Adam Silver's latest crusade against tanking has him looking like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.
Unquestionably, tanking has become part of the NBA landscape and annual discussion — and it is worse this year because of a particularly deep draft followed by what are projected to be down years. Silver argues that it is bad for the league's image and for its fans, though if you ask fans in Utah or Washington right now, they'd overwhelmingly be in favor of it this year. Ask Pistons fans now about tanking in 2020-21 and getting Cade Cunningham.
Silver and the league's owners are poised to act this summer to reduce the tanking "scourge." Except it's not a monster, it's another windmill — what Silver has done before and appears poised to do again this summer is treating the symptoms, not the disease. Teams turn to multi-year tanking because other paths to team building have been cut off or narrowed. The draft has always been the best way to land young talent, but now, for many small and mid-market teams, it's also the only reliable, viable option. Making it harder for those teams to get top players just extends how long they tank, it doesn't eliminate the need for it.
If Silver wants to change the NBA Draft Lottery to reduce tanking and help usher in more of the parity he craves, there is one clear way to do it that is fair:
Eliminate the Draft Lottery. Altogether.
Don't eliminate the draft, just revert to the pre-1985 system (or the NFL model): the worst team drafts first. It's not perfect, but it's much better than what the NBA is about to do.
NBA anti-tanking options
What Silver and the NBA really want to stop is what the Jazz and Wizards are doing this year, what Philadelphia most famously did with "The Process": multi-year tanking.
The problem is, the league's list of "solutions" only means teams will have to tank longer.
When Silver spoke to NBA GMs last week, a few ideas were floated as potential lottery changes for next season. Among them:
• Limiting traded draft pick protections to either 1-4 or the lottery. This one seems destined to pass, according to league sources, and deals with situations such as the Jazz's and the Wizards' this season, tanking to hold on to their top-eight-protected picks.
• Flattening the lottery odds. Again. Currently, teams with the three worst records have the same chance of landing the No. 1 pick (14%), and the odds slowly drop from there. The new plan will likely have the six, eight, or 10 worst teams have the same odds. Some have called for the older lottery system, the envelope era, where every team that misses the playoffs has the same odds. In whatever form it takes, it seems highly likely the odds will get flattened again.
• Teams cannot pick in the top 4 in consecutive years. We would not have this year's San Antonio Spurs with this rule, and small markets may well push back on it. (A modified version of this rule would be part of my plan to eliminate the lottery, laid out below.)
• Freeze the lottery draft positions at the All-Star break (or some other date). Sure, let's get teams tanking earlier, in the heart of the season. This is the worst idea on the table.
• Teams that make the conference Finals cannot draft in the top four. This seems oddly, specifically aimed at the circumstances that befell the Indiana Pacers this year. Which is not a real issue, this rarely comes up and when it does it's because a star player was injured or left the team (the Cavaliers got No. 1 after LeBron left, but was that wrong?). This rule seems pointless.
Why those solutions make the problem worse
Teams are tanking for multiple years because other paths to team building are closed off or narrowed, leaving only the draft as an option.
Free agency is largely dead for All-Star-level players. They don't get traded against their will (except for Luka Doncic, and we see how well that went in Dallas). They get a max contract from the team they are on then force their way out, or organize a sign-and-trade to where they want to go. Players have a lot of control over the process, which often leaves small- to mid-market teams out of the mix.
Trading for stars is also very difficult now. It took four unprotected first-rounders for Orlando to secure Desmond Bane last summer; it took five first-round picks for the Knicks to get Mikal Bridges — and neither one of them is an All-Star. That's not to say star players are not traded, they are — James Harden was traded earlier this month — but he had a lot of say in that (and it was about money in future contracts). It's a difficult spot for a small market team.
Which means teams need to focus on the NBA draft to improve (and for any successful franchise, scouting and player development are now more crucial than ever; for example, turning a No. 12 pick into an All-NBA player like Jalen Williams, as Oklahoma City did).
The problem with flattening the lottery odds is that it just makes the issue worse — teams have to be bad longer to get a top pick. It's random chance, not giving the worst teams hope.
For the past three drafts, the team with the worst record in the NBA drafted fifth. Not terrible, but look at Utah as an example: It had the worst record last season, drafted Ace Bailey fifth, but if it had drafted Cooper Flagg No. 1 it would be a very different situation in Utah, one where we were talking about making the play-in not tanking (for the record, their Jaren Jackson Jr. trade at the deadline was brilliant).
End the draft lottery (with a caveat)
The best solution is this: End the NBA Draft Lottery.
Not the draft. In a league where teams need to sell playoff glory or hope, the draft offers hope to struggling fan bases.
Just let the team with the worst record draft first. No lottery, no ping-pong balls or fancy math. This is how it was done until 1985, and it's still how the NFL and other sports do it. If Sacramento has the worst record this season, it gets the No. 1 pick. End of story.
Well, not quite the end because there needs to be one rule: The team with the No. 1 pick cannot pick in the top four (or five) in consecutive years. Or, maybe make that ban two years. To stick with the Utah example from earlier, if it drafted No. 1 a year ago and got Flagg, it couldn't draft higher than fifth this season.
Would this end tanking? No. But in a sport where drafting one elite player — Flagg, Victor Wembanyama, Cade Cunningham, Anthony Edwards, just to name a few recent ones — changes a franchise, there is no way to eliminate it completely.
What eliminating the lottery would do is eliminate long-term tanking projects — teams would get their top pick, then could not be in the top five for another year or two.
Also, eliminating the lottery would limit tanking in any given year. Every year, a couple of teams are going to be bad from the start, but the mid-season pivot to a tank in hopes of improving lottery odds goes away. Two or three teams a year may tank, but not 10 like this year.
(It has to be noted that this year's especially deep draft would have led to more tanking than usual regardless of the system in place. This is just a perfect storm of a season for tanking.)
In the modern world of analytics, there is no way to completely eliminate tanking and still give the fan bases of the worst teams real hope for the future. The league has to sell hope.
Which is why it should ditch the lottery.
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