NBA commissioner promises to fix tanking, but how he will do it isn’t clear

The NBA will be making changes to “fix” tanking after the 2025-26 season concludes. Commissioner Adam Silver promised as much on Wednesday after two days of meetings with league owners in New York.

The issue of tanking has become a hot-button issue this season and Silver is running with it as one of the league’s highest priorities.

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“It’s one that we take very seriously,” Silver said. “And we are going to fix it. Full stop.”

But how Silver and the NBA’s best minds plan to fix tanking is not totally clear.

Last month, after a previous meeting with NBA decision-makers and the competition committee, ESPN reported that several solutions and concepts had been floated during discussions:

• First-round draft picks can be protected only for top-four or top-14-plus selections

• Lottery odds freeze at the trade deadline or a later date

• No longer allowing a team to pick in the top four in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes

• Teams can’t pick in the top four the year after making the conference finals

• Lottery odds allocated based on two-year records

• Lottery extended to include all play-in teams

• Flatten odds for all lottery teams

The problem is that very few, if any, of these ideas would actually curb tanking and there would be unintended consequences for teams that have done nothing wrong in the eyes of the NBA.

Do these solutions make sense?

Changing the protections that teams can put on draft picks when trading them will likely change the way that trading is done and how picks are valued in those trades, but the teams that have a top-four protected pick are going to absolutely tank as hard as possible in order to keep it. Unless, of course, the team that trades that pick is a legitimate contender, in which case the pick would end up lower in the first round.

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If the lottery odds froze at the trade deadline or any other date, that would just ensure teams tanked earlier in the season, diluting the NBA product from the first week of games rather than slowly moving toward tanking at the end of the NBA calendar.

Saying that a team cannot have a top-four pick in consecutive years or after consecutive bottom-three finishes or the year after making a conference finals appearance assumes that all teams who finish at the bottom of the standings are tanking. But let’s play out a very plausible scenario.

The Indiana Pacers were really bad this season, largely because their most important player, Tyrese Haliburton, was sidelined after an Achilles rupture in Game 7 of the Finals last year. The team went through a slew of other injuries and also had some major roster changes in the offseason.

Does Indiana deserve to have their draft pick taken away?

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What if Haliburton comes back next year, but there are significant injuries to role players on the Pacers’ roster? What if Haliburton doesn’t completely look like himself and the team just can’t find its footing?

Should the Pacers be penalized for injuries changing the dynamic of their team? Most people would agree that there are definitely situations in which consecutive years at the bottom of the standings does not mean that a team is tanking and that a conference finals appearance does not mean a team is guaranteed to have a successful season the next year.

Lottery odds being based on two-year records rather than a single season and flattening lottery odds for lottery teams are not solutions that will end or curb tanking. If anything, the previous time the league flattened the odds, in 2019, opened the door for more teams to believe they had a chance.

Changes coming soon

The point is, that so long as the NBA’s draft is based on record, the NBA will have to deal with a few teams tanking. It always has. The incentive structure is built into the fabric of the NBA.

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To that point, Silver said that a solution for tanking will have to change how teams are incentivized.

“Incentives need to be fixed. We will fix them,” he said, noting that tanking is not a new issue that the league is facing.

Silver also noted that on Wednesday NBA brass held lengthy discussions about how to approach this topic and solutions for it, but that nothing was voted on. But, he did say that there was unanimous agreement that a change needs to happen and happen soon — before the June draft and free agency in July.

“That means we will most likely have a special board meeting in May,” Silver said. “At that point, we will vote on whatever modification we come up with.”

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So, we’ll find out more in May, and we’ll see if the NBA has something up its sleeve that will actually change how NBA teams are incentivized and if the changes will actually be a move in the right direction for the league.