams. Even things like supermax contracts, originally intended to help small market teams keep their good players, have effectively hamstrung those same organizations. Those teams are basically forced to give any good player they draft a massive contract just so they can keep them around, which cripples their ability to build a roster around those players and then they can just demand a trade within a couple years

The system is broken but they keep doubling down on “fixing” the wrong issues instead of improving the product and finding ways to allow bad teams to actually get better. There are always going to be teams that suck, it’s the case in literally every single major sports league. Focus on things that matter instead of trying to appease gambling companies

The Lakers had 7,2,2,2

Julius Randle D’Angelo Russell Brandon Ingram Lonzo Ball

😭😭😭

Yep, and then if the “always bad” teams picked top 4 the previous year and just stay bad while they develop, they’re locked out of the current year, so the fringe playoff teams or injured teams are more incentivized to tank, because they know the true bad teams can’t get into the top 4 in the next draft.

Yep. Every time they fiddle with things it just has unintended consequences by making things worse.

The solution to stop tanking is to make it so the teams that lose the most are guaranteed the best prize? What the fuck are you thinking

RIP small market teams