Congrats OP! This is an idea worth actual consideration. Well done!

I think this is a step in the right direction, but at the same time general (harsh) enforcement of rules on the books would be the way I’d go at this time. 

You just shifted tanking to October-December

Hey - great contribution. I appreciate hearing strategies that different sports/leagues take to the incorporation of new talent (drafting). This is an interesting approach for sure, and I kinda like it, but I wonder if teams will tank earlier in the season so they can get eliminated from playoff contention and then worry less. You could look back at previous years to see when teams typically start getting eliminated and see how it affects the draft order. That might give some useful insight.

Remindme! 2 months

PWHL also only has 8 teams and has been around for 3-4 years 

What if a team just actually sucks? How are they supposed to get better if they can never win games and get good picks?

Doesn’t that just promote tanking earlier in the season to get mathematically eliminated as fast as possible

Seems like a way for bad teams to never get better and stuck in the cellar perpetually, especially in places that don’t attract free agents

Maybe easier to implement in a league with no history, but not sure it could really work in the NBA now.

Especially if you are in a weaker conference and despite not winning games you don’t get eliminated until much later. Your draft points suddenly become reliant on how other teams perform and that will lead to even more imbalance between conferences.

Sounds like it would be great, but I think there could be concern about what if the worst team is so bad that they can never beat teams even after getting eliminated from the playoffs

Like others have said, teams can and will still tank until they’re eliminated. This is marginally better because at least we get to see some competition later in the season.

But what if there were a variation of this where there are a random set of games that qualify for the draft order points rather than accruing after being formally eliminated? That way teams can’t be strategic of when to be shitty and when to turn on the jets. Those games could even be determined at the end of the season. Draft lottery odds would then favor a combination of worst records and draft order points. Still not perfect, but potentially better than the Gold Plan.

I kind of like it, but then I realize no teams have been eliminated from playoffs yet so at this point in season, would make teams tank harder until theyre eliminated before trying to win. 

It might make trade deadline more interesting as teams load up to win post elimination games but again theyd have to be quite behind to be eliminated which wont happen until after trade deadline.

Someone made a video about this and he probably only has like 2k subscribers. Can someone link it

I keep shouting this: the answer is to simply penalize tanking with removal of lottery combinations.

The lottery has 1000 possible combinations. The worst three teams in the draft get 140, the lowest get 5.

If you simply told the Jazz they’d lose 10 combinations as a penalty this would stop immediately. An owners willingness to spend or have bad press wouldn’t change anything.

Obviously there would still be injury shut downs and subtle tanking, but that’s not anything like the same issue as pulling starters in the final quarter.

So all that happens is shit teams who actually need a good pick don’t get it. This also rewards teams who luck into an easy late schedule.

All that needs to happen is we go back to the original lottery rules.

This doesn’t work very well in a league with two conferences. Teams will get eliminated at different rates based on how strong the other teams are in their conference

I actually really like this idea

How about pushing the trade deadline to later. Mid March. This way teams are not trying to tank In Early February. Games are competitive for almost the whole season.

Maybe mathematically eliminated from a top 4 seed or something. Takes too long to mathematically be eliminated from 10th seed for the play-ins.

This seems like it just encourages teams to tank to start the season. A on-the-cusp playoff team could just rest a starter or two for a stretch, then batta-bing batta-boom you get the first pick. Way too easily exploitable.

Get rid of the draft stop rewarding failure

So an anonymous Utah-based team gets mathematically eliminated in a few months and starts playing regular rotations to close the season. How does this solve that?

Next time start by telling us wtf is PWHL

So you’re incentivized to tank early instead of late. Nice

This is perhaps the best suggestion I’ve heard so far. Thanks OP!

That’s pretty brilliant.

So for the NBA would be if you can’t get higher than 11th when it starts because the play-in is still a part of the playoff picture.

Devil’s advocate: Teams will just start tanking earlier to be the first eliminated team, then they will try to win games. Basically moves tanking to the earlier part of the season.

IMO the solution should be stripping picks from teams that are blatantly tanking

I like it! Smart for a new league to take some chances and improve things

Would make for an exciting trade deadline and would eliminate the current practice (pioneered by the Raptors) of trading for a star player at deadline and having them nurse an “injury” for the rest of the season.

Or the strategy of taking a “gap year” while the best player is injured. At least in part. First pioneered by the warriors, although they wasted the pick.

But I think the more direct and obvious strategies are 1) harsher enforcement, impacting draft odds/position and 2) take money away from losing teams (eg. Their share in tax revenue)

What would stop teams from tanking incredibly aggressively the first half of the season, getting eliminated by game 50, then turning it on after that?

I feel like it would make the problem even worse because teams would actively try to get good players, but they’d bench them for ²⁄₃ of the year, then play them when winning started to benefit them. 

I’ve said before, any system that uses losing as any type of reward will always have teams trying to lose. 

In this case, losing early and winning late is the ideal structure, so you’re just going to have teams front loading losses. 

What if you just progressively taxed the bad teams?

I know they’d never do this, but it would actually incentivize not tanking

what if every team starts to get points for wins as soon as the first team is eliminated?

Wouldn’t this push tanking to the start of the season to be eliminated as early as possible to have as many opportunity for points as possible.

Interesting. I think it’d still lead to teams trying to lose early to get eliminated as quickly as possible, but don’t hate this at all

I’ve been advocating for this since the PWHL first rolled it out.

Why don’t we just have a committee who’s a “draft watchdog” and when teams commit offenses that constitute tanking, they accumulate strikes. 3 strikes and you lose your pick. 

We can see when teams are tanking, take away their objective 

As interesting as this, deep down, I don’t think the NBA really wants to get rid of the lottery, because that’s one less ad revenue stream if they can’t do that stupid ESPN special anymore

So all of these “solutions” are either going to keep that in place, or replace it with a new way to make that money back, like that stupid draft order tournament idea that’s been floated around this weekend

What about adding in negative points, like sitting healthy players, hurting the tv ratings, getting taken off national broadcast, etc., to stop people from trying to tank early and build a godly amount of draft points

The only wrinkle is that if you trade a draft pick you’re encouraged to lose.

Are there any NBA teams “mathematically eliminated” right now? Yet tanking already started weeks ago.  

Plus, if a team just sucks, they’re losing out in multiple ways, as they won’t get any wins anyway. 

I think it should just be a flat lottery 1-14. There are 14 balls and that’s it. 

The teams that are in that league-wide 13-17 range might lose some games on purpose to enter the lottery instead of enter the playoffs, but we’ll have to address those problems when they arise. 

And if rat teams want to sit their stars for injury prevention we’re gonna need to enforce the rules already on the books for that. 

Someone suggested this years ago for the nba. Was it Lowe or Simmons maybe?

Lose as much as you can early so you can rack up as many points as possible later.

Bro the PWHL has existed for less time than Chet Holmgren has been in the league. There isn’t enough time to say that they’ve “solved” jack shit

Open the season with a super hard tank then rush to get as many wins as possible without getting back to playoff contention? That sounds too complicated for the casual fan but I would love to see the Kings lose their way out of the top pick lol

I wonder how this works for traded picks. Could create interesting situations if you don’t own your 1st round pick but are also a non-playoff team. You could be tanking to mid-ify your traded pick.

Great contribution OP! I wonder how it would play out with the East and West. If one conference is stronger than the other, a bad team would be eliminated from playoff contention sooner in a good conference than a bad one and start accumulating draft points sooner. Probably doesn’t have a practical impact over time but just a thought I had!

In a recent Bulls game Stacey King offered something similar as a solution I liked. Records for teams in the last 25-30 games of a season. Those that miss the playoffs, but have the most wins in the end period would get the top draft pick and then go backwards from there.

My idea: instead of messing with the draft, create a counter incentive for teams to land on or close to the 15th draft spot (the “purgatory” zone). Maybe some kind of credit that gives those teams extra cap flexibility, or a bigger MLE for the next couple of years. Often those teams are one good free agent signing from being contenders, so they’re getting just what they need.

This will just make teams tank in October/November/December instead

I can just imagine a somewhat decent team tanking from game 1, being the first eliminated, making a decent trade acquisition, and then going on a run and sneaking into the play-in tournament.

Just as other people suggested, they’d just “throw games to get eliminated earlier, and then, start trying, when there’s no chance for a playoff spot.

IMO, the best solution is to have 2 playoffs. One for the championship, and one for the draft. This might also help with the owners agreeing to a reduced regular season.

It’ll be hard to get players to win games just to get a better draft pick

Wouldn’t this really screw over the teams who are right on the periphery of making playoffs but get eliminated in the final week of the season? Like they might have been scrapping for their tournament lives but now they miss the playoffs and get an awful pick because they have no draft order points.

Here’s my solution to tanking: play-in teams get a 6.25% chance, and eliminated teams all have 5%.

I think we need to forget about having a reward system for poor performance from teams and instead look at it from the angle of “where is the best place for that player to go for everyone”

A play in team could use a superstar rookie and probably has a spot for them, and it’s ok if you make a team that is imbalanced, it might even be good for the league to have a juggernaut team every now and then.

This system rewards the best teams with guaranteed playoff spots, the mediocre teams with a good chance at a superstar, and the worst teams with a decent chance at a superstar.

Now the incentive is always to win, and it will make some of those late season matchups between weaker teams pretty exciting

Wouldn’t that incentivize teams to get eliminated from playoffs as fast as possible?

There’s two problems that I can see

• Teams that want to tank are incentivized to lose early as much as possible so that they’re eliminated sooner. You’d see teams sitting their best players in November rather than post ASB

• If there’s still conferences, then teams in the weaker conference(the east) are punished because it’ll take longer for them to be eliminated. This could make the difference between the conferences even worse going forward, as top picks are more likely to go to western teams

It didn’t cure tanking. NHL teams can still tank by becoming mathematically eliminated from the playoffs as quickly as possible, which gives that team the biggest window to accumulate points.

Doesn’t this just move the tanking earlier in the season? For some teams there is a point when they have not been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet, but they have been practically eliminated. Under this system, it makes sense to start tanking at that point to get mathematically eliminated more quickly.

When it comes to acquiring a generational talent that can carry a team deep into the playoffs, teams will do whatever it takes to get the best odds.

You can argue that a lottery system makes tanking worse because it leaves teams tanking for 3-5 years rather than just 1-2.

So the wizards can start and play Trey and AD when eliminated and really make a mockery of the system

Sounds an interesting approach. I wonder if it would still be an issue for teams that don’t tank on purpose but instead they lose just because they made really bad management decisions in the past and are badly managed in general. For them they could be worse because they would not compete during the season and they won’t get nice picks because they can’t win draft order points.

“when they began operations in 2024”

So you mean we have no idea if it worked or not?

My guess is smart owners who wanted to tank would be even more incentivized to do so even earlier in the season. You just move the problem. 

Not a bad idea at all.

This is absolutely worth trying, imho. The sooner the better

If you don’t think you can win, like being in a rebuild, you might tank to get OUT of the playoffs and then put your starters in to win a bunch of games to get first pick? I do like the idea though, just my first thought lmao.

Reading the back and forth in the comments to this, and I think it’s important that everyone realize and accept something:

There is no one simple, singular perfect solution to tanking.

No matter what they do, there are going to be downsides. It’s really not helpful to immediately dismiss any idea the second you think of a single thing wrong with it.

That’s certainly the best solution I’ve seen

I just refuse to believe tanking itself is a problem, do you guys actually yearn the Wizards and Nets fighting tooth and nail for 32 wins, only to lessen their chances of landing their franchise altering star? The way people are talking about this you’d think half the league was tanking.

Stupid idea, but,

what if we took record out of the draft and just put every team into a lottery with equal odds?

I would love for somebody to do the math and apply this strategy to prior years and see how the draft order changes

Maybe reserve a 1st round pick for all star game MVP. Get player some incentive in all star game too

Ok but why are these guys going to fight for a pick that might replace them?

Its been 2 seasons (less than that considering they the first season was short), and the initial draft was so full of talent because it was the start of the league (and also impossible for a team to tank before games have played). It is also still a very small amount of teams with 8 in total as of now. It is was to early to claim that they have fixed anything, you need several years to see how things shake out.

This incentivizes teams to be bad at the beginning of the year which feels shitty, I don’t want to see tanking from the jump haha

Wouldn’t you just have teams rapidly tanking at the start of the season instead?

This makes so much sense, thus why it will never be implemented.

NBA could do the same, but base it on point differential.

For the final 30 games, start counting the goal differentials.

Non-playoff teams with the smallest goal differentials get the highest picks.

This incentivizes teams to keep the score close, even if they lose. So they still need to put out good lineups to make games more entertaining.

My only concern with a system like that is that if you end up with a team that’s just atrocious for one reason or another that struggles to win games under any circumstances, that kind of team would obviously stand to gain the most from a high pick… and still get a lesser one than a team that is serviceable or at least mid development that hit a bad stretch or suffered a critical season ending injury.

For added context, I’m an AZ Cardinals fan. Believe me when I say that supporting a team that is consistently bad and barred from ever getting help in the draft by other teams being better is miserable.

Yes, I started running the numbers using this and weighting losses through the season, going to post this wee. It’s accomplishes two things: ensuring truly bad teams, who can’t win for shit, still get #1, and teams that are not but still apt to tank have an incentive not to. 

TL;DR - losses rated high at start of season, wins weighted higher at end. That total is what determines draft order, no lottery.

This means if a team is neck and neck with another in draft points near the end of the season they are fighting for every win.

Nice suggestion OP. That’s actually a really good system. The only downside is teams getting eliminated early likely wont win much more even if they do try so they might suck longer. However, I do think this will make teams invest harder into player development and scouting.

This whole conversation is backwards.

The discussion shouldn’t be about the draft lottery. It should be about how to incentivize teams and players to compete in games that don’t matter.

The draft can be solved easily. Make it random and you can’t have a top 3 pick more than once every three years. Done.

Now tell me how you get the guys on the Kings to play hard in March. And no, a higher draft pick for the franchise won’t do it.

I like it and have argued for something like this on the sub previously. I think that it’s an improvement on the status quo, as it removes the incentive to build a roster that can’t win this year. It does, however, keep the incentive to lose your first 60 games. You then have an incentive to win the next 22 games, and that’s an improvement on status quo. I just don’t know if it’s possible to create a good structure that sends good picks to bad teams and gives bad team a bigger incentive to winning

Wont this just incentivise teams to tank earlier to ensure they get a headstart to earning points?

Honestly I think tanking is the biggest issue in the league by far. There’a no other sport where close to a ¹⁄₃ of the league is actively trying to lose games halfway through the season. It wreaks the integrety of the entire sport.

I think they should just make the draft odds even for the teams who are not top 6 in the confrence. Playin team has the same chance as the worst team.

That would remove tanking instantly. No one would want to tank out of the 6th spot to risk the play in for a 5.56% chance at the top pick.

The danger is that bad teams would stay bad and miss out of a top pick as “good” teams sneak in. But this ALREADY happens with the current system (Flagg to the Mavs). The CBA and salary cap actually does a decent job at spreading talent so I honestly think this very much the lesser of 2 evils.