Bulls ownership is going to love this.

So aren’t you going to tank your way out of the play-in to get a better chance at the #1 pick? It removes the incentive at the very bottom, but moves it up to being part of the bottom 10.

I’d rather a mid-team get the number 1 pick then waste talent on the worst-run organizations in the league. It literally encourages teams to be competent rather than complete ass. Isn’t that what we want?

Isnt that the point? The Bulls actually try to win and end up in purgatory while teams losing on purpose get the good players.

That’s a bad idea, yes, but we cannot just dismiss it when it is tied to the actual issue. OKC played the system with the two years of Poku-and-a-bunch-of-janitors lineup for the whole last third of both seasons and so did many other teams (even the Mavs, we allowed Theo Pinson to have permanent green light for a game and a half when we were out of the play-in). Teams will play within the rules of the system and the lotto system is flawed because the race to the bottom can get very ugly very fast (see the Jazz this season).

This is a systematic issue and yet this sub loves to waive it off for whatever reason.

It’ll be disastrous because small-market teams won’t be able to put any talent around the superstar that they finally do manage to draft. Big market teams will snatch up the small-market stars via trade or free agency to pair with their own stars that they luck into via the draft. NBA basically never wants an OKC style dominance to happen again. Which is good to prevent tanking equaling success but horrid for small-market teams.

There are plenty of teams stuck as treadmill teams that could desperately use a top tier talent to push them over the hump.

Ill take that over teams that spend years in the lottery and do nothing

“and the Los Angeles Lakers have won the lottery for the 19th straight season”

Silver likes it because it’ll look less suspicious when he rigs the lottery.

Flat odds for all teams would be fun

What’s wrong with giving mid teams the #1 pick? We all agree that they have no shot at winning anything, right?

It’s great for bulls ownership now they won’t get shit for being a mid team and only caring about revenue.

Most of the “tanking” teams aren’t even that bad though.

The league is in a position where there isn’t that many truly bad teams other than like Brooklyn and Memphis

Also it wasn’t a good look to have 10 teams giving out auto-wins for 3 straight months

Don’t disagree, but it’s probably intended as a bandaid.  The solutions I’ve seen that might actually fix something will need to be part of the next CBA.

Spurs

There desperately need to be safeguards from teams just being eternally bad.

The answer is challenging ownership when teams are shit for ten years straight, but that’s never gonna happen. The lottery rules have changed a bunch and yet it’s still been the same 5-6 teams being shit for 20 years.

Teams can still get better even without the lottery. The nets after having traded all their picks used their team salary to pick up mid first round picks and other good roleplayers from teams in salary dump trades. They experimented with g-leaguers and were able to find 2 pieces and made themselves a playoff team in 2 years after having a 20 win season. Obviously they got KD and Kyrie after and that is in part to being in a big market but it also helped that they weren’t complete garbage when the 2 of them were free agents.

Dont get be started on the Spurs. Their draft luck is MORE than fortunate

as much as getting unlucky is factor, being dumb is a much bigger factor. Hornets drafted Kobe at 13 and traded him draft night for Vlade Divac. They also drafted the soon to be two time MVP at 11 and traded him for Miles Bridges and two seconds. The suns have moved up in the lottery one time in history and used the number one pick on Ayton instead of Luka. Getting lucky in the lottery also not a guarantee of shit. A team like the Lakers hit on the lottery 3x and drafted second three years in a row still ended up coming out of it with DAngelo Russell, Lonzo Ball and Brandon Ingram when it could have been Devin Booker, Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum

Getting high picks that aren’t the number one pick are still good though, and your team should still be able to improve on repeated ~5th picks or so, for example 

You can’t safeguard a team from being eternally bad. There’s only so much the league can do, at the end of the day the onus has to be on the teams ownership to put the right people in charge. This current system hasn’t stopped the hornets and kings from being terrible for the most part of the last 2 decades. Even getting rid of the lottery in general doesn’t help. Look at my raiders or browns or jets in the nfl. Incompetent people will always be incompetent no matter the system. Even a sport like European football where big teams like Manchester United have every advantage to continually be great, they’ve been fucking shit for the last decade+ because of stupid people in charge.

This is exactly what will happen.

We’ll never see a poverty team get the #1 ever again

I mean the law of averages says both will happen. It will for sure increase the odds of a play-in team getting the #1 pick, but the Kings of the world will still get the #1 pick as well - just less frequently. 

And of course the first year a team like the Lakers will get it and everyone will flip out, but you know what we won’t see? The bottom 10 teams trying to tank further. 

I personally like the idea of giving an incentive to the play-in caliber teams while still giving a chance (albeit a smaller one) to the terrible teams. 

I feel like the misalignment here is that people think the NBA should WANT to reward teams for being bad. They want situations like you all are describing, where good teams get better and better, so you get real contenders. They have no reason to want their future superstars stuck on bad teams trying to carry them to relevance. That’s how you end up with situations like AD and Zion in New Orleans for two decades. They want the middle to rise to the top, and the bottom to figure out how to at least get to the middle. For whatever reason, NBA fans LIKE the idea of punishing the teams who have the audacity to try to get to the middle instead of going full tank.

The Mavericks last year would be the new normal

“How can we help the biggest markets stay as good as possible as much as possible”

That’s the only thing that governs any decision the league makes

We were mad that flattening the odds to give 14 teams a chance caused there to be 14 teams tanking. Now we’ll have 18 teams tanking lol

But anti tanking rules have nothing to do with improving parity? They’re to stop tanking.

Got any perfect ideas you would like to share?

it reduces the incentive to tank and reduces the welfare cliff of moving from 11 -> ¹⁰⁄₉ -> ⁸⁄₇

Go check out this year’s standings. There was an 11 game difference between the playin and out in both conferences. Almost every non playin team was tanking to end the year.

What the NBA is trying to kill is teams intentionally trying to lose every game. You just gotta miss the playin.

“what if we made even the good teams try to tank?”

Yeah, he saw how horribly that worked, and he was like, “Yes. Let’s do that, but MORE.”

These anti tanking ideas remind me of when MLS signed Messi and then instantly put all his games behind an additional paywall to watch. Leagues just looking to shoot themselves in the foot instead of trying to actually grow the fan base.

Why tf does anyone deserve the #1 pick

Somehow I think it might be a hot take now but I genuinely think just nixing the lottery altogether makes the most sense no? There will always be tanking unfortunately, but by flattening the odds they’re just incentivizing more teams to tank or keep losing. With no odds to game, sure there will be a race to the bottom but the mid teams won’t be as likely to tank given their odds aren’t heightened

Haven’t we all collectively agreed that being just kind of mid is the worst place to be, because you have no actual shot at winning the title?

So… Why don’t they deserve the number one pick?

Hornets/bobcats had the worst record ever(win percentage) missed out on AD and got MKG. Another bad season get 2nd pick right after Wemby.  Spurs have had 6 top 5 picks ever. Robinson, Elliot, Duncan, Wemby, Castle, Harper. It’s insane to have have hit on every top 5 pick you have ever made. So much of the draft is just luck (obviously Spurs have a great scouting department too) 

Hawks might be one of the best positioned teams in the league to benefit from this. Currently relying on an old mid guy for what will ultimately be a first round playoff exit, and could easily go from like what would’ve been a 0.5% chance to win to an 8% chance to win next year

They just need to switch to a hard cap and get rid of max salaries.

Max salaries mean bad/small market teams have no way of attracting high end talent. Let them buy it if they want. And you need a hard cap to avoid the MLB problem.

Why this is never brought up I don’t know, but it would do more for parity then messing around with the draft lottery.

The problem is when teams are bad they don’t actually attempt to do anything to become better. You’re encouraged to sell off every player older than 25 and sign a bunch of g Leaguers who have no future.

This was always going to be the challenge with lottery reform to curb tanking.

Want teams to not be incentivized by losing? Then there’s going to be more drafts where the top pick goes to a decent team.

I’m not sure if that’s going to change tanking (the last two lottery winners were in the Play-In, and teams still shamelessly tanked), but this seems like Adam Silver telling tanking teams “You guys went too far, now you ruined it for everyone (tanking and genuinely bad teams).”

at some point when do we stop propping up shitty ownership by giving them good lottery odds year after year?

Not to mention that bad teams will have a harder time flipping picks for good players because their odds won’t actually be that better than anyone else’s.

Yeah this basically guarantees a 20 year playoff drought unless we draft another Hali. We’d probably just trade him again though.

Easy. The play-ins should happen if the team has not won at least 40 games.

I agree with pick protections.

Nope dropping from top 6 to ⁷⁄₈ might give you a 1-2% chance at the top pick not an 8% chance. Would the Hawks/Raptors really want to lose a guaranteed playoff spot for a small shot at the lottery?

The new rules would be most beneficial to the teams in the mid lottery not towards the top of the play in. I could see teams tanking from 9th/10th to 11th to get that 8% chance but most years you won’t find teams tanking from top 6 to 11th

That’s a really good point, which is why I think they’re gonna do a tiered odds system for the playin teams, so the 7 seed will only have like a .6% chance of the #1 pick or something. “20% of the remaining odds will be distributed to the other 8 teams”

Even if you are the shitass Raptors this year, I think you are happy with the 5 seed and seeing which of your guys work in a playoff setting vs tanking a few games and messing around in the playin just for a miniscule lottery chance, cause 2 losses in a row would kick you out of the playoffs completely. Shoot they’re tied 2-2 now anyway and has discovered CMB is really that dude, that’s valuable 

Aside from gambling, wanting twams to try to win is important for competitive integrity. Like if you play a “tanking” team in December and get their full effort, and then your division rival plays them in March and gets a free win, thats not really fair. It’s not as big a deal in the NBA as other sports because eveyone makes the playoffs, but it is still a valid reason for the league to care.

Theres no incentive to tank….. But there’s also no lifeline for sucking

Now we have European soccer

You can still tank just as hard because any team that doesn’t move up to top 4 will still have its draft position determined by record, and fifth pick is way better than eighth pick and so on. It’s silly to think that the only reason to tank is for a top three pick when there’s also enormous value gained from losing to draft higher in general