I think pick protections quietly fuel tanking more than people admit. It is not just about chasing a top pick, it is about avoiding losing one. If you either own the pick or you do not, the incentives are way clearer.

Why does everyone suddenly pretend to care what teams like the Jazz and Wizards do? I agree with the sentiment regarding pick protection but let’s not act like more people would be watching them if they were organically very bad instead of artificially terrible

The NBA needs to solve the financial fraud by Steve Ballmer, the Clippers front office, & Kawhi Leonard if they want the integrity of the league to not be fully questioned and only be moderately questioned.

lol the funniest thing about “the league” and Adam Silver is how people act like they don’t work for — and answer to — the owners. The draft system, tanking, and collective bargaining all create incentives that don’t exactly reward winning now. A lot of teams are more focused on long-term assets and financial flexibility than actually spending to compete.

In the history of the league, only a handful of franchises have consistently shown they’re truly all-in on winning. It starts at the top. Y’all have to understand — ownership priorities shape everything.

And the competitive edge people talk about from older NBA eras? A lot of that came from different upbringings and circumstances. Now the system is more structured — AAU circuits, early exposure, money involved from a young age — and that changes the culture.

I’m against removing pick protections because it’d likely decrease player movement, which I and most people enjoy/find interesting. Teams are less likely to trade picks if it is all or nothing and we will therefore see fewer trades being made.

I am not a fan of tanking but why is it the teams that agreed to the protection, are now whining about it?

When the trade was made they knew the protection was there, they agreed to it, they also knew that teams have been tanking for as long as I’ve been alive. They were making a bet that Utah would be further along in their development/competitive plan than they turned out to be. They lost that bet, boohoo. But now OKC, a team that is no stranger to tanking is whining that the Jazz are being meanies that tricksied them, and are acting like they aren’t big boys with big brains getting paid big money who could figure out themselves that this was a possibility. Ridiculous.

No it will not. If you own your own pick, you can still tank.

Grizzlies own their pick. We reserve the right to swap if the conditions are more favorable to us

I don’t mind allowing lower bound pick protections, e.g. 15-30 protected. This protection will slightly motivate teams to try to win.

The problem is just inherent in basketball. Superstars win championships and the worst place you can be is a 7 seed with no superstars. Everyone knows it which is why when there is a loaded draft, everyone is hoping to get a Dybantsa or Peterson and turn into a contender. NBA scouting seems to be far more accurate than most other sports or compared to say football where you have 22 starters. How many QB’s turn into total busts vs. PG’s? Maybe they don’t turn into absolute superstars but the number 1 picks in the NBA that don’t work out are labeled that way before the draft and everyone knows if it is a strong draft or a weak draft.

I think it’d be okay to have it lottery protected. I don’t think it encourages much tanking that way. Having a top 4 or top 8 protected really encourages tanking so that you guarantee a lower seed. At just top 14 - you don’t have to tank per se cause the band is pretty large

Downvoted for lying in your title.

It’s the only real “Will reduce tanking” solution that makes any sense to me. Pretty much all the others I’ve seen either ruin the “parity” aspect of the draft or are just bad ideas for many reasons.

Without protections you’d still get a few teams every year tanking, and a few more in stacked draft years, but a lot of it would be reduced. Utah wouldn’t be tanking because they desperately wanted pick 6 over pick 9. They’re tanking because they want a pick vs no pick at all.

This is honestly the single biggest factor. People want these hyper complex solutions while a team is looking at their season thinking “if we don’t pick in the top 6 we lose our pick, we better be fucking terrible this year.” All of the most egregious tanking is to protect a protected pick or to get a generational talent. Nobody except the Hinke sixers are embarrassinging themselves to pick 3rd instead of 5th in a weak draft. It’s either Wemby or a pick protection, that’s it.

This is what I was thinking. Pick protections incentivise tanking. Picks should be picks, their value should be a known quantity during the trade, and they should be static in value so future team performance is not relevant. I think the reason the NBA hasn’t done it is that the unknown value of picks can make them disproportionately valued and thus they can fuel the blockbuster trades we sees that the NBA loves so much

Yes, Zach Lowe also brought up this point. Much of this tanking is driven by pick protections because something like a top 10 protected pick would obviously result in the 11th pick translating to nothing, so teams are heavily driven to try to be bad, because even getting the 10th pick is much better than getting absolutely nothing at all. So once the New Year rolls around, it becomes a race to the bottom for teams in the 7th seed or below.

Morey really is responsible for ushering in this horrible new level of tanking with what he did in the 2024-25 76ers after their rough start. Even with Embiid injured, you could tell the 76ers were tanking like mad to keep their top 6 protected pick, like having good players rest a lot, particularly Maxey.

I actually think top 4 pick protection should not be permitted. The only protection options should be a top 2 or lottery protected. Otherwise the pick is unprotected. Rather than the teams desperately trying to hold on to their asset, they will view it as a sunk cost and instead try to start building a team or try to win.

IMO, in the long term, is to have a points-based marketplace for the draft. Every year, the worst team gets 20 points, 2nd gets 18, 3rd gets 15, etc, until all playoff teams get 4 points. Teams can roll their points forward up to a decade. Every playoff round win gets 2 points, with the championship giving 3 points.

Draft positions can then be bid upon by teams using points. So in very weak draft years, the max bid may be very low, maybe only 6 points. In good draft years, the top pick may be worth 40-60 points. After the bidding, then the remaining picks (out of 30) are dealt out to teams that have not bid for 2 points, thus discouraging blatant hording.

This will help incentivize prudent long-term management and also eliminate insane tankathons when generational prospects are available. After all, you can only tank so much if a team could easily outbid you. Points can be traded but a team can never lose the opportunity to draft, which also eliminates strange situations like OKC having 20 first rounders

Eliminate pick protections, abolish the stepien rule and allow teams to trade all their firsts if they really desire, abolish pick swaps in the process, abolish swaps on swaps (obviously,) allow draft day trades to be made instantly so the teams drafting the player is clear, don’t allow teams to fall within the top 5 of the draft in consecutive years.

This whole tanking conversation the last couple weeks is already tired. Silver needs to roll back the flattening of the odds. Teams finishing 5th and better shouldn’t be having a real good shot at getting a top pick. There will always be a few bad teams. All his solution did was expand that pool of bad teams 

I’m glad you’re being honest.

Honestly I don’t think that would help almost at all. In some circumstances sure, but Utah isn’t making the playoffs if they tried anyway. Dallas the other year 100% did what you’re saying though to keep the pick. It helps but I don’t think it would stop what’s wrong so not really a high end result.

r/nbadiscussions

The pelicans and bucks would be tank kings if they owned their picks.

had there been pick protections there would not have been Showtime Lakers or the boom in NBA popularity in the 1980’s.

Completely flatten the lottery odds. Keep protections.

This is the biggest issue and something that doesn’t benefit the league at all

It also doesn’t need to be “phased out”

Just make it a rule that no future trades can be done with them. Obviously prior ones are grandfathered in.

Maybe not removing protections, but putting a limit on what protections can be. For example only protecting lottery or top 5, and the rewards off protections r set as well.

Lottery protected if doesn’t convey is automatically a next year first, while top 5 protected if doesn’t convey is either 2 firsts or automatically a first and a second from that next year draft or smth.

That way it allows one year of tanking if ur have a protection but after that ur punished no matter what

Been saying this for years. It makes no sense to add pick protections since all it does is muddy the waters and makes draft picks impossible to follow. Either trade the pick or don’t.

Yea, we all saw the bill simmons clip

This is not really the problem though. The Wizards have zero chance of conveying that pick to the Knicks. They’re tanking to get a better pick. The Jazz are in danger of conveying their pick, but they could also very easily be a play-in team if they were actively trying to win this season. You think they’re tanking to avoid giving up the 13th-15th pick? No. They’re tanking to get a top pick. Pacers were a bottom-feeding team before the Clippers trade (rankings wise we all know the championship core is still there don’t @me Pacers fans). If they don’t trade that pick to the Clippers are they not still equally incentivized to tank to get a better pick?

The only time pick protections really matters is for edge cases like the Mavs two years ago tanking to keep a top-10 protected pick, and even then “tanking” meant sitting guys for like the last two games of the season. Getting rid of pick protections might help, slightly, at the margins, but it ignores the fact that whether your pick is top-8 protected or not you still would rather have a top-8 pick than the 9th pick

Rules will always be worked around to a team’s advantage. If you stop protecting picks, teams will figure out another way to use tanking to their advantage.

I’m not sure how it would work for the NBA, but I like how a European soccer league does things. The worst teams get knocked down to the minors, and the best teams in the minors can move up. That would make teams want to remain competitive because going to the minors would mean a serious loss of revenue. Again, I’m not sure how the NBA would make it work, but there needs to be financial incentives and penalties tied to competitiveness.

Utah just stays on Thunders brain    Didn’t y’all win a chip?? Definition of GREED

Yeah im all in favor of removing protections. You either trade the picks or you don’t . So sick of fine print such as 1-4 protected and 8-12 protected and it conveys to 2nd rounders if it falls under protection yadayadayada. Pick swaps are also lame AF . All these things make it sound like picks have value but they really aren’t worth much when it has to be the third Wednesday of the winter solstice and Orion’s Belt must be pointing above the eastern hemisphere and tinky winky from teletubbies on a cocaine bender for these picks to convey

Solving the tanking “issue” involves getting out of bed with draft kings. Suddenly there is no longer an “issue.”

The one obvious answer. Every year, their will always be a few teams in the race to the bottom. Pick protection’s add a few more and make more games unwatchable.

Completely agree. Pick protections (especially on lottery picks) just HEAVILY incentivize a team to be bad.

What if we just banned pick trading altogether? Force teams to develop their own picks and get rid of stockpiling picks.

1. True fairness would be lottery draft position is ordered by longest time since making the playoffs

2. Traded picks become the draft position of the team that receives the pick

Why is “issue” in scare quotes?

Even if you ban such protections, teams will continue to tank.

Stupid solution.

1000% agree. Either trade the pick or don’t trade it.

All these proposals just skirt around the issue that the league fundamentally incentivises losing. In a sport where individual players have outsized impact you’re gonna see tanking.

Americans love their draft, so there’s no doing away with that.

So either you flatten the odds for all teams (my preference), or you punish teams for losing, especially for continuing to lose over multiple years.

True lottery system. Your record and everything else don’t matter. Treat it like powerball. Your team pops out, there’s your pick position, move on. Tanking benefits nobody.

I think this will barely move the needle. 

I also think the NBA has no intention to do much about tanking and redditors are becoming confused about how the NBA perceives tanking. 

Just phase out any protection and let every team get equal lottery chances.

Yes it’s not fair. So what? I prefer a contender to get No.1 pick once every years instead of multiple teams tanking EVERY year.

Or make the rules so that if you protect a pick, the protections fall off with each successive year.

In other words, want to tank to keep your pick this year? Great. But now next year that pick becomes unprotected.