Yep, every tanking “solution” comes with its own set of pitfalls, just like the last tanking “solution”

I just don’t understand why any team who may see themselves going through a rebuild ever would sign up for any of this. You’re just screwing your future selves.

Only old heads like me remember why we have odds so heavily weighted to the bottom.

Because Orlando who got a generational gift with the #1 pick in the Shaq draft, improved massively from a bottom team to a near playoff team, got the #1 pick again.

And everyone said “well that’s not right, let’s make sure a bottom team gets the #1 pick not a team that’s already got a future superstar on it.

Yeah option two could have the best team in the NBA lose in the first round (maybe due to injury or whatever) then come back with Flagg or Wemby or someone like that lol

It’s important to consider what is being incentivized by a system. In this case, giving better teams better lottery odds makes it more appealing for teams to end up 7/8/9/10 in the conference. Having nearly as good of odds as the worst teams means the draft equity will be more randomly distributed, as opposed to giving the worst teams the best picks.

This creates a system where the worst teams don’t getting picks and remain bad for years. That’s what annoys people, multiple years of being bad. The Process 6ers, current Jazz, etc. the one year tank doesn’t bother people much (Pacers).

The reason these changes haven’t worked is we keep giving top picks to already decent teams and the terrible teams struggle to get stars

<David Beckham thank you meme>

Yep so more bottom tier teams have more chances to get screwed over? This is not the way to get more parity across the league but I don’t think the NBA cares though, they prefer to have the bigger market teams in the finals anyway. You think OKC gets good from having draft picks in the teens or later and trying to recruit free agents??? Shittttt don’t anybody want to play in Oklahoma voluntarily.

Adam Silver is a beeyotch

I’m fine with that

Yeah, these ideas all suck. They’re all just variations of the same “change the odds” solution that didn’t work last time.

There is an absolutely unhinged, cult commitment to the current set up. These obviously address things, they’re no more terrible than the current set up, and what about them guarantees that they will make ‘the issue’ (what is ‘the issue’?) worse?

The League could expand/shrink the lottery by one team and it feels like there’d be 1k upvoted comments threatening to self immolate.

That was my thought. Silver talked about aggressive and bold changes, then trots out these mild half-measures that owners will accept even though they’ll just cause huge problems later.

I mean, it would have been so easy to add something like “ winning a top 3 pick in the lottery disqualifies the team from winning the lottery again for X number of years”. That’s something that would actually shift incentives because it gives a downside to winning the lottery, but more owners would fight it, so it’s not even considered.

I agree, they’re not good ideas.

Why not use the process where a team gains draft odds (/lottery balls) for each win they get after they’re officially eliminated from making the playoffs? That way bad teams are still incentivized to try to get wins, while teams like the Jazz and Wizards this season, who have been openly tanking, would not be rewarded for the efforts to lose.

Yeah anything that’s just “we’re changing the distribution of lottery luck” still creates incentives for tanking, they’re just different incentives

Wouldn’t the concept of a win floor for lotto odds - say at 30 games - solve a good portion of the current issue?

Every proposal seems to not take into consideration that some teams just actually suck. Like I genuinely don’t get how you look at a team like the Kings rn and go “we should make it incredibly difficult for them to get the first overall pick”

Every draft change proposal is the most braindead, made by an MBA grad bullshit I’ve ever seen. Adam Silver is so lucky that Donald Sterling was a dumbass racist because since he’s been commissioner, banning him was the only good thing he’s done

And putting more teams in the lottery should help too…

Did you notice that it would take the lottery into the playoffs? Flirting with throwing a playoff series lol

They’re almost definitely going to overcorrect. If you start punishing teams for being bad, somebody will get caught in a death spiral. If you flatten odds too much, some team is going to get a crazy windfall.

Yeah given how things have gone since 2013 I’m more inclined to think that flattening the odds will result in more tanking, not less tanking. I am curious to see how a 22-team lottery field could affect that, though.

it’s not about having fewer teams tanking, it’s about having less reward for losing.

Flattening the odds is the main change that brought about the current problem that everyone is crying about (30-40% of the league tanking) so why don’t we just continue to flatten them so now 22 teams in the league have an active incentive to tank. This will fix everything!

^^But ^^what ^^about…

I SAID IT WILL FIX EVERYTHING!

I think the larger issue in the current system is that a bad team is guaranteed a top pick even if they get unlucky in the lottery. If a playoff team decides to throw their last game to get into the lottery or whatever, so be it, but the larger issue is teams tanking the entire season. Finishing with the worst record in the league and having a very realistic chance of falling out of the top 8 or whatever and a possible chance of falling out of the lottery entirely would probably improve things at least to some extent IMO.

If the goal is to make as much money as possible at the expense of everything else Adam Silver is great at his job

My guess is that if multiple teams fall below the minimum win threshold they would be treated as if their record was the “minimum.”

For example: Team A is 12-70, Team B is 22-60, Min Win 25

Team A and Team B would be treated as if they hit 25 wins and slotted into the draft odds accordingly

As for #2, say the “floor” is 25 wins as they used in the example, the fewest “wins” a team could have in regards to lottery is 25. So if one team only wins 18 games and another team wins 21 games, they both would have their win totals artificially inflated to 25 in the lottery standings.

Of everything they’ve suggested, this one makes the most sense. In fact, I think they could leave everything else the way it is and move that floor up to 35 games.

I think organically bad teams, like the Kings this year who didn’t start the season trying to tank, would naturally be on pace to win 35 or fewer games, so they would have no incentive to sit players and try to lose games on purpose.

And then all the teams with 35 or fewer wins get same lottery odds. Gives all the “bad” teams equal opportunity without having to do tank wars after all- start break.

There’d be some funny business by teams trying to get under the 36 wins at the end, but overall, the amount of tanking games the last few months of the season would be substantially lower.

I think what those mean is:

• For 2), for the purposes of calculating lottery odds, each team is calculated to have at minimum 25 wins in a season. So if they have less than that, their number gets pumped up for the lottery. For example, last year the Jazz/Wizards/Hornets/Pelicans/76ers would all have their win totals bumped up to 25 for the lottery.
• For 3), you’d have a lottery for the top 5 picks, which every bottom 5 team gets equal odds for. After that, you’d have a separate lottery for the remaining lottery picks. If any of the bottom 5 teams fell outside the top 5, they would be guaranteed at worst the 10th pick

Conjecture on my part but my understanding:
Slotted to meet the floor = if you get less than 25 wins in a season, in this calculation they will count it as if you did have 25. So no team can be below 50 total over a 2-year period. It should discourage absurd levels of tanking
Sorted into a separate drawing - Every team that doesn’t have a top5 pick will be put into a drawing with some pre-determined odds and draft order will be based upon this “sub-lottery”

Since I’m not a crazy person I don’t believe in the NBA draft conspiracies, but you’ve made a good point. The minute that happens, people are going to go crazy with the conspiracy theories.

The sports betting and foul baiting/flopping problems are infinitely more pressing than this and yet this is what the league is focusing on

Did not want the Mavs to win that lottery for obvious reasons, but I have not problem with a franchise like the Mavs—which usually tries to win games—winning the lottery over the obvious tankers.

It’s also the worst kind of tanking imo. Teams that could be decent and start out the year decent, but the have to overcorrect for early wins by egregiously tanking in the 2nd half of the season. Utah is the prime example of this.

I’d keep top 1 and top 14 protections as options.

I’d keep the lottery odds as they are, but start taking away lottery combinations from individual teams based on games missed and giving them to teams that don’t have many missed games. Then some independent person at the league office could adjust that number based on what happens in games. For example, if Utah sits their 3 best players in the 4th quarter clearly with the intent to lose, that person could add another missed game or 2. This incentivizes playing and disincentivizes not playing.

Seems like tanking would happen in the first round now 

The problem with just removing protections is it wouldn’t go into effect until like 2030 bc of all the outgoing picks already traded.

I’m ok with top three and lottery protected, I understand teams can still tank, but it allows for more trades which is a fair trade off to me.

no you still want to be top four Bad so you lose on purpose.

i think it will have unintended consequences. Lets say the Nets, Wizards and Bulls get the top 3 picks this year. If i’m a mediocre team next season, i know that essentially 3 bad teams can’t win the lottery so that improves my odds if i intentionally tank.

If a team hits in a shitty draft and the next year’s draft is generational that puts them in a pretty bad spot

I don’t know how many teams will even be affected by this though. Going through the teams which recently got good after tanking : Spurs picked 1,4 & 2

Rockets picked 2,3 & 4 so they’d be slightly affected I guess

Okc picked 6, 2 & 10

Detroit picked 1, 5 ,5 and 5

Charlotte picked 2, 6 & 4

I don’t really think that works, though - in general the problem with tanking is that teams obscure their overall quality to maximise their odds of getting higher picks. But draft classes are inherently really variable, so the incentive to tank can differ pretty drastically. Stopping teams from getting consecutive picks doesn’t really stop the incentive to tank on those loaded draft classes, especially for teams which have temporary setbacks such as stars being out for the season. It feels like a proposal which keeps bad teams bad for longer without actually doing anything about spikes of tanking

Why tho

I dislike that, and not because the Spurs benefitted from no restrictions to that end (I do think it’s wildly unfair and dumb that we got Harper, even if I’m obviously okay with it).

Imagine if the Hawks were actually bad the year they won Risacher (yes I know they were mid, but it’s the easiest example to point to); it’d be pretty wildly unfair for a team to get banned from getting a top pick in the lottery the next year because they won the lottery in a year that was objectively weaker than the years around it.

Winning the Risacher lottery was the equivalent of getting like the 6th pick in 2023 or 2025, a blanket rule like that just makes it unfair to the lottery-winning teams if they win it in a down year.

I agree. And only 1 number 1 pick every 7 years is fair. Too many franchises with no number 1 picks to have all these teams get one every time they suck

Only 1 year would be dumb, since all picks are not close to equal.

So when teams get a top pick in a Risacher draft or even the 3rd pick in an average draft, they can’t pick high the next year either?

Personally, I prefer back to back top 5’s or after winning the lottery you can get a top 7, 2nd pick is pushed to top 5.

Spurs making out like bandits and then no one else can would be so annoying

The solutions posted daily in this sub are just as bad.

Exactly, the more teams that have a realistic chance at a top pick in the lottery, the more teams that will join in on tanking.

If the lottery was literally just for the top 3 worst teams, teams 5-14 wouldn’t even try to tank down. But with the proposed changes, literally the top 18 teams are incentivized to tank games at some point.

The 25 wins one can lead to some fun outcomes. The second a tanking teams hits 25 they will shut down half the team.

Do you know why the lottery was implemented?

The Gold Plan doesn’t solve every problem, but you know what it absolutely does do? It makes watching your team after they are eliminated way more interesting and fun.

I have no clue how giving all the bottom teams equal chance at top pick makes me want to watch my awful team.

Well these are just concepts not fully formed plans. Once they pick a concept they will provide more details on how it works

I agree number 1 is a good option. We could’ve just been bad without Hali this year without resting starters and ruining the fan experience. We would’ve had the same odds as the Wizards, Nets, and Kings without needing to out-tank them. It makes sense to me, but of course, this is Reddit, a place full of supreme businessmen and athletes…

I do agree with what some other guy said though in that pick protections should go away. That + option 1 would be a good start