The NBA is signaling that changes are coming to combat tanking.
On Thursday, the league’s 30 general managers met to discuss anti-tanking measures, which the league wants to implement by next year. That came on the heels of both the Jazz and the Pacers getting fined by the league for not playing players just before the All-Star break.
As to what exact changes could be put in place, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported seven ideas that had been floated in league circles. Some are minor changes that most fans might not even notice, while others could shift the way the league works in rather dramatic ways.
Below we break down the ideas the NBA floated to fix tanking from least to most drastic.
7. Lottery odds allocated based on two-year records
This feels like the smallest change the league could make and by far the easiest to implement. Rather than letting a single season’s results determine lottery odds, take the past two seasons into account. The result is, ideally, teams that are genuinely bad being put in a position to gain a franchise-changing player near the top of the draft, while teams having a single down season still have a chance to pick high, but can’t be overly rewarded for making a midseason pivot to tanking once they realized it was not their year to make a playoff run.
It’s worth noting that this is the way that the WNBA draft lottery already operates, and the system works fine.
One potential pitfall of the strategy is that while it is meant to prevent teams from tanking by lessening the incentive of a single down season, the result may be teams committing even further to tanking, going into a rebuild they believe will be at least a two- or three-year process from the start.
6. Teams can’t pick in the top four the season after making conference finals
This is pretty rare, although it has happened in recent years, and could happen again in the upcoming draft lottery. The Mavericks made the conference finals and drafted Cooper Flagg at No. 1 in 2025. However, the thing that damned Dallas to mediocrity that season wasn’t an outright tanking job, but rather the franchise’s refusal to give Luka Dončić a max contract and the eventual decision to trade him.
Mostly, this rule feels like a direct shot at this season’s Pacers team. Indiana made a run to the NBA Finals last year and pushed the Thunder to seven games in the championship series, but lost star guard Tyrese Haliburton to an Achilles tear. The team has spent this season in the basement of the East as Haliburton recovers, but could get two star players back on the court next season between Haliburton’s return and a top-five pick.
This potential change feels pretty small because it would apply to so few teams. Further, the only reason a team goes from the conference finals to the lottery in a single year is usually because something pretty bad has happened. If the goal is to only let the truly worst of the worst teams get top picks, it could help, but it feels like a rule being made while staring directly at the Indiana front office.
5. No longer allowing a team to pick top four in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes
Similar to the suggestion regarding teams coming off a berth in the conference finals, this feels like a solution in search of a problem. Just like the above rule appears aimed directly at the Pacers, this one feels pretty pointed toward the Rockets, who have had a top-four pick in four of the past five years (although one of those came via trade).
With lottery odds already flattened to an extent, there’s a good amount of chance baked into any team winning top-four picks in back-to-back years. Such a change might make it so tanking teams have a worse chance at their bet paying off, but doesn’t feel like it would do much to end the practice altogether.
4. Lottery odds freeze at the trade deadline or a later date
This one is kind of interesting. What better way to disincentivize losing than to literally strip it of its incentive? There’s a simple logic there that feels like it could work.
But again, this change on its own feels like a bit of a half measure. If the lottery odds freeze earlier in the season, it just means that teams committed to tanking will have to time their tanks to a different portion of the season. That doesn’t exactly solve the issue.
Still, such a move would undoubtedly save us from a few of the most depressing NBA games we see every April, with two teams actively hoping the other wins in order to gain an edge of a few percentage points in the upcoming lottery.
3. First-round picks can be protected only top four or top 14-plus
It feels like this shift could have the biggest impact on the league, although said impact would have more to do with the trade market than with the fight against tanking.
In recent years, pick protections have become an even more important aspect of greasing the wheels to get a deal across the finish line both in the offseason and ahead of the trade deadline. The problem with protections is they sometimes leave a team with a clear target worth tanking toward that would allow them to retain their high-value pick. By restricting the protections to be either top four or top 14 (which would account for any lottery pick), teams that are in the lottery could know that their pick is moving no matter what, and thus have less incentive to tank.
Again though, this feels like a half measure. If this proposal is on the table, then why not ban pick protections in trades entirely? If picks are traded unprotected, teams will have literally zero reason to play down once a pick is out of their hands. Such a change would reshape the value of picks on the free market, but it could go a long way toward preventing a specific type of tanking.
2. Lottery extended to include all play-in teams
This one feels like a no-brainer. The idea of the play-in tournament was to give more teams in the middle of the pack a chance to make the postseason. The last thing the league wants is a team deciding they would be better off missing the play-in tournament so they could have a shot in the lottery—and after the Mavs won the No. 1 pick despite slim odds last year, teams may very well be right in thinking that.
This doesn’t address the bottom of the bottom tanking teams, as they are for the most part pretty far removed from the play-in tournament race, but it would make it so a team sitting in 11th place in their conference isn’t actively looking to not make the postseason, which is good.
Why is this such a drastic change then? The extra lottery odds that are given to the eight play-in tournament teams have to come from somewhere, meaning the already fairly flattened odds of the current system would become even more diluted.
1. Flatten odds for all lottery teams
This would be a big change. If you are in the lottery, you are in the lottery, and that’s the end of it. Whether you’re the worst team in the NBA or you miss the postseason by the slimmest margin, you both have an equal chance of winning the No. 1 pick, and every other position on the draft board.
Again, it’s easy to see how this would remove the incentive for teams to tank—once you’re in the lottery picture, your chances of getting a top pick are all the same. But it’s another fix that would fail to address the logic behind tanking itself—if the top pick comes down solely to chance among teams in the bottom half, we might see teams simply extend their tanking efforts for more years until they finally hit with a good pick in a good draft class.
Where do these proposals leave us?
There’s no easy answer here, and it’s unsurprising that the league is looking at any and all potential remedies to find a cure for tanking.
Adding the play-in teams to the lottery field seems like a good change to make, but doesn’t do much to address the underlying issue. Making lottery odds reflective of a cumulative two-year record as is done in the WNBA would be a painless shift, but would only soften the advantage gained by tanking in any given year rather than eliminate its incentive.
Freezing odds at a certain point of the season has potential, and can be fiddled with several ways to make the system a bit more difficult to game. The league could potentially mark that at a certain point in the season, wins rather than losses start helping your draft position, or could keep the date that the lottery odds lock in secret until the end of the year.
As Sports Illustrated’s Chris Mannix made clear in a report on Friday, the talks are still in the exploratory stage. Per Mannix:
Team officials threw out a number of proposals, from limiting pick protections (a popular change among top league officials, sources say) to freezing lottery odds to not allowing teams to pick inside the top four in consecutive years. It was “idea gathering,” said one top team executive briefed on the call. Added another, “I’d call it throwing s— against the wall.”
There’s a chance that next year will feature the adoption of not just one, but a combination of several of these proposals. It’s also possible that by the time it comes for implementation, new, even more convoluted methods will be constructed to solve the tanking issue. Whatever rules are ultimately put in place, we won’t know the full repercussions until we see the new system in action.
If the system still needs work, I’m sure more proposals will be ready to go.