im not gonna lie i think this is a great solution lol

its fun until you dig into it. The Kings would tank so they choose the Wizards. The Wizards would tank so they could choose the Kings. Both GMs would have a gentlemen’s agreement to suck as much as possible the next year.

This is both incredibly stupid and also kinda genius lol

The NBA don’t have a tanking problem. The NBA has a gambling problem. Tanking has been a thing since the 90s, and no one bat an eye until the degenerate gamblers start losing money. Fuck the gamblers, and please keep the tank rolling on.

It baffles me that the general population hasn’t realized that the only way to reduce tanking is to make the worst teams have an easy path to getting competent. The NFL doesn’t have this discourse because everyone knows that the worst teams can have 2 good drafts and become good again.

In the NBA a team like the wizards cam be the worst team in the league for  3 years in a row and have never gotten the number 1 overall pick.

Just make the odds better for the worst teams so they get better picks.

I like the weirdness. It has the side effect of making Toilet Bowl games crazy. If Kings own the Wizards pick, they desperately want to WIN Kings v Wizards.

I actually like tanking.

Wait this is genius. I really want to see this happen now

The best solution to tanking is obviously just to have promotion and regulation. If the bottom 3 teams were dropped to a second division, there would be absolutely zero tanking.

It’s just that it would never happen.

I think you just invented tanking with collusion. What’s stopping a GM picking up a phone and making a back door deal with another team and now we have a pair of teams tanking.

This still doesn’t help actually bad teams get better if you just guess wrong or like someone else mentioned you have 2 teams that pick one another.

Personally, I like locking teams out of ranges for consecutive years.

Let’s say a team is a top 5 pick. The following year they can’t receive another top 5 pick. So they get pushed back 6-10. If you have 2 consecutive top 10 picks, you move to the 11-14 range (11-16 when expansion teams arrive)

This incentivizes teams to win games after receiving a high lottery pick. After 2 years of top 10 picks, there is zero incentive to at least try to make the play-in. If a team is legitimately bad or drafts busts that’s an unfortunate consequence, but it would reset after a pick outside the top 10 and you can get a top 5 pick again.

An example would be like last year the top 5 was Mavs, Spurs, 76ers, Hornets, Jazz.

This year the top 10 is projected to be Pacers, Nets, Wizards, Kings, Jazz (move to 6th), Mavs (bumped to 7th), Grizzlies (jump to 5th), Hawks, Bucks, Bulls.

So in 2 consecutive years, the Jazz and Mavericks can’t pick in the top 10 for 2027, and the Pacers, Nets, Wizards, Kings and Grizzlies can’t pick top 5.

Not a lot of teams left that are allowed to completely bottom out. You’d probably still see some tanking from the Bulls or the Bucks if they trade Giannis, but not many other teams are outright a bottom 5 team besides maybe the Pelicans. And the Bulls and Bucks would have 2 years of top 10 picks which means they’d have to try to win games in 2027-28. Pretty much every other team can simultaneously go for at least the play-in and luck into a top 5 pick, almost no incentive to tank except for a couple teams and it’s only for a single season.

I don’t think it’s a massive issue for a team to be bad 1 year, then try to build a competent, winning team around marketable young players. It’s the multi-year tanking that is gross and turns people off from those teams. Nobody really minds the Pacers are bad for 1 year and should be competitive next year. It’s the stuff like the Jazz, Wizards or what the Rockets and Spurs did to build their teams that makes it a bad product.

hello collusion, my new friend?

What happens when nobody picks the Thunder and so they wind up with their own pick by process of elimination?

Just do the wheel, everything else is just way too gimmicky. Every team goes every pick in the draft over a 30 or 32 year period, it’s fair, it’s balanced and you could even build your teams around it, teams could trade specific picks, fans would get excited waiting for their team’s opportunity to draft top 3 and every team gets a top 3 pick and a top 6 pick every decade essentially

It’s a pipe dream but I’d love it if teams could be relegated to a different lower league like they do in soccer.

It makes games between the worst teams mean something and gives players a reason to fight for their spot in the league

Introduce promotion and relegation

Kosta Medvedovsky, the creator of DARKO, posed the same idea at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last year. Here was his take:

Anti-tanking idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, teams aren’t allowed to use their own draft picks.

That’s it. If you still own your pick when the season starts, it moves to the end of the first round. Nothing else needed.

Bad teams still have a valuable asset. They just have to trade it before the season begins. So hopeless teams (say Kings and Pacers) pair off and swap picks before the season. Both get value back. Neither has any reason to tank in-season. Or your can just trade your pick for players, future assets, etc. Anything you want. You just can’t use your own pick.

Eliminates the incentive to lose without eliminating the mechanism that helps bad teams improve. Clean, elegant, easy to explain.

Note it doesn’t prevent Hinkie-style tanking. Teams can still build terrible rosters on purpose. But it does prevent the Utah Jazz from this year, where you bench your starters in the 4th Q to chase ping pong balls. The latter is more pernicious and more detrimental imo, but I appreciate there is some disagreement on this.

Several years ago, there was a solution that I liked, and it was rotating draft position. Rather than draft position being based on record, it rotated with every teams having a pick in each draft slot over the course of 30 years. Expand it to 32 with expansion, and there it is. You know where you’ll be picking, whether you’re good or bad. No incentive to tank.

You dont need a conspiracy when interests align. I don’t think this would solve it, but it’s a great idea.

But OKC already has everyone’s first round picks.

Doesn’t this not solve the problem at all? I mean two things are still true:

1. The most reliable way to improve your championship prospects in the NBA is through the draft

2. Performing worse increases the likelihood that you will draft higher

It’s more convoluted, sure, but teams will still be incentivized to lose most of the time if they don’t believe their current roster has any chance at a championship. There might be incredibly specific instances where bad teams will attempt to play kingmaker to a rival, but for the most part tanking will look exactly the same. It may be even more reliable than it currently is if they get rid of the lottery.

The problem the NBA has is that top tier talent is so concentrated to a small group of individuals compared to other team sports and as long as that is true you will always have tanking.

You can either impose financial penalties on teams who have a pattern of uncompetitive decision-making (which the owners would be unlikely to adopt) or you can impose playing time restrictions for the players to force the teams to have deeper rosters (which superstars and likely the fans would hate).

The best solution (imo) is to abolish the draft, impose a hard salary cap, and then divide the NBA into an A and a B league (like soccer). Relegate the bottom four teams from A and promote the top four teams from B. This obviously would never happen for a ton of reasons, but it would solve the tanking problem.

Really funny to imagine Adam Silver having to pitch this to the owners

Thank you for all joining me here today, you’re 30 of the richest and most powerful people in the world so I won’t waste your time. We’ve come up with a solution to draft pick manipulation:

The NBA Draft Pick Draft

The free market can solve tanking. No draft whatsoever. All incoming players are free agents and can sign with any team willing to sign them. Small market teams would cry. But there would be no incentive to tank. Every team would be trying to perform their best in order to attract future talent. College already does this.

I love the idea, but bad teams in the second half of the season would still have an incentive to lose games so that they get a higher spot to pick next year’s team.

Eliminate the draft and let the market and salary cap do the rest. The #1 pick goes to whoever can pay the most.

The worst teams would always pick each other and collude to have the worst records guaranteeing the top picks. 

My solution is to give the lottery picks to the play in teams. Bad teams should be incentivized to fight and claw their way to at least make the play ins. The team with the worst record in the league would pick 9th.

Tanking is annihilated immediately and it’s fairly difficult to game the system. A team that’s the 6th seed might try to slide into the play in for a draft pick, but they’d risk missing the playoffs entirely and even so it’s far better than tanking.

All the proposals that think tanking is hard to fix always come down to bad teams still get given something. If you take away that assumption, fixing tanking couldn’t be easier.

Now, we do create a new problem here, in that bad teams might remain bad forever. So you’d want to balance this out somehow. The easiest way to do this would be some sort of salary cap incentive to make it easier for the worst teams in the league to sign competent veterans to hopefully get them up to play in quality. It specifically needs to be an incentive that makes them pay players because if it’s just cash - increased revenue sharing - some owners would be happy to be terrible but cash the checks.

Weird idea: What about using cap space to “bid” on the first pick?

Teams use the cap space to sign the rights to draft first (the money goes towards the cap and is paid into the revenue sharing). You can give ‘bonuses’ to teams with worse records.

Tanking shenanigans fine your pick money.

I liked Bill Simmons’ idea where of the worst 5 (for example, could be a different number) teams say who they want to take with the first pick, and if there are any overlaps, the player gets to choose who he wants to play for. Add the next team, rinse, and repeat for the first 18 picks. 

30 ( or 32) balls in the lottery. Every team has equal chance at #1.