All three proposals are expansive and hard to explain. One would make it so that the five worst teams in the league would have the same odds and the league would draw the top five picks separately. Another proposal would make it so that every team in the lottery would have the same odds to win it. The last proposal would weigh teams’ records from the last two seasons in order to determine odds.  It will take time for fans to understand how these new rules will work and even then, some might still find it hard to understand. 

Here’s what tanking is: Teams design their game plans and lineups to lose intentionally. That gives them a worse record, which improves their odds to win the draft lottery and pick first. The draft is where teams select collegiate players, and the most sought-after players are picked first.

Stopping tanking would take away the easiest way for teams to rebuild and re-contend for the top of the league. This practice has existed in sports anytime there has been a lottery, but it started to gain more traction in the 2010s when the Philadelphia 76ers started tanking and coined it as “The Process.”

The 76ers had enough success that other middle-of-the-pack teams tried to imitate their strategy, to varying degrees of success. For example the 76ers themselves only have made it as far as the second round of the playoffs. This season, teams like the Pacers, the Wizards and the Mavericks tanked in order to get one of the top talents in the 2026 draft, like AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, and Cameron Boozer, among others.

While tanking can help teams eventually contend for a title, the opposite can happen as well. It can lead to being stuck at the bottom of the NBA, which happened with the Pelicans and the Wizards. Teams are not guaranteed to win the lottery, as it’s just a random drawing of ping pong balls.

Another important negative, which can deter teams from tanking, is financial losses. People aren’t going to games if teams are delivering a terrible product to get better players for the future. 

But the most overlooked negative of tanking is that the players sometimes don’t pan out to their potential. A prime example of tanking not giving a team a player as advertised is the 2019 draft. The Pelicans won the lottery and picked Zion Williamson, but he never became the player the Pelicans hoped.

While trying to fix the issue of tanking is a good idea, the proposed solutions miss the main point. Teams understand that having the worst record in the league doesn’t automatically give them the number one pick. They’re not going to stop tanking if you just mess with the odds and add middling teams into the mix. In fact, that might motivate teams more to tank, to get to the top of the pecking order so that they don’t get grouped with teams that made the play-in. 

A better idea for the league to consider is adopting NHL lottery rules. In the NHL draft lottery, only the bottom 11 teams can get the number one pick. Teams can only move up ten spots from their place in the standings. In addition, a team can only improve their spot twice in five years. 

The NHL draft lottery doesn’t completely stop tanking, but it does limit it by making it so the worst teams can get their stars early and not just hog the top picks all the time. It actually doesn’t punish the worst teams for being bad as much as the NBA does, and it doesn’t let a middling team steal a top pick that a bad team might need as well. 

Overall, the tanking epidemic does not have an easy solution. Many ideas will be tried and tested before finding the right one. But the NBA needs to pick a plan that the fans will understand, that will help curb tanking, and that will make teams actually want to compete.

Until the NBA addresses the main reasons that teams tank in the first place, the league will be plagued with teams racing to the bottom.

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featured image graphic by EMILY STEPHENS