I’ll take that over RIP to the teams in no man’s land. Teams that lack talent but play hard have been getting the shaft for years

There’s more of a tanking problem than a genuinely ass team problem.

It also wildly changes the value of protected picks. You can’t guarantee falling into a particular zone anymore. Even if you’re the worst team, you could fall all the way to 12.

That’s is a stupid argument. Its pro sports, being “genuinely ass” is not an excuse. They are asking them to finish in 27th place not win the championship. The draft is not the only way to get better.

Teams are genuinely ass because from the team building perspective, they are built to be ass. They trade away all the good players. Just look at how OKC built their tanking team after the Westbrook and Paul George era. They are genuinely ass by design, because the current lottery rewards being the worst

Yeah, this is awesome for teams who are good enough to finagle their place in the standings and terrible for teams who can’t win even if they try.

There are no genuinely bad team in professional sports. No need to treat them like grade school kids.

Hey, that’s us!

This seems like a terrible solution lol. I saw so many great proposals to help solve the problem and they go with… this?

These teams shouldn’t have been so disgusting about tanking then. It was fucking shameless

Literally, Silver saw the Spurs were good and the Luka trade was a huge success for the Lakers by gifting them Flagg and decided to close up shop. If you want a crazy statistic since 1985 the Spurs have never moved to a worse pick ever.

Better than ultra weird behavior in the 1-10 range.

Yeah, they’re just shifting the problem up in the rankings. Bottom feeders should get slightly worse odds to remove the tanking incentive, and everyone else in the lottery gets higher odds.

“Cannot drop below the 12th pick” is just rubbing salt in the wound lol. Sure, you might be the worst team in the league and not get a top prospect to help you out, but in the worst case scenario you can at least expect to get… Nick Collison?

Is the lottery only for the no.1 pick? What about pick 2-12?

Why is Dallas ineligible for the #1 pick?

And now the tanking becomes teams trying not to be 7th or 8th, getting that 9th or 10th seed and winning two play-in games.

Nice break down is it safe to assume it will not affect this years draft? Cause the way these articles come out they’re making it seem this year

Wizards just barely avoid the “can’t have top-5 picks in three consecutive seasons” by getting 6th in 2025.

nice

They’re betting owners want that playoff revenue more than a 6% increase in lottery chance

yea, i think until the odds are completely flat, there will always be loopholes.

Yes. Some teams will have the choice of getting swept by the Thunder 1st round or getting a 8% chance at number 1. 

Yes, which will be even more stupid than what we had before.

If you are playing contenders in all star break, you are aiming for playoff 6-8 seed. No way you intentionally go opposite direction just to increase the odds by a few percentage.

From what I’m understanding Play in losers will get max odds so either youre in the playoffs or get a chance at a high lottery pick. I feel like there will be teams wanting the 7th and 8th seed so I dont think playoffs will have any implications but this will cause easy ganes in the play in in many cases I bet

As if they weren’t already doing this?!

Exactly this is all so stupid. Literally only changes a few shitty teams trying to get out of the basement. But now adds more teams trying to lose.

The Jazz have an 11% chance at the first pick. Under these rules, that would change to 8%

So no, the Jazz would not have better odds. And from what I understand, Jazz can drop out of the top 12.

So instead of having an 11% chance at first pick, you get an 8% chance and a good chance at picking 13-15th. Where as under the current rules, you couldn’t drop below 8th.

The odds are too good for the play in teams to not let themselves fall 

What is confusing?

Instead of all the bad teams blatantly trying to lose, throwing games, and resting their best players, they want to incentivize teams to try to win. So you can’t shut down half your roster at the all-star break because you have to actually win games.

That’s it. That’s the entire concept.

Yeah flattening the odds already will reduce the need for tanking. No need to punish the bottom 3

It does, this annihilates the ability to fiddle with lineups or rosters. There’s no point trying to be bad or even gutting the roster to re-build.

They want every team to try to field a competitive team. As now the main way to improve is random as anything.

what doesnt make sense about it?

Wouldnt this give kings better odds?

Bingo, they are trying to kill too birds one stone. Increase the amount of combination of outcomes and try to fix tanking. Probably will change it again in 3 years.

It prevents teams who are bad from shutting down their best players. Essentially if you are bottom 3 you tru like he’ll to claw our ans 4th/5th worst try like he’ll to not fall in. 

That’s the point.

Exactly, nobody should try to be bottom 3 and win as much as they can!

Im not understanding the bottom 3 odd drop. Why not just make it even across the board

The odds are still so flat it barely matters. It just affirms that tanking is never a viable strategy. 

imo this year there was only one genuinely bad team: Brooklyn.  Indiana, Washington, Sacramento and Utah could all have had better records if losing carried a penalty.  In spite of injuries, those four teams were quite capable and could have got more games from their top players in an absolute must win situation. Meanwhile Brooklyn had absolutely no intention of putting out a competitive team this year, so they are Exhibit A for the type of team that should be hurt by the new rules.

I don’t understand why so many fans feel that incompetent FO management needs to go unpunished.  I endured a lot of shitty Clippers teams back in the day and never felt that their complete lack of ambition entitled them to get a shot at landing a superstar player via the draft.

Yeah, this just encourages play-in caliber teams to tank towards the end of the season.

-Sam Presti as he prays for the downfall of the teams whose picks he owns

The average win total of the 4th-10th worst teams over the last 6 seasons is 28 wins. That’s bad, but not exactly tanking. So teams would have to be competitive for the majority of the season to stay in that range. 

“The process” really caused long lasting damage to the NBA and the end result of it didn’t even get the team that did it into a conference finals lmao

The incentive is to now finish between 4-10, and to not finish bottom 3. But all you get for being in the top 4-10 is an 8% chance at #1 and the hope that you can get into the top 3 or 4…but if you get lucky and get into the top 5 two years in a row you won’t get a top pick the next year.

I really like how bold they’re being here, I think it’s great.

Lmao. No it’s disgusting that it took them this long to do something. And we had basically a third of the league purposefully losing games this year because the slightly flattened odds still made it much better for a franchise to completely tank rather then try to put together a decent squad and compete for 30-40 wins.

It gets worse because of large player guarantee contracts. Player today are on board to tank because they get paid big time. Not like 20-30 years ago. Every game was a chance for the next pay contracts and none of them were generation wealth except MJ.

The people that support losing on purpose was because of how the odds and lottery worked. Wasn’t because they like losing, it was the best way for most markets to get better through the draft. Calling those people morons is a little ironic

spoiler: this will benefit teams that “lose on purpose” and will punish teams that are genuinely ass.

As a Suns fan should you be happy about this?

Name a single league besides the NBA where a single player can elevate a team from trash to competing for titles.

It forces the three worst teams to keep trying. Your incentive will be to not be on the bottom. So all teams around that 1-6 slot will keep playing to win throughout the year instead of purposefully losing.

This is a great change for the product.

And the bottom teams will try their best to win games to get out of the bottom 3

Nephews aren’t old enough to have taken stats class yet