Who Gets Cooper Flagg? How 2025 NBA Draft Would Look Under Proposed Anti-Tanking Rule Changes

With weeks remaining in the 2025–26 NBA season, tanking is once again on everybody’s mind.

As the season winds down with eight different teams fiercely battling to finish with as poor of a record as possible, the NBA is discussing significant changes to the lottery system. Three specific proposals were reported on Friday that represent the league’s attempt to disincentivize tanking. Those proposals are as follows.

Option 1: The lottery is expanded to 18 teams and includes every franchise that misses the playoffs outright as well as the eight teams who qualify for the play-in tournament. The worst 10 teams would all have even odds to win the first pick and the remaining eight would have descending odds based on record like how most of the lottery is currently determined.

Option 2: A total of 22 teams make the lottery—the non-playoff teams, the play-in tournament teams and the teams that lost in the first round of the playoffs. Lottery odds are determined by the average of a team’s two-year record. The worst record a team can post in regards to those lottery odds is 20 wins, i.e. if they finish with 15 wins one season and 30 wins the next, their lottery odds would be calculated as the average between 20 wins and 30 wins.

Option 3: There are 18 teams in the lottery, as with Option 1. The five worst teams get equal odds and the odds descend from there based on record. The five worst teams cannot select lower than 10th.

They are all complicated proposals. They all have their own pros and cons to consider. Further details still must be ironed out and there will undoubtedly be modifications to each proposal before a final vote is held in May. But this is the direction the NBA is headed.

In an effort to understand the full impact of these rule changes, we applied each scenario to the most recent NBA draft in 2025. That year’s lottery was a shocker that saw the Mavericks land the No. 1 pick and Cooper Flagg. It’s an imprecise science but we gave it our best shot to paint a picture of how the changes would alter the landscape of the most recent draft lottery using customized odds based on our best understanding of how the proposals would function in reality.

How the 2025 NBA draft would change under each proposal

Dallas won the 2025 lottery despite only a 1.8% chance of doing so. How would things shake out under each of the newly-proposed rules?

Option 1 (18 lottery teams, bottom 10 have flat odds)

Under the first proposal, the following teams would have an 8% chance of winning the lottery: the Jazz, Wizards, Hornets, Pelicans, 76ers, Nets, Raptors, Spurs, Suns and Trail Blazers. The Mavericks, Bulls, Kings, Hawks, Heat, Magic, Warriors and Grizzlies would have lesser, descending odds.

Using ZenGM’s Universal Draft Lottery Simulator, which allows you to customize the number of teams and odds involved in a lottery, here’s how the top five picks could have shaken out in this alternative reality with new odds.

PICK	TEAM	ODDS FOR NO. 1
1	Pelicans	8%
2	Hawks	3.2%
3	Hornets	8%
4	Jazz	8%
5	Spurs	8%

Quite different! In this simulation New Orleans lucks into Flagg while Dallas actually dropped a spot to 12th. Atlanta is the only team that took a big leap up, going from the 14th spot to the second selection, but Chicago wound up right behind them with the sixth pick despite finishing outside the top-10 in this hypothetical.

The team most unaffected? Charlotte. The Hornets got the fourth pick in real life and the third in our simulated lottery here.

Option 2 (22 lottery teams, odds based on two-year record)

This is the most complicated alternative reality. It is also unclear right now how it would work. Reporting hasn’t detailed how the odds would be weighed based on the two-year record of the teams in question, but ESPN does note the top four picks would be drawn as part of the lottery “as is currently.” So, without further information, let’s assume the actual odds are the same as the current lottery system but expanded to 22 teams and the placements are determined by that two-year record.

In this scenario the above 18 teams would be included in the lottery, plus the Lakers, Clippers, Bucks and Pistons. We won’t bore you by listing the full order of all 22 teams based on their two-year record, but here’s what the new top five looks like if the NBA were weighing odds with that criteria; in reality the bottom five teams in last year’s lottery were the Jazz, Wizards, Hornets, Pelicans and 76ers.

TEAM	TWO-YEAR RECORD
Washington Wizards	33–131
Charlotte Hornets	40–124
Utah Jazz	48–116
Toronto Raptors	55–109
San Antonio Spurs	56–108

Now that’s interesting! Both Philadelphia and New Orleans lose top-five spots because of the success the two teams found in 2023–24 being taken into account for the 2025 lottery. Meanwhile the Raptors and Spurs get a bump up for two years of poor play.

Under the 20-win minimum aspect of this rule change, Washington and Charlotte would be given the same lottery odds at a 40–124 record.

Who could win the lottery in this new reality?

PICK	TEAM	ODDS FOR NO. 1
1	Philadelphia 76ers	5.8%
2	Charlotte Hornets	13.5%
3	Utah Jazz	13.5%
4	San Antonio Spurs	10.1%
5	Washington Wizards	13.5%

Despite its best efforts, the NBA gets exactly the result it wants to avoid in this simulation—the Sixers, a contender who ran into a bad year and leaned into it, got the top spot while the teams who have genuinely been terrible several years in a row drop down a spot or two. Four, in the case of Washington. A good reminder that no matter how convoluted the league might want to make the lottery odds, it is still a lottery and unexpected results are part of the deal.

Option 3 (18 lottery teams, worst five have flat odds)

Under this last proposal, the same 18 teams listed under Option 1 would be eligible for the lottery. But only the bottom five, instead of the bottom 10, would receive flat odds. Without the two-year record addendum in Option 2 the teams with the best odds to win the lottery are the five worst teams in the standings, hard stop.

Here’s how the top five picks could have shaken out in this reality.

PICK	TEAM	ODDS FOR NO. 1
1	San Antonio Spurs	5.6%
2	Utah Jazz	13.1%
3	Philadelphia 76ers	13.1%
4	New Orleans Pelicans	13.1%
5	Washington Wizards	13.1%

Wizards fans, feel free to exit out of this article. Another team jumps the line, this time the Spurs. Even giving an extra team flat odds for the No. 1 pick couldn’t eliminate the possibility of a lower-rung team leaping up the lottery order.

What we learned from these mock lottery drafts

What does one take away from this exercise?

That no matter how hard the NBA tries to reform the lottery system, it’s just that—a lottery system. The league can do whatever math it wants to try to put the worst teams in the best possible position to get the top overall pick, but as long as chance is involved there is zero guarantee it would work.

And thus the self-perpetuating cycle continues. None of the three above scenarios saw an annually terrible franchise earn the top pick in the draft. That means there’s no way for them to take a leap and avoid being in the same spot the following year. They can improve, especially since those bad teams ended up with a high selection anyway, but without an opportunity at the sort of generational transformation that sometimes waits at the top of the order they will struggle to stay out of the basement. And as long as the reward for getting that top pick is so much greater than the alternatives, tanking to earn that pick will continue in force.

It’s not an easy problem the NBA has on its hands. That, if anything, is illustrated by putting the league’s own proposals to the test.

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