NBA tanking has rarely been as rampant as it is in 2026, and the league is seeking to end the practice once and for all.
Commissioner Adam Silver gathered representatives from the 30 NBA teams for a call about the issue Thursday, one that consisted of “throwing s— against the wall,” a high-level team executive told Sports Illustrated’s Chris Mannix.
What was reportedly billed as an ideation session that allowed the teams to share feedback on the situation wasn’t meant to come up with a solution. That will ultimately be left up to the NBA’s competition committee. However, the meeting also gave Silver the chance to make a stern statement to every team—perhaps even the kind that his predecessor David Stern would deliver, one executive told The Athletic.
According to the report, Silver’s message could be boiled down to: “This is not who we are going to be as a league.”
The NBA is still in the process of collecting potential models to disincentivize tanking, but speaking to general manager Sean Marks of the 15–40 Nets, Silver made it very clear that the goal is a model that will have every team looking to win every night out.
“I would just say, Sean, you could assume for next season your only incentive will be to win games,” Silver said, per The Athletic.
Seven anti-tanking measures have been discussed as the NBA weighs rule changes
After the Thursday meeting, ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania reported on seven potential anti-tanking rule changes that are on the table:
- First-round picks can be protected only top-four or top-14-plus
- Lottery odds freeze at the trade deadline or a later date
- No longer allowing a team to pick top four in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes
- Teams can’t pick top-four 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
An adjustment on protected picks feels like the most straightforward potential rule change, one that wouldn’t cause many ripple effects but could help reduce the number of teams outwardly tanking. An expansion of the lottery to the play-in teams could do the same—allowing teams to play for playoff positioning without fully eliminating their hopes to land a top pick.
Those don’t sound like the sort of radical changes that Silver seemed to favor in his reported message to Marks—though that came in a closed-door meeting, of course.
One thing seems certain, and it is that the NBA’s draft lottery process will undergo an overhaul ahead of the 2026–27 season. How drastic that overhaul is remains to be seen.
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