Evaluating the Pros and Cons of the Proposed NBA Draft Reform

On Tuesday, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported what is currently the most concrete NBA Draft reform — designed by the league to combat tanking, which has been a major subject of discussion in 2025-26 season.

The NBA has disclosed to its 30 GMs a singular new anti-tanking reform that expands the draft lottery to 16 teams, flattens odds, and have a relegation zone where the bottom 3 teams are penalized with fewer lottery balls for the No. 1 pick.

ESPN details: https://t.co/0Zs1OfktfP
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) April 28, 2026

The newest proposal — one that seems to have the most traction so far — is centered around moving the lottery to 16 teams, in addition to continuing to flatten the odds and create a “relegation zone” which will lessen the odds of the bottom-three teams, thus promoting winning.

There are certainly pros and potentially many more cons that come with this system, which we’ll evaluate below:

Pros:

It should help tanking: The newest method will discourage league-wide tanking to some degree, in at least making it viable for the worst teams to try and win games. The teams in the No. 4 through 10 range, depending on how the standings are shaking out, might not be incentivized to lose either, thus playing their best players down the stretch of the season.

Middling teams will be rewarded: Those teams that typically struggle to make the postseason and acquire top talent via draft odds will be majorly rewarded. Some see this as a win for avoiding being among the league’s worst.

Cons:

Further flattening of the odds: The further flattening of the odds, allowing several teams an 8% chance opposed to a descending order, is set to add even more chaos to the draft space. Teams already lack a control of where they’ll pick via the current scenarios, and this adds even more unpredictability to a process that teams need to use to team-build.

A new lower tier: Given the proposed format punishes teams for being in the bottom-three, there’s a chance it could create a truly bad tier near the bottom, with talent-less teams unable to land top picks and maximize their chances at getting better.

Playoffs teams could land top pick: The new format adds two teams to the lottery, which have to be postseason-bound teams given there are 30 teams. That could mean the loser of the seven-eight Play-In game could land the top pick, a puzzling scenario given the NBA Draft is used to infuse bad teams with talent.

Bottom-three teams can fall to No. 12: Under the current format, the league’s worst teams can fall to No. 5, 6 and 7, respectively, allowing them to still grab top talent even accounting for draft falls. Under the new format, there’s a great chance they could fall all the way to No. 12, making it exceptionally hard to build for the future.

Could potentially worsen tanking: While the bottom-three will be clawing to get out of the relegation zone, fringe-Playoffs teams will see a few more losses and good odds at the No. 1 pick as a reason to join the draft tier, potentially moving tanking teams from the very bottom to the middle of the league.

It’s convoluted: Most simply, the proposed changes are massively convoluted, taking an already tough-to-understand system and making it near-impossible for the casual NBA watcher.

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