All the solutions for tanking always hurt teams that genuinely need to rebuild through the draft. Like some teams are just bad, they aren’t tanking.

I think the best solution should just be what the MLB does, you can’t have a top 3 or 5 or 10 pick in the draft for x amount of years in a row. This is an actual incentive that will basically force teams to become more competitive while still letting them build through the draft.

am I crazy for looking at all three of these and thinking none of them actually incentivize winning they just try to punish teams with the worst records?

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

Lauri, JJJ and Keyonte have been officially ruled out for the next 150 games

Tanking didn’t get bad until you started flattening the odds giving more teams a chsnce. Meanwhile you’re hurting the teams that needs the help. Silver is a dumb ass.

The league seems to be doubling down on the problem, that they caused, in the first place. You used to have really bad teams but they knew they could be bad for 2-3 years, have juiced odds at the top picks and move on. Now, with the flattened odds, you’re just incentivizing teams 5-9 to win less instead of going for the play in. Increasing the pool and flattening the odds is just going to incentivize teams to not chase the playoffs or play in because the team in 13th place in the lotto now thinks it has a legitimate shot at a top pick

The problem we’re having these days is it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild.

This is the crux of the issue. And the problem is that every “anti-tanking” measure simply makes it harder to rebuild. And the problem is that the line between the two is blurred or arguably nonexistent. Because once a team decides to begin an “honest” rebuild, tanking suddenly becomes the #1 strategy to achieve the goal. So it’s more like trying to differentiate between strategic rebuilding vs straight incompetence.

Why don’t organizations copy the Celtics? Get the number 1 seed and the number 1 pick in the draft. Trade the number 1 pick to get more assets and get the best player in the draft? Are they stupid at team building?

Never going to get rid of tanking especially when a star changes a teams outlook significantly. Whatever change they make they’ll be looking to undo a few years later

This type of tanking won’t be happening as bad next year with a way worse draft class, this is such an overreaction to an all time great class coming in

Oh, your team had a bottom five record? Here’s the 10th pick to get you back on your feet.

Genuinely mind blowing how stupid this league is. How does any of this accomplish anything?

the Bulls are so embarrassing, missed their chance to properly tank this season in a loaded draft and now they will be bottom 3 next season in a bad draft and have the new lottery rules in place. Just a terribly ran organization from top to bottom.

It’s hilarious to see how much they magically care about tanking. It’s 100% due to the gambling partners complaining.

They refuse to fix flopping, poor officiating, offensive players getting the carry travel and push off every possession, etc. but yes, the wizards being ass every year is what we need to address.

Did this clown actually say integrity with a straight face.

That’s rich. Every other ad during an NBA game is a gambling advertisement, and he wants to talk about integrity?

Feel like 1 and 3 do nothing for you if your team is just ass.

1 is just continued flattening of odds, so now you could have the worst record in the league and still drop far in the lottery.

3 is just more of the same except the guarantee if you have a top 5 record you can’t pick outside of 10th. Which, being ass and having a terrible record with a small market team and falling to 10th in the draft, ensures you continue to be ass.

HAHAHAHAH

Called it yesterday, new structure incentivizes more mid range teams to tank while punishing bottom teams that actually need the top picks to rebuild.

When will the NBA finally take its medicine and admit the lottery was a mistake?

All of these are stupid, but I hate the 2nd proposal the least I guess.

Good to know they’re trying to do something, unfortunately the teams that are just bad will suffer from, due to their team peers abusing the current system, which was also just changed recently, but still isn’t “working.”

I like the second proposal, a combo of weighing teams by their two year record and a record floor seems like it could work. Plus like with a rebuild you want your team naturally to go from losing to making the playin or playoffs and this still gives you some lottery weight for doing it the right way. 

Hopefully for this system since it’s 22 teams involved it’s not very flat odds, don’t wanna see too many teams jump up

None of those work. Not to mention there’s a difference between tanking and “we just don’t care. the season is long. we are out of the playoffs.”

Fuck it, just do a lottery for all 30 teams every year regardless of record.

He didn’t give a shit when the spurs tanked to get where they are now.

Or just rotate the 32 teams from 1 to 32, and let them pick in that order.

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.

Ooh I like this. This can discourage totally blowing up the team also since you don’t get an advantage over a team that is really bad but not deliberately trying to go 0-82.

Flattening the odds seems to be the issue, so flatting them further probably won’t help.

Without the lottery, you’d have maybe a few teams tanking. With flattened odds, any team that’s doesn’t believe they have a shot at the championship is incentivized to lose as many games as possible

Flattening the odds keeps making it worse. 

The truly bad teams lack talent and they’re bad end-to-end during the season. 

You can’t finesse your way to the bottom three if you started the season with the goal of actually winning. 

I don’t know why the season after the dumbest team in the league traded an MVP player and lucked into a number one pick that we decided tanking was bad. 

I lost respect when they brought fans bases into it. Tanking fanbase understand the mission. No pacer fan is pissed that the team isn’t winning games, I can tell you that. 

Plus, with SA, OKC, and DET at the top of there division, this just looks stupid af to be complaining about 

I just cannot comprehend caring this much about tanking. It’s just an inherent quality in a sport where the top pick is so much more astronomically valuable than even the second overall pick.

The reason the NFL doesn’t have a tanking issue is that you can get a franchise-altering player sometimes as deep as the middle of the first round, and pretty much always within the top 5-8 picks.

In the NBA it’s pretty often just the top guy or top couple guys that can change your future.

The league is focusing on the wrong thing with tanking. The biggest issues with the league are (1) the players don’t give a shit for half the year because half the teams make the playoffs and (2) foul baiting makes the game less entertaining to watch.

This just changes how teams will tank lol. If you can get a generational talent like Wemby then it’s going to be worth it in the long run plus I doubt fans will be happy about overpaying average to above average players to be a mid team.

The second the Lakers lose in the first round and get 1.1 this is all getting blown up

This over the top effort to fix tanking is so dumb. This is the playing field that has been created, teams just don’t have a ton of options to get better. Things are NOT equal in the NBA and you have to allow the teams that don’t benefit from other things to have a chance

You have destination teams where everyone wants to be, you have teams that have minimal taxes then you have teams in other countries and teams that tax you through the roof. There just cannot be such significant differences. This is not an even playing field so you cant expect to hold everyone to the same standard. 

Teams in small markets that are not considered destination cities need to be able to help themselves

I think the second proposal has legs. I like the win floor and averaging win/loss over two seasons. I like the idea of expanding lottery eligible teams to the losers of the 1st round only to place them by record.

The only issue I see is the flattening of the lottery odds. The second choice seems best with the 5x5 idea from the next proposal. The 5 worst teams are in their own lottery for the top 5 picks. The 6th-10th worst teams are in a lottery for picks 6-10, etc. do this all the way to 22 and I think that’s a pretty good system.

Sounds like a great way to have the 5th and 6th seeds tank to get into the 7th and 8th spot (because no team below the 3 seed has ever won a title). so you’d still get your shot at the playoffs, but also a shot at the top pick. All while hurting the teams at the bottom who actually need the help.

It really stinks to not know how to fix this problem while simultaneously knowing that this definitely is not the fix.

I always point to the problem of the players not wanting to sign with the majority of the teams in the league in free agency. In the NFL it feels like cap space is the primary thing that dictates where a player wants to go, which is how it should be. But I get it, I probably wouldn’t want to sign with the Hawks, Pelicans, Grizzlies, Blazers, Kings, Wizards, or Hornets either if I could play in Miami or LA.

I dont think its a draft problem; its a player contract issue with larger markets offering more than what smaller franchises can. “Integrity” is complete horseshit. Get rid of the gambling sponsors and throw in a hard cap then if youre going to throw around that word. The players are doing exactly what it takes to maximize their salary from college right until retirement

These are all stupid. The lottery doesn’t work. All it does is make it harder for bad teams to get better. All these proposals would multiply that problem several-fold. Fans are ok with their team being bad for a year or two and then getting a guy and being good again. When you make it impossible to rebuild and the team is bad forever then you lose them.

The teams that just barely missed the playoffs should have the best lottery odds and then descending odds by overall record

It seems easy to me, what am I missing

At least they’re trying something new

“Ethical” rebuilding

Just get rid of the draft. All newcomers into the league are unrestricted free agents with the ability to go anywhere they choose provided that the team is willing to pay. The current salary cap for teams should already handle any concern of just all the best young talent going to only a few select popular teams.

Or, they could get rid of the lottery altogether. The lottery brings attention, so they won’t do away with that. If they’re worried about teams constantly tanking in that system, they could implement a rule that a team can’t have top 4 picks in consecutive years. They could also do away with protected picks, which might help with some of the tanking.

I think the biggest factor in tanking this year, though, is that the draft is supposed to be loaded at the top end. I don’t think you’ll see this level of tanking next season.

Don’t talk about integrity Adam, do something for the integrity of the game and fire Scott Foster.

Might as well get rid of the draft at that point. The purpose of a draft ideally is to create balance in the league by allowing bad teams to get better players.

The PWHL has the best system to prevent tanking

At first blush this seems like all proposals make it worse.

As a Kings fan, I would like bad contracts to help us move up in the draft.

The wizards legitimately chose NOT tank during the tank for Wemby year. They don’t deserve to be punished. Or… wait actually ya maybe they do.

Silver is a clown. If they actually cared about the product they would reduce the number of games. Everything else they do is just smoke and mirrors hypocrisy

Loving the NBA is learning that unless you’re in a major market, you need your team to get stupid lucky. Using my flair as an example, there was one magical run that got derailed and it hasn’t been close ever since. Winning the lottery doesn’t mean much if it’s a cruddy year. And you will inevitably have to trade picks for help and/or overpay for mid-tier stars to keep butts in seats because let’s face it, no superstar is coming to sign in free agency.

How about a simple fix… A team’s standing at the end of the season affects draft odds 4 years into the future as opposed to the upcoming draft. This will still ensure bad teams have a chance to draft top talent, while also dissuading teams from blatantly tanking. Since teams will have no idea on the quality of the top prospects 4 years into the future, it makes no sense for teams to explicitly tank.

There are some nice side benefits to this as well, incoming prospects will know years in advance which team they are likely to go to, teams will also have an opportunity to observe and plan for in coming prospects so they can build meaningful teams. They will not be in a situation like say Dallas or Cleveland who got good immediately after drafting Luka and Lebron and thus could not put together draft talent around them.

Just add a negative amplifier to the draft odds based on player availability and salary of missed games.

Team A only wins 20 games but they had an average of 30% of their team salary not play per game due to injury/rest/tanking

Team B only won 22 games but they still played their best guys every game they were available and only had 10% of their team salary not play per game

Team As rank in the tanking standing is treated as a 26 win team and team B is treaded as a 24.2 win team.

Throw in an extra constant to decide how drastically missed games affect tank standings (wins + wins x(bench salary % x modifier)) and we got ourselves a penalty for tanking.

Ethical tanking.

“A rebuild with integrity” means signing and trading for players to create a core you think can win games and improve. Just because you have a young core doesn’t mean it was developed with integrity

“A rebuild with integrity” The Pistons got the 5th pick how many times, Adam?

At this point just make it an auction draft where the shit teams should in theory have the most cap space.

Why not have a 25-win floor and each win below that marginally reduces odds? Sorry, if your roster and coaching sucks and can’t get a measly 25 wins, maybe that should be treated as an indictment on your franchise rather than some master team-building plan.

Adam, the Kings continue to play DeRozan 30 plus minutes a night hoping to win meaningless games in March. The very definition of a rebuild with integrity. Please reward us with the number 1 pick. 

Sponsored by DraftKings

Second proposal makes the most sense to me, the other two still do too much to incentivize losing.

With proposal one in particular, you’ll see a lot of teams do what the mavericks did to get Dereck Lively… tank to intentionally miss the play in/ play offs

And then Dallas gets Flagg cause nothing matters

The fact that teams and fans genuinely think they’re entitled to the best players ever year just for being dogshit is honestly hilarious. I hope Adam gets rid of the draft or makes everyone have equal odds from 1-30. The tears of the tanking fans when they’re the ones who pushed it this far will be delicious

Ethical Rebuild

Just make it so that a team can’t abuse that system as opposed to hurting their chances to benefit.

There are teams that just suck that bad and because of the lottery system, don’t have a means to improve.

All that needs to happen is to create a system that doesn’t encourage losing long term. MLB has a system like that now that prevents a team from just getting 1OA every year. Do something similar in basketball

Let’s just go back to rigged lotteries and call it a day. 

None of these work, because it’s not enough to disincentivize losing.

You have to incentivize winning, even with the lower tier teams.

Let tanking exist but kill the incentive that is making multiple teams want to tank when otherwise they might make the playoffs with their talent. Remove pick protections entirely.

Additionally limit how many top four picks you can get in a 4 year span.

Finally, create additional cap exceptions that teams who have failed to make the playoffs multiple times but are meeting other financial benchmarks can use to sign better free agents, so that tanking for rookie talent and then waiting 3 years for the rookies to be decent NBA players is not the sole means of team building.

The point of the draft is so the bad teams don’t stay bad. So by structure teams will be rewarded for tanking. None of what is proposed changes that.

All these chutes and ladders they implement are dumb. I made a proposal to allow teams money to spend on amateur players, up to two or three a year. Send them to the G League, which now becomes a true developmental league. This is globally. So it doesn’t kill of NCAA and it forces teams to really scour the globe to find guys like Dabone. You still have a draft but most blue chip prospects are in an NBA system.

That way a team’s fate is dependent mostly on scouting and development rather than dumb luck of the draw. It’s such a dumb system.

There are 2 different systems that could easily fix tanking, and it’s not those that the NBA consider.

It’s possible to even combine those 2 systems.

(1) Make the top 3 picks allotted on a 30 year basis to every team, not in a pre-ordained cycle, but with a randomized fonction that makes it so that your chances to get the pick you’re allotted when your team has been bad for 2 or more consecutive years rise, while your picks are basically “on hold” until you miss the playoffs for a second time in a row.

Removing the top 3 picks from the lottery seriously reduces the appeal to tank. Having a privileged access to high picks would still be a major advantage in terms of team building.

When the 30 year cycle nears its end, the few teams that have still picks to be allocated could be “targeted” by future prospects. To prevent that, the next cycle can start while there are still 2-3 picks to be allocated, while capping the odds to receive the due pick at 33-50% No player will waste a year in college or overseas only to improve odds of going to a certain team from 25-33% chances to 33-50%.

You could probably tweak the system so instead of it being top 3 picks allocated, it’d be tier 1/ tier 2/ tier 3picks, and teams would chose ahead of the draft what tiers are those pick. One draft could have 2 tier 1 picks, 1 tier 2 and 2 tier 3, for a total of 5 pre-allocated picks. And the next draft only 1 tier 2 pick.

With this tweak, you could probably reduce it to having 60 picks/30 years (instead of 90) being pre-allocated, and no team would tank for a CHANCE at a player that’s projected to be the 61st best of his generation.

(2) Change the lottery system to a point system, where points are used to bid for a certain pick in the draft.
Teams get awarded draft points based on their position in the rankings :
Champion : 15
Finalist : 16
#3-4 : 18
#5-8 : 22
#9-16 : 30
17 : 32
18 : 34
[…]
30 : 58

You can accumulate as many points as you have been allocated in the past 3 years, with a max of 100 points (so a team that has been 17th for 3 years in a row can’t have more than 96 points, even if they wish to acquire more via trade). If two teams use the same amount of points to get a pick, they get to raise their bid. If neither do (or can’t, if they use up all of their 100 points on a generational talent), the pick is randomly attributed to one of the bidders.

In this system, don’t get to trade picks, you get to trade draft points. You can trade as many of the current draft points you have (provided your trading partners are eligible to receive your draft points in the first place), but you don’t get to trade more than 15 future draft points per year (the minimum you’re guaranteed to be allocated even if you’re champion).

I am all for expanding the league into Seattle and Vegas (especially Seattle) but it’s also ironic that expanding will also just further dilute the average skill level of an NBA team and that will most likely make tanking even more prevalent

This is fuckin crazy

Adam Silver and the NBA want a bunch of mediocre 40-ish win teams that are “trying” to win.

That is the dream for them.

I feel like people miss the point. They don’t give a shit if Washington or Sacramento ever get out of purgatory. They just want them just not bad enough that casual fans and sponsors aren’t turned off.

Bro, just remove the lottery completely. Convert all picks into Rookie Signing Rights, make teams having to put Rookie under a Salary Limit tied to their remaining Cap Space + X and have uncapped Rookie Contracts. Rewards good squad building and player development staff. And if a top Rookie wants to take a massive paycut to join a contender for 5 years, so be it. Incentivizes small markets to develop players and build winning teams properly instead of just sucking for decades in hope to land a top prospect, who eventually leaves anyways bcs their franchise is lead by dumbasses.

Adam silver is such a mouthpiece and is just a wet blanket of actions. All about views and influencers and spectacul but no substance or integrity for the game.

Reduce the revenue share earned by the worst teams, cheap owners would stop tanking real quick

Hahahahaha ain’t no way we’re in the ethical rebuild timeline

The purpose of the lottery is to allow for the worst teams to acquire talent. If we are allowing playoff teams into the lottery (which all of these do), then they should just scrap the lottery.

Give each team a Rookie Salary Cap. All rookies must sign 4 year deals which are fully guaranteed. All rookies on these deals count towards a team’s RSC. The RSC is hard, and there is no emergency relief granted for injury or cutting a player.

Once a player’s rookie deal is over, no matter what happens, that space is cleared from the RSC.

This would prevent the best teams from signing the best rookie talent, and would prevent teams from pulling a spurs (getting Wemby, Castle, and Harper in three straight years) as truly generational talents like Wemby would command most if not all of the RSC.

Why not just do what Baseball does? If you get a top five pick in any given season you are automatically at the end of the lottery next draft. It won’t totally end tanking but it would mean that teams that are bottom feeders every year are going to be given a reason to not bottom out multiple years while giving more of a chance to a higher win team to add talent.

Convinced this is only to appease their new draft kings/kalshi overlords. Pathetic tbh.

Should have regulation to dissuade tanking.

Maybe something like this:

Bottom 2 teams every year automatically get the number 1 and number 2 picks, no lottery.

However if next year they finish idk, bottom 3 then they will get regulated to the g-league for one year. Maybe only have it be possible to regulate one team at a time, with the team coming up for a season being the g-league champion from the year before.

Biggest issue with this is that g-league teams are all related to NBA teams so idk who that conflict of interest would work once they’re actually playing NBA teams.

Maybe it’s the EURO NBA championship team if they ever start that league?

Genuinely asking, but if you’re a bad team at this point who’s sucked for a long time and you see these rules changes, is it hard for anyone else to not feel demoralized and frustrated? It’s like being told that your team is going to remain shit because the fringe teams should be better

What if for the most part your team genuinely sucks

The one thing that is always completely out of place in these discussions is the insinuation that players chose not to play for tanking purposes or load management reasons. Like that “pain levels” comment.

It just doesn’t make sense when talking about uber competitive athletes.

Every single player wants to maximize their playing opportunities and their time on the court. There is no way in hell they get to that level without having an insane drive to compete.

The decision to rest players is almost universally a team decision with maybe a couple of exceptions over the last 10 years but those were usually accompanied with serious injury histories.

This NBA season has made me despise the words “integrity” and “ethical”.

Charlotte rebuilt the right way Adam. Give us the #1 pick.

These statements are being contradicted by the fact that the league implemented a punishing second apron if your team develops players well.

They should rank it by who wins the playin tournament, descending then by best record. Incentivize winning

Bad teams need young talent. Those teams are going to lose games regardless

What you don’t want is a team who is already talented, sitting out players to aquire more young talent

Use the tax aprons. If a team is over the apron their odds of moving up get severely limited or even eliminated. Perhaps thrown to the bottom of the draft order behind teams that are below the tax lines

If you want to take it step further and punish teams who repeatedly pick in the lottery? Create salary holds for rookie extensions that count towards a projected tax bill in the future. Teams get out of that hold if they renounce rights leading up to the extension

Adam Silver talking about integrity while turning a blind eye on Aspiration for more than half a year

I like the 2nd proposal, the 1st and third feel like they bately change a thing other than giving a few playoff teams a slim chance of getting in. Which I guess is good for avoiding end of season ducking the playoffs. But I think the biggest issue is the absolute blatant tanking all season of the worst teams.

The minimum win threshold is a great idea but I think it needs to punish high loss teams a bit more. Make it so a 16 win season counts as 24 wins instead of as 20.

Any team trying should be able to reach or get close to 20 wins. And if they don’t, it’s not like their odds get that much worse unless they were great the year before.

If these were the models and pieces in the new system I would have to use I would choose number 1 with a couple of additions. First min win total of 30 and 2nd I would probably remove the 4 teams that make the playoffs. With 2 new expansion teams that will end up to be 16 teams in the lottery.

I still don’t think this incentivizes winning, but by having a min win total of 30 the tanking won’t really start till very late in the year to stay below 30 wins. We currently have 10 teams below 30 wins and only 2 maybe 3 of those teams will get there.

Overall they could just say 14 lottery teams with even odds and call it a day then add in if your team is found in violation of tanking the league reserves the right to take away your odds an place you 14th

Adam Silver and “ integrity ” should never be in the same sentence unless it’s being noted how little he has. A lecture from Silver about integrity is like a lecture in abstinence from Anthony Edwards

Women’s professional hockey has a really interesting lottery-tank rules. I bet NBA looks at that

Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) utilizes the “Gold Plan” to determine draft order, eliminating the traditional draft tanking incentive. Once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, the points they earn in subsequent games go toward securing the highest draft pick

Adam Silver has to go man. Dude is completely lost.

Maybe they should just award the picks in reverse order. The team with the best record who misses the playoffs gets the first pick

Yes. THAT’S what we need to do to fix the league. Give PLAYOFF teams the first pick in the draft.

The third proposal is a lot better than the other two tbh.

Reverse the order of the lottery. Make it so that it’s still the 14 teams who missed the playoffs are in the lottery. Of those 14 teams, give the teams with the best records the 14% chance at the number 1 pick and the teams at the bottom of the standings the worst odds. Draw 4 picks through the lottery, and order the remaining teams from worst to best. That way, the worst team in the league is most likely to get the 5th pick, so the really bad teams aren’t punished too badly and can still build through the draft to get out from the bottom of the league, but there’s also incentive for teams to win if they want to boost their odds at a top 4 pick.

The counterargument to this is that it might incentivize some teams in the play-in bubble to lose their games for a shot at the first pick, but at 14% odds for the first pick, there’s still an over 50% chance their pick lands outside the top 4, in which case they end up with the 14th pick. I guess there probably would be some teams who would prefer that over being in the playoffs for some reason, but even then, there would be far less actual tanking going on than what there is now, because to even be in that position you have to be competitive and winning games for the majority of the season. The teams at the bottom of the league would still suck and lose a lot of games but they would no longer be losing games on purpose