LOS ANGELES — Late Monday night, after the Washington Wizards had absorbed a 19-point loss to the Lakers, Wizards coach Brian Keefe stepped into a near empty interview room. The audience for Keefe’s postgame autopsy was small. No beat writers, no local digital outlets. Just a team videographer, a sideline reporter and one curious magazine writer.
Keefe’s tone was upbeat. He said he liked what his team did in the first quarter, when the Wizards squeezed out a one-point lead. He liked the resiliency the team showed in the third. The second half got away from Washington, but Keefe saw positives to take from it. “We’re putting some guys in situations to learn and grow,” said Keefe. “There’s things that we’re constantly talking about and we’re learning that stuff within the game, which is great.”
Left unsaid was the most tangible thing Washington took from its trip to Los Angeles: a loss. Monday’s defeat dropped the Wizards to 17–58 on the season, into a statistical tie with Indiana for the NBA’s worst record. Eventually, Washington wants to get to a place where it’s fighting for wins. It’s what midseason trades for Anthony Davis and Trae Young were for. For now, they are among a handful of teams openly welcoming losses.
Last week, NBA commissioner Adam Silver offered a promise on the tanking pandemic: “We are going to fix it,” Silver said. “Full stop.” What was once a relatively minor, end-of-season nuisance—one the NBA had effectively reduced by flattening the lottery odds and introducing a play-in tournament—has become a full-blown calamity. Nearly a third of the league’s teams had waved the white flag by the All-Star break. The tanking had become so brazen that Silver was forced to slap two teams with six-figure fines … in February.
Silver has vowed to hold a vote on new anti-tanking measures at an emergency Board of Governors meeting in May, with three proposals being floated. All three would expand the lottery—two swell the number to 18 teams, another to 22—with tweaks that range from flattening the odds for the bottom 10 teams to weighting teams by their record across the prior two seasons. It’s possible none of these proposals could be adopted, league sources say, or that parts of them could be picked off to create a new one.
Confused? You are not alone. Most fans—hell, most reporters—already need a guide to understand the lottery system. First introduced in 1985, the lottery has undergone several revisions. Up until 2019, the first three positions were determined by the lottery draw. Since ’19, it’s been expanded to four, with flattened, 14% odds for the three teams with the worst records.
For the NBA, the lottery has created some mid-spring intrigue. It’s a made-for-TV event sandwiched into the early rounds of the playoffs. But it has objectively been a failure. In creating the lottery, the NBA sought to combat widespread tanking. Some 40 years later, tanking is more widespread than ever.
Worse, the lottery has defeated the purpose of the draft, which is getting the best players to the worst teams. Theoretically, there are several ways to team build. Trades, free agency. But unless you are in a major market—New York, Los Angeles, Miami—constructing a sustainable winner that way is fanciful.
Recent champions offer a road map. Oklahoma City? Built through the draft. Boston? Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown were high picks. Golden State’s dynasty was anchored by Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, all (you guessed it) drafted. The Charlotte Hornets are one of the best stories in the NBA this season. Their foundation—LaMelo Ball, Brandon Miller, Kon Knueppel—is built on top-four picks.
For the NBA, last spring’s lottery was a catastrophe. Utah, Washington and Charlotte, three rebuilding franchises desperately in need of a high-level talent infusion, owned the best odds to land the No. 1 overall pick. Dallas, with a 1.8% chance, grabbed it, followed by San Antonio (6%) and Philadelphia (10.5%). That meant Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper and VJ Edgecombe were ticketed for teams with entrenched franchise players. Not to teams that needed them to be one.
The proposals being considered by the Board of Governors seem less likely to solve the problem than make it measurably worse. As an exercise, apply them immediately. An 18-team lottery? What happens when Orlando lucks into a perimeter scorer with a top-three pick? A 22-team field? How about if one of these first-round losers’ ping-pong ball combination comes up?
There is a simpler solution: abolish the lottery entirely. Between 1966 and ’84, the teams that finished with the worst records in each conference flipped a coin to determine which team would draft first. The remaining teams picked in inverse order of their won-lost records. Returning to an NFL-style draft order could come with protections—teams cannot draft in the top four in consecutive seasons, top two blocked for three years, etc.—that would dissuade annual bottoming out.
It’s not perfect, but if there’s anything to be learned from decades of lottery tweaking, nothing is. Whatever the NBA does to manipulate the lottery, smart teams will find a way to game it. Eliminating it solves a problem. Send the best players to the worst franchises. Give them a reason for hope. Tanking is an unsolvable problem for the NBA. Might as well give teams a chance to avoid it.
That’s what the Wizards are looking for. Keefe knew what he was getting into when he accepted the job in 2024, fresh off an 8–31 stint as Washington’s interim coach. The Wizards went 18–64 in his first full season. They will finish with a comparable record in this one, with an NBA-worst point differential (-11.4). Young has played five games. Davis has not played any, leaving Washington to roll out a collection of unproven talent. Prod Keefe about it, though, and he will continue to focus on the positive.
“I love our group,” Keefe said. “We got a fun group. Like I said, they come to work every day. They want to get better. And we’ve had not the team success we wanted, but we’ve had a lot of growth from a lot of our guys. And that’s going to really help us going forward. But there’s lessons that we learned still. And I think we’re going to take advantage of these last games.”
Any fears of long-term damage for a young team absorbing nightly whoopings?
“I get the pleasure of being around them every day,” Keefe said. “The habits are good. They prepare right. They train right. We’re learning because we’re young, and that’s O.K. There’s nothing we’re going to apologize for that. And we’re not going to use that as excuse, but we’re learning, we are getting better. So that’s the things that we stick on. The process has been right. Sometimes we don’t always make the shots. Sometimes we don’t do it, but the process of what we’re trying to do and the mindset has been correct.”
With that, the news conference wrapped. No more questions. No more answers. Just a couple more weeks to go.
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