[Charania] Adam Silver on tanking: “There is an aspect of team building that is called a genuine rebuild, a rebuild with integrity.” An in-depth breakdown of the new proposed lottery changes:
In the first proposal, sources told Charania, 18 teams – the bottom 10 that miss the play-in tournament, and the eight that qualify for it – all will be part of the draft lottery.
The bottom 10 teams will all have an equal 8% chance of moving up in the lottery, with the remaining 20% of the odds being split among the eight play-in teams in descending order from 11th through 18th.
All 18 spots would be drawn as part of the lottery in that format.
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In the second proposal, sources told Charania, 22 teams – the bottom 10 teams that miss the play-in tournament, the eight that qualify for it and the four playoff teams that lose in the first round – will all be included in the lottery, and will be ranked according to their record across two seasons. The last part, weighting teams by their record across the prior two seasons, is how the WNBA weights its lottery system.
Under that system, each team would need to reach a minimum win total floor in each season, to mitigate the need to lose every game possible. For example, if the minimum floor for an individual season was 20 wins, a team that went 14-68 would be 20-62 for lottery purposes. And if a team wins 40 games one season and 20 games the next season, it would go in as 30 wins for the lottery.
In this system, the top four spots would be drawn as part of the lottery, as is currently.
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The third proposal is a “5 by 5” method, sources told Charania. In this one, the same 18 teams from the first proposal – the bottom 10 that miss the play-in, plus the eight that make it – would be entered into the lottery. The teams with the five worst records would then all have the same odds, with them descending from there, and there would be a lottery drawing for each of the top five picks in the draft.
After those five picks are selected, there would be another lottery drawing for the remaining 13 teams. If any of the teams with the five worst records didn’t land one of those top five spots – like last season, when the teams with the first (the Utah Jazz), second (Washington Wizards) and fourth (New Orleans Pelicans) worst records all moved back to 5th, 6th and 7th, respectively – the lowest they could wind up in the second lottery drawing would be 10th, preventing a bad team from falling too far down the draft board.
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“There is an aspect of team building that is called a genuine rebuild, a rebuild with integrity,” Silver said.
“The problem we’re having these days is it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild.
“There’s such a subtlety to this when incentives don’t match, when we’re now into it with coaches decisions on lineups and when players come in and out of the game, injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other, pain levels of players that my sense is when I say fix now, yes, we need to do something more extreme than we did with those incremental changes the last four times [we’ve made changes].”