I like this idea a lot.

But when does the cut off end? 5th pick and on, you roll over all your tickets? Or is 5th pick less Tickets rolled over than the 6th pick etc etc?

Like is pick 7 the same as pick 13?

Too many fans don’t realize two things:

1. The original point of giving the worst teams the highest pick (then changed to best odds of highest pick) was to help bring them back to relevance. This is too exploitable for tanking, but a less-exploitable version should be in place.

2. If all non-playoff teams get the same lotto odds, you incentivize low-end playoff teams to tank into the lotto. All lotto teams would have a 7.1% chance of winning the top pick, and a 21.4% chance to get a top 3, both of which are remarkably better than for a typical 8 seed to win the title. So now you changed who tanks, and it’s arguably worse for above .500 teams to throw games than bad teams who were going to lose 50+ games anyway.

Am I the only one who just doesn’t give a shit if 5 teams tank their asses off each year? Like I’m not spending my free time watching Utah or the wizards.

Edit: Go look at the league for a second. The Jazz, Wizards, Pacers and Nets are the true “tanking” teams. 

The pelicans, kings, mavericks, grizzles, bulls and bucks are mid to bad teams that actually tried to be somewhat competent. Is that really some kind of pandemic level event in terms of tanking?

We really wanna talk about abolishing the draft over that?

This one and the one from that 8 team hockey league seem pretty good. 

People are pooh-poohing all of this but we obviously need a change - Adam Silver said it himself - and I don’t see anyone else offering viable alternatives. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1r5oj0q/the_pwhl_solved_tanking_with_their_innovative/

I like it. I guess the only trouble is what if you get unlucky and lose all your tickets for Anthony Bennett. Then you suck for another five years.

Wait, this is actually great. This exists in a current league somewhere?

Overall I like it, two concerns:

1. Would a team that has a bunch of tickets stashed that’s like 8th in the standings be incentivized to drop down to 9th? A really high chance at a #1 pick might be worth missing out as a bad playoff team, or just being further down in the play-in.

2. Would make trading future picks interesting, I’m not fully sure how it would affect things. But like if a team didn’t have its 2026 1st round pick, but had its 2027 1st rounder, would it be incentivized to be bad for two years to have a really good chance the 2027 pick is a high one?

You’ll be moving the tanking up the standings, though it would be cut down significantly.

There would definitely be teams tanking out of the 8 and 7 spot depending on their circumstances

Am I wrong in thinking this still would not fix tanking?

What’s stoping you from purposely losing games and you keep stocking up on tickets year after year.

So Let’s say you do that an eventually get the first pick one year. You’re good right? Probably not one first round pick probably is not enough. So you want another high pick. So what do you do? The same process you purposely try to miss the playoffs year after year.

Look at it like this

Year 1: miss the playoffs, but you don’t get a high pick.

Year 2: same thing miss the playoffs, still don’t get a high pick but now you have enough tickets to get a high pick next year.

Year 3: you get the high pick, but it’s not enough to make the playoffs

Year 4: same thing as year 1 or two

Year 5: get a high pick agian

Then finally year 6: you make the playoffs.

That’s still 5 years of purposely tanking. Maybe I’m not understanding the system, but I think this makes ranking a lot more clear to do lol. Could be wrong

Wouldn’t this just incentivize tanking around the play in instead of a race for the bottom?

People would still tank.

Add a repeater tax for teams consistently in the bottom 3 or bottom 5 so that owners are incentivized not to tank (or lose out on profits) and I think this could work

What happens if you have are a shit team and get the no1 pick in a bad year (eg risacher). Then you are just fucked still. I don’t think this is as good of a solution as it looks on paper

I don’t hate this, but I still think it doesn’t actually discourage tanking.

If you get increased probability of winning for years of being bad, that sounds like even more reason to adopt the Utah model.

The most elegant solution to me has always been abolishment of any weighted system entirely. Every team outside of the playoffs… Hell include the play-in teams should have equal chance at any of the top pick.

I’d be hard to justify tanking to yourself it your odds of a top pick are only just as good as the team in a dogfight for the 6-seed and ends up falling into the play-in.

All this because two teams lost on purpose lmao

The NBA doesn’t eliminate teams from the playoffs fast enough for this to stop tanking. The Wizards are only 10.5 games back from the last play-in spot even though they have been tanking all season. There are 25-30 games left per team, so they will have spent like 80-90% of the season tanking before they are mathematically eliminated and the losses then become irrelevant.

The only way to stop tanking is to give all of the non-playoff teams the same odds for all of the top 14 picks.

The only way to fix tanking would be completely random odds for all 30 teams and obviously that creates extreme issues for parity

This is the best idea I’ve seen so far.

I think if anything this would just encourage longer periods of tanking?

I feel like this doesn’t reduce tanking, it just changes how teams tank. Instead of tanking for 1 year, you can start sooner to get more tickets in a loaded class.

It’s still a pretty cool concept and think it’s worth trying out.

I got it!

Just have 3 different drafts: World draft, Stars draft, Stripes draft..

To me the best solution is to have all of the teams that miss the playoffs have a chance in the lottery. The first pick goes to the team with the best record that missed the playoffs in inverse order.

This way teams that play hard and are maybe missing one piece have a chance to turn their team around next year.

Teams that play to win the entire year are rewarded. Tanking does nothing as the team with the worst record will get the last lottery pick.

Could this result in teams tanking the play-in games if they didn’t have a good shot making a run? No tickets + losing tickets for making the playoffs might be too punishing. Just don’t give them any more tickets and only decrease ticket count if the team makes the conference finals or something.

Tickets have to not be tradable for this to work but yeah seems aight.

Nah here is the tank killer -

Mix tiered odds with multi year performance and you kill most tanking incentives.

Split teams into 3 groups each season based on record + playoff success. Bottom 10, middle 10, top 10. Give the most lottery odds to bottom tier, some to middle, and a small amount to top. Keep odds fairly flat inside each tier so losing extra games barely helps.

Then add a 3 year performance modifier. Teams that have been bad for years get boosted odds. Teams that just blew up a good roster get reduced odds. That stops the one year intentional collapse strategy.

This pushes teams toward staying competitive long term instead of detonating rosters for one draft. You still help truly bad franchises, but you make fake losing mostly useless. 

It’s a clever idea, but it doesn’t incentivize winning. The tanking would just occur earlier in the season in a race to secure their tickets. After the technical cutoff point, they don’t have any reason to play. They aren’t improving their odds by losing, but they don’t have any incentive to play to win. Any system that rewards losing will be exploited. That’s why I’m more and more interested in demoting teams. There is no point in playing games against Utah, for instance. So if these teams want to tank for lottery tickets and better odds, then let them. Just separate it from the nba season. All the lottery teams would be demoted to the gleague. Their gleague standings would determine their lottery placement or odds. Winning is rewarded. The biggest reward would be earning a place back in the league. Demotion should also affect the organization and the players financially somehow. Maybe something like a 10% contractual pay cut for players and reduced revenue share for organizations. Or inelligibility for all-star participation all nba scoring titles etc. Also, there should be a hard salary cap for the whole league. Something like this would allow the playoff teams to play less games in season, which would hopefully make load management less of an issue. … now I’m thinking the demoted teams should be the participants of the nba cup. That would be a better use of the in season tournament. My Knicks played a whole extra game that meant nothing. What if a key player had gotten injured? Why is their no real reward for the winning team? Let the lesser teams play for the cup.

Do people understand that giving the worst teams the best young players is good for everyone ?

Yeah I’ve seen variations of this system where once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, further wins accumulate some kind of draft currency. I like the carry-over addition.

Honestly I love how the two ‘big problems’ the league is tackling are:

Trying to eliminate pick protections so that who owns what is easier for the average fan to understand

And also

Trying to create the most convoluted draft lottery system ever conceived so that teams won’t tank

COLA sounds like it was created by PhD students, and I don’t mean that in a positive way lol. I think The Process caused a massive over correction by the league when they smoothed out lotto odds. When the 6ers went 10-72 they were one of two teams with less than 20 wins that season. You had 3 teams with less than 20 wins last season. Feels like tanking is more viable than ever because of the smoothed odds.

This is a half-measure that doesn’t really address the bigger issue. Even without the draft lottery as a factor, teams will still sit players for meaningless games after they are eliminated and players have little motivation to try to win games. To me, the way to look at this is to figure out how to make every game matter, even once you are eliminated from the playoffs.

Interesting but won’t teams race to be the first eliminated to get tickets?

How would this prevent teams like Jazz/Washington/Nets etc from changing their behavior

Either find a way to reward winning or do a auction system where the best bids gets the rookie (if youre bad wait till bad contracts are off the books or find a way to get them off)

I think we’ve spent too much time worrying about what terrible teams are doing. The league’s issues have nothing to do with the Wizards not trying to win games in February. Like how many people bitching and moaning about tanking actually wanted to watch the Jazz last week?

This is stupid.

-Mavs fan.

But forreal though, this would really screw over teams that draft a bust at # 1.

Idk this just makes moves the tanking to mid teams late in ref season and playin. Being the 8 seed is not worth losing out on your tickets

I think they should have 3 different lottery systems, and they pick which system they use each season randomly at the end of the season. One is the current system, one rewards best record among eliminated teams, and one is equal odds for all teams, something like that. Teams wouldn’t know which strategy to adopt, because the lottery mechanism would be unknown until the end of the season, but you could still tweak things (like the probability distribution of the methods wouldn’t have to be equal) to get the kind of results that you want over time.

I say eliminate #2. This still has shades of the current system. Which isn’t working.

…Or force habitual lottery teams to be part of the play-in.

Keep the rest though

I like this if only because it makes you more and more likely to actually get a good pick after multiple years of missing the playoffs.

Just get rid of the draft and make rookies free agents subject to the same cap rules as everyone else.

How does this work with traded picks? Becomes pretty convoluted pretty fast I would think.

Can a title winning team get the first pick due to COLA on a trade they made? If they did does that reset the counter for the other team? Feels like a boatload of new unforeseen problems that could pop up with a system like this.

I like this idea a lot. It will make successive years of tanking less effective which is a major problem. I also think something should be done about play in teams jumping in the lottery. SAS and DAL jumping to picks 1 and 2 last year for example shows it’s too easy for fringe play off teams to be selecting that high.

Maybe there’s some merit, but here’s the key flaw:

The NBA playoffs lets in far too many teams. Everyone knows that a 6/7/8 seed is canon fodder in the playoffs. Those teams will still be incentivized to trade decent players away to avoid getting in the playoffs and earn some “tickets”.

The tanking issue is tied directly to having a regular season that’s too long and a playoffs that lets every mediocre team in.

Top picks should go to the teams that regularly are fringe playoff teams but can’t get over the hump, teams that are actually trying to win. We should stop giving top picks to teams that are the worst in the league and are tanking. Let those teams have like the 5-10th picks where there are still plenty of good players available. 

That might have the most potential of any anti tanking plan I’ve read. Well done.

This would probably solve both the clippers potentially giving OKC a crazy pick as well as the Pacers tanking. And maybe the Jazz would’ve had a better pick a few years ago. I like it. 

It’s always hilarious knowing that the vast majority of people here barely watch (if at all) and wouldn’t materially change their viewing habits regardless of how much tanking is reduced. Is there a league with a larger chasm between social media engagement and actual viewership than that of the NBA?

Sounds nice before solving tanking can anyone explain why some teams are good for long time even small market teams and others stink all the time. Putting an effort to not stink means that you might have to pay tax once in a while snd that means that for many owners it’s just cheaper to stink all the time . It doesn’t affect price they will get when they sell.

This doesnt quite get there. Once a team chooses to tank, there’s no incentive to play their stars and risk injury.

There needs to be a penalty for sitting stars.

How bout we just get rid of the perverse incentive structure and give the best teams the top picks? I haven’t seen any evidence that rewarding bad teams for sucking actually results in parity. Poorly managed franchises continue to suck regardless of who they draft and well managed franchises get rewarded for having an occasional bad year or injury situation.

I like this but I wonder if teams would tank to avoid the playoffs. For example, the Bulls have 5,000 tickets, after missing the playoffs for a decade. Do they tank the play-in to keep accumulating tickets instead of getting the 8 seed and getting swept?

The next wrinkles would be could you lose lottery tickets by making playoffs, or do you need to win it all?

Can tickets be traded from team to team? Meaning contenders that might want an asset to a team out of the playoffs can cash-in on their possible unlucky streak when they turn it around

The wheel and and promotion/relegation are the only methods of removing tanking from the game and neither ever be used

Perfect opportunity for a sponsorship bidding war between Coke and Pepsi to in on this too. Smart.

Same number of tickets. 🚨🚔

problem is that it’s then much better to tank to miss the playoffs than to make it. Teams will be incentivized to throw play-in games (because they’ll get slaughtered by 1 seed anyway), to get tickets. This makes for a horrible product in what should be some of the most exciting games.

Important reminder that the root of this problem is that organizations and players are the weakest we’ve seen in the history of the NBA.

What’s the reduction in playoff tickets like? Could a team that sucked for a few years then made a finals run get the #1 overall pick.

I think this can be paired with that other suggestion of having wins after a team has been eliminated actually increase their odds.

The inly problem with step one is that it gives no incentive for winning NOR losing. Once a team is eliminated from the playoffs, they can still rest their star players to avoid injuries in meaningless games. At least there won’t be obvious tanking, but you won’t get top effort or availability from star players.

This means no trading future  picks anymore?

[ Removed by Reddit ]

I think this is a great idea. Are tickets tradeable though?

I like the thought of being able to carry over your odds year to year, but I don’t like even odds for all of the non-lottery teams, and I don’t like it being mandatory usage (See: Anthony Bennett vs. Wemby).

I’d tweak this to keep it so the worst teams by default get the best picks. But I’d issue them “points” based on some metric you want to incentivize (winning after the all-star break, PLAYING YOUR STARTERS, etc.). Teams could use these points, at their discretion, to put their thumb on the scale and improve their draft position. You’d have to work this like an auction. You could even weight the positions so that it takes more points to go from 5th to 3rd than it does to jump from 10th to 8th. This would give more skilled GMs with better scouting departments a small advantage to know when to use points to jump into the high lottery and when to roll them over, and exceptional GMs might save points knowing that a bunch of teams will blow theirs in the 26 draft, which might leave them and only one other team with enough points to jump into the top 2 in 27.

Not that they should do this, but you could also see these used in trades. Giannis is a good example. Instead of completely mortgaging their future picks, a team could have a warchest of points they could include in trade for him without giving up their actual picks. This way the Bucks could essentially guarantee better draft slots for their own picks for a few years.

This is the way!

But how do you trade picks?

I like this but just like the other solution posted yday I think the problem is that teams that want to tank will tank right from the get go to quickly try to get eliminated from playoff contention and then they’ll try. That part feels off to me

So tanking doesn’t help teams.

Yes and no. With nothing to gain by winning, there’s still the issue of teams risking their players’ health, not building up their young/new talent by playing regular season games, etc.

There’s still an incentive, if not to tank, to not play your best players and play hard all the time. I like the carrot part of this system, but it’s missing a stick to keep teams honest.

Remember that the point of getting rid of tanking is to make sure fans get to see good basketball, not simply to avoid rewarding teams for tanking per se.

Seems pretty well thought out. But as always the devil will be in the details.

I like this idea a lot but instead let’s just give the Lakers a lottery pick every year and just call it a day - Adam Silver

Not a bad idea. Never heard this before but initial thoughts are I like it

So this is just the pity system from gacha games

There’s an alternate idea that I can’t figure the downsides of. Take the top 3 picks and make it an equal lottery for the bottom 24 teams.

Then have pick 4+ part of the regular lottery, obviously if you win 1-3 then that’s your 1st round pick consumed.

Teams aren’t tanking hard to get picks 4-10.

Assuming there is no way to do relegation – and I can’t see how that would ever happen – the most important principle to an anti-tanking system is that win/loss record not be used as the basis for awarding picks. 

Why? Because (obviously) it is far too easy to manufactures losses. That’s what tanking is. 

So, unless you throw away the concept that the best picks go to the neediest teams, there needs to be a way of assessing ‘neediness’ that isn’t based on win/loss.

But how?

One potential approach would be to use analytics to evaluate the strength or weakness of a team’s roster. The problem is that nobody would ever agree on which analytic system to use, how to weight it, etc.

And there’s an even easier solution: survey the GMs.

Yes, that’s right. The solution to the perennial tanking problem is to just have the GMs of the league each rank every team from worst to best. Add up those votes and you get a draft order.

I know the objection will be: “But teams will punish their rivals by claiming they are better than they really are!” Of course they will. But that will just cancel out. And in the end, every GM has a strong incentive to make sure to ‘vote’ that the top draft picks go to the worst teams.

And by the way, this method would take into consideration everything, including draft picks held, returning injured players, because GMs look at the true state of other teams, not only their seasonal performance. 

Just make the draft positioning unrelated to regular season seedings. Just put all 30 teams in the lottery machine and draw one by one to determine picks 1-30 and 31-60. By doing this there would be absolutely no reason at all for any team to intentionally lose. This will also stop teams from trading a gazillion picks for a player and will bring back player for player trades.

This seems quite logical, but also waaaaay too complicated for the avg American sports fan to understand. :(

What happens if you miss the playoffs, don’t have a ticket refresh level pick, make the playoffs year two but then miss again in year 3. Do you get your tickets from the original year 1 or did they go away when you made the playoffs? I like the idea in general though!

Completely unnecessary and overly complicated.

-Hawks -Wizards -Jazz -Hornets -Pelicans -Kings -Mavs minimum 

+2 franchises max 

These teams aren’t shit because of the draft. They are shit because the orgs and ownership are bums. 

How does OP’s PhD student-produced draft system account for the Lakers of the league from getting better? Free agents are always going to want to sign in LA, NY, Miami, etc. I prefer a draft system where less popular cities can rely on the draft until they “make it”. So, that means needing to be bad.

It doesn’t matter. The league will just give the pick to its favorites as usual.

At this point just create a Kenpom-like computer metric and assign draft picks based on a full-strength (no injuries) Elo. Now the only way to tank is to tell your best players to intentionally play bad, which they won’t do because it would hurt their value

Yeah the wnba does it well where among all lotto teams they base your lotto% on your last two years, not just your current year.

I can’t believe the current system is still here and teams can tank in the big 26, great idea.