NBA Reportedly Will Enact Anti-Tanking Rules Next Season

Per ESPN’s Shams Charania, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has informed the league’s 30 General Managers that the league plans to make anti-tanking rule changes for next season.

Tanking, the colloquial term used for the positioning of a team toward the NBA Draft, opposed to the postseason, has been hot in headlines recently. Teams such as the Pacers and Jazz were recently issues hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, largely to do with resting players not listed on the injury report in order to lose games.

The has largely been spurred by the depth of the 2026 NBA Draft class, which features players like Darryn Peterson, AJ Dybantsa and Cameron Boozer, as well as continual talent through the lottery and first round.

Given just how deep the ’26 class is, many expect there to be around a dozen teams opting to losing games rather than win them. And in the league’s eyes, that’s not exactly ideal.

In a follow-up tweet, Charania listed concepts that were discussed in Thursday’s GM meeting, as well as the late January Competition Committee meeting:

First-round picks can be protected only top-4 or top-14+

Lottery odds freeze at the trade deadline or a later date

No longer allowing a team to pick top 4 in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-3 finishes

Teams can’t pick top-4 the year after making conference finals

Lottery odds allocated based on two-year records

Lottery extended to include all play-in teams

Flatten odds for all lottery teams

Maintaining competitiveness throughout the league is an obvious goal for the NBA, but eradicating tanking entirely simply isn't a viable option for a league that's infused with talent by the draft. If team's can grab the best prospects by losing, they'll do just that.

The NBA's true goal should be to limit the amount of teams tanking, and the duration that they do. While the proposed concepts likely come from a good place, they don't necessarily aim to do that, see further flattening the odds — which has put the leauge in this position in the first place — as well as not allowing potentiall bad teams to pick near the top.

Furthermore, this year is a bit of an outlier, again due to the depth of the '26 draft class. This isn't likely to be an issue next season, when several lesser teams grab great prospects, and with the 2027 class reportedly not offering quite as much incoming talent.