The One Key Problem With the NBA’s New Proposals to Stop Tanking

Tanking has been a huge talking point this NBA season. It’s not a new talking point, to be sure. Intentionally losing for the purposes of securing a high draft pick is one of the loudest annual complaints around the modern NBA. But the issue apparently hit critical mass this season for commissioner Adam Silver and the league’s governors.

A loaded 2026 draft class has resulted in eight teams engaging in tanking for the second half of the 2025–26 season. To be specific: the Pacers, Nets, Wizards and Jazz all began the season fully intending to tank for different reasons. As the year progressed the Grizzlies, Mavericks and Kings joined them as their respective seasons collapsed early on. The competitive race to the bottom has resulted in incredibly blatant efforts to lose. Complaints from fans and media have never been louder.

Thus, Silver decided it is now time to try to fix tanking. He started by handing out very generous fines around the halfway point of the season to Indiana and Utah as a warning shot across the bow of sorts. Then the Board of Governors began to discuss possible rule changes that would address the tanking issue. On Friday, after the Board met for its March meetings, it was reported the league presented three “comprehensive” changes to the governors for consideration before a formal vote in May.

This has been a problem for a long time. Just as recently as last year there were six teams who went to egregious lengths to lose for a shot at Cooper Flagg. Only two more losing teams doesn’t seem like a lot on paper. The fact that the NBA’s decision-makers are suddenly in a tizzy gives the impression the above proposals are an overreaction to an extreme circumstance—much like how the NBAPA suddenly decided to vocalize their previously-unknown aversion to the 65-games played rule (despite agreeing to it in collective bargaining!) after Cade Cunningham’s extremely bad stroke of injury luck. The perception of the tanking issue has never been worse, and thus the NBA feels driven to address it.

Regardless of the why, however, it’s undeniable that tanking is a sore spot in professional basketball. Nobody likes teams trying to lose, from fans to players to Silver himself. But the proposed solutions the NBA is considering fail to address the systemic issue that causes tanking in the first place.

NBA’s proposals to fix tanking

Before we get into that, here’s a general breakdown of the three ideas the league is looking at to fix the tanking problem, per ESPN’s Shams Charania.

In the first proposal, the lottery would expand to 18 teams and include every franchise that would miss the playoffs outright in addition to the eight 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. This creates a setup where a team hoping for a high draft pick just has to finish in the bottom third of the standings rather than with one of the three worst records in the NBA.

The second proposal is the most complicated. In this scenario 22 teams would make the lottery—the teams who miss the playoffs, the teams who don’t make it out of the play-in tournament and teams who lose in the first round of the postseason. Lottery odds are then determined based on the two-year average of a team’s record, i.e. if an organization won 40 games last year and 30 games this year they would get lottery odds like they are a 35-win team.

It’s how the WNBA does its own draft lottery but this proposal would come with a twist: the worst record a team can post in regards to lottery odds is 20 wins. 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. This proposal does not eliminate the value of finishing with a bad record but it does remove the incentive for a franchise to put the worst possible product on the floor to win the fewest number of games possible. It also injects a significant chaos factor into the lottery by including playoff teams. This scenario would allow for the possibility that a No. 1 seed suffers an upset in the first round of the playoffs and is rewarded by getting the top pick in the draft a few months later. It makes for a fun thought exercise (what if the 2007 Mavericks got to draft Derrick Rose?) but would not help the current talent imbalance between the good and bad teams, obviously.

In the final proposal there would be 18 teams included in the lottery. The five worst teams would have equal odds for the top pick and there would be protections in place to ensure they can’t fall too far down the draft board. This appears to be the simplest change where the alterations are largely being made to the odds themselves.

The key problem with the NBA’s proposed rule changes

There are a few specific issues with the above proposals, and overall they are so convoluted it’s likely to confuse the average fan (which the NBA should be trying to avoid at all costs given the confusing rules already in place). But the overarching issue? They don’t solve the actual problem.

The NBA is approaching tanking the wrong way. The league’s above proposals attempt to take away the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for losing teams. That misses the point. If there’s going to be rule changes that address tanking those changes have to address the driving motivation for going after that pot of gold at all—the simple fact that bottoming out and drafting high-caliber talent at the top of the board is the only way to become a contending team in the NBA.

This is not the NFL where the variability of a 17-game season means it’s always worth trying to put a competitive team on the field. Nor is it MLB, where the weighted talent of a given roster will almost always win the day over a singular superstar. By and large NBA teams go as far as their best players can get them. In order to get those players, they have to draft them, and 99% of the time they have to draft them high in the lottery. No other avenues exist to acquiring elite talent in modern basketball. There are exceptions to every rule; the Lakers won a championship in 2020 by signing LeBron James in free agency and trading for Anthony Davis. The Nuggets drafted a three-time MVP in the second round. But those are exceptions for a reason. No team can plan on strokes of luck like that.

The NBA cannot (and should not) try to change the fact that this is a superstar-driven league and the teams with the best players win championships. That’s a reality of sports at large. But the way the current system works, teams without one of those superstars have to be bad and very lucky in order to get one. The above proposals are all different in their specifics but the one trait they share is that it makes it harder for bad teams to get lucky. That might lead to teams only losing 50 games instead of 60. But it wouldn’t alleviate the self-perpetuating cycle of very bad teams where they aren’t talented enough to win but don’t get a high enough pick to land franchise-changing talent due to how the lottery odds currently work.

It’s not an easy problem to solve. Eliminating the draft entirely is a popular alternative that would completely change the foundation of the league and its labor practices. Limiting how often teams can land a pick at the top of the lottery is another that comes with its own complications. But this round of proposed rule changes wouldn’t do anything to address the systemic problem at the core the modern NBA—there are no avenues to contention outside of the flawed system the league itself put in place.

More NBA from Sports Illustrated

Listen to SI’s NBA podcast, Open Floor, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.

Add us as a preferred source on Google