Tanking - Is It Worth Fixing?

Backstory

For those who may be a little more removed from the NBA this year, it feels like tanking is at an all-time high, and people cannot stop talking about it. I push back a bit on that, we might just be looking at an absolutely loaded draft class, and maybe that has something to do with why tanking feels worse. The Utah Jazz have been the main talking point, as it’s felt like they’re blatantly trying to lose by not playing a lot of their starters in the fourth quarter.

Personally, I don’t believe tanking is the number one issue the NBA needs to fix, and I think a lot of the proposed changes could send massive shockwaves through the league that end up hurting more than helping.

Proposed Changes

Today, Febuary 19th 2026, ESPN's Shams Charania shared a tweet of some possible changes being discussed by adam silver and co:

First-round picks can be protected only top-4 or top 14+

This proposed rule probably has the fewest obvious negative side effects. For anyone who isn’t deep in the weeds on pick protections, here’s the quick version: when a team trades a first-round pick, they can “protect” it. For example, a team might make it top-6 protected. That means if things completely fall apart and the pick lands in the top six, they keep it. If it falls outside that range, it conveys to the other team. Sometimes if it doesn’t convey, it rolls over into the next year with different protections.

Under this proposal, teams would only be allowed to protect picks in two ways: either top-4 protected, or lottery-level (top-14) and beyond. So no more top-5 through top-13 protections, which realistically, is where a lot of protections probably sit.

At first, this confused me. But the thinking seems to be that those middle protections (top 5–13) still give teams a reason to flirt with tanking. If you protect top-10, for example, there’s still incentive to slide down the standings to keep your pick.

Now here’s where I push back.

What’s one of the best times of the NBA calendar? Say it with me: the trade deadline. That chaos is part of what makes the league so fun. And while this rule wouldn’t completely kill that excitement (like eliminating protections altogether could), it absolutely reduces flexibility. Protections are insurance. They make teams feel safer swinging big.

Take some of that insurance away, and teams might get more hesitant to make aggressive moves. Fewer creative deals. Fewer blockbuster swaps. A slightly less chaotic deadline. Maybe that’s cleaner from a league-office perspective, but from a fan perspective? I’m not sure that’s a win.

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

Right now, the draft lottery happens after the regular season ends. Every non-playoff team gets lottery odds based on their record, the three worst teams each get a 14% chance at the No. 1 pick, and the odds gradually decrease from there. Normally, those odds are locked in after the final game of the season. Records are final, and that determines the lottery order.

The goal of this proposal is pretty straightforward, reduce the incentive for teams to tank late in the year. Once you’re out of the playoff picture, winning can actually hurt your draft position, which creates some ugly incentives down the stretch.

But in my opinion, this change creates two new problems.

First, it just shifts the tanking earlier. Teams will still have every reason to lose, they’ll just front-load it before the deadline. Maybe the games get more competitive after that point, but is that really solving the issue or just moving it around on the calendar?

The second issue is the bigger one. This opens the door for manipulation from better teams. Imagine a solid team that coasts into the deadline, resting stars, punting games, quietly underperforming just enough to lock in stronger lottery odds. Then suddenly, after the odds freeze, everyone’s healthy again and they make a playoff push while still holding meaningful lottery chances.

Is that scenario extreme? Maybe. But rules are supposed to guard against extreme outcomes. And this one feels like it creates a loophole where a competent team could realistically try to have it both ways.

No longer allowing a team to pick top 4 in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-3 finishes

This one sounds good in theory. The idea is simple, if a team is terrible year after year, they shouldn’t just keep stacking top picks. When people think about this, they immediately think of “The Process” in Philadelphia. On paper, it makes sense.

But again, you have to think about extreme examples, because those are the ones rules actually impact.

As a Celtics fan, here’s one that hits close to home.

In 2013, the Boston Celtics traded Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to the Brooklyn Nets. In return, they got a haul of future first-round picks (2014, 2016, 2017, 2018) 2017 being a swap. Fast forward to 2016: the Nets finished with the third-worst record in the league and landed the No. 3 pick. That pick belonged to Boston, and they used it on a shooting guard out of Cal: Jaylen Brown.

The following year, the Nets were even worse. They finished with the worst record in the NBA and won the No. 1 pick. Once again, that pick belonged to Boston. The Celtics traded down to No. 3 and selected a forward out of Duke: Jayson Tatum.

Now imagine this proposed rule exists back then.

Under a strict version of it, the Celtics might’ve been blocked from making back-to-back top-4 selections, even though those picks weren’t the result of tanking. They were the result of winning a trade.

So you end up with a weird outcome, Boston misses out on drafting the two franchise cornerstones who became supermax players and perennial Finals contenders… because another team made a bad trade and then happened to be terrible.

That feels like punishing the wrong party.

And it’s also worth pointing out, the Nets had zero incentive to tank in this scenario. They didn’t even control their own picks. They were just legitimately bad. So now you’re not even stopping tanking, you’re penalizing asset management and bad roster construction.

That’s where this rule starts to fall apart for me. It sounds logical in theory, but once you apply real-world examples, it gets messy fast.

Teams can't pick top-4 the year after making a conference finals

This one feels the most out of left field. You might ask: how often does a team make the conference finals and then pick in the top four the very next year?

Funny enough, it’s potentially happening twice in a really short window.

In 2024, the Dallas Mavericks made the NBA Finals but lost to the Celtics. The very next season, they ended up winning the lottery and picking No. 1 overall. How did that happen? A shocking Luka Dončić trade, missing the playoffs, and then getting extremely lucky in the lottery.

Then you look at the Pacers. They made the Finals the following year, losing a Game 7 to Oklahoma City. The defining moment of that series for Indy was Tyrese Haliburton tearing his Achilles. Now the question becomes: does losing one superstar take you from a Finals team to a bottom-feeder? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s at least within the realm of outcomes.

Under this proposed rule, both of those teams would be punished. And that’s what makes this feel like an overcorrection driven by a couple of weird, back-to-back scenarios.

I’d also be really curious how often this has actually happened historically. Is this a real trend the league needs to address, or are we reacting to two recent outliers and building policy around them?

Lottery odds allocated based on two-year records

This is one I don’t absolutely hate. I still don’t love it, and I’m not convinced it solves everything, but compared to the others, it feels a little more reasonable.

The biggest downside to me is complexity. One of the best things about the lottery right now is that it’s simple, bad record this year = better odds. If you start blending multiple seasons together, it gets harder for casual fans to follow. And once things feel overly complicated, people tend to care less, especially about something like the lottery, which is supposed to be a fun, chaotic event.

I also don’t know if this really fixes the core issue. Teams might still tank, they’d just do it more strategically across multiple years instead of one. So you’re not necessarily removing the incentive, just stretching it out.

That said, unless I’m missing a huge unintended consequence, this probably wouldn’t be the worst change in the world. It just feels like adding complexity to a system that doesn’t necessarily need it.

Lottery extended to include all play-in teams

This is one I actually kind of like. It doesn’t solve the true tanking problem, the teams chasing the No. 1 pick usually aren’t anywhere near the play-in anyway, but it does help address the middle ground.

Where this helps is with bubble teams. Giving all play-in teams at least a shot at a decent pick isn’t the worst idea. Right now, there’s a weird incentive where teams around the 9–11 range have to decide whether to push for the play-in or just slide back for draft positioning. This could smooth that out a bit.

And realistically, making the play-in doesn’t automatically mean you’re a real playoff team. We’ve barely seen 10-seeds win two play-in games and make a run (Miami might've done it). Just because you survive two play-in games doesn’t suddenly make you a contender.

So overall, this isn’t some massive fix, but it feels like a reasonable tweak. It helps the competitive middle without completely reshaping the top of the lottery.

Flatten odds of all lottery teams

This is the last major rule change that’s been floated, and honestly, it might be one of my least favorite. It also directly contradicts the “fix” I’ll talk about after this.

In a weird way, I actually think the lottery system already incentivizes tanking more than it prevents it. Since the last big lottery reform, when the worst three teams were given equal odds at the No. 1 pick, the team with the worst record hasn’t landed the top pick once. That’s kind of wild.

I get why people don’t like blatant tanking. Nobody wants to watch a team clearly trying to lose games. But more often than not, the worst team in the league is just… bad. They’re not gaming the system, they’re rebuilding, injured, or poorly constructed. And now they don’t even have a clear path to improvement.

Flattening the odds across the entire lottery would only amplify that problem. In theory, you’re creating a world where there’s very little difference between being the worst team in the league and being, say, the 14th-worst team that just missed the playoffs. Sure, maybe that reduces the incentive to bottom out completely, but it also removes meaningful reward for truly bad teams trying to rebuild.

And that’s my biggest issue with this idea. It might reduce extreme tanking, but it does so by making it harder for legitimately bad teams to get better. And if your anti-tanking solution hurts rebuilding more than it helps competition, I’m not sure that’s a great trade-off.

My proposed "fix"

At its core, the NBA draft, like any draft in sports, exists to give the worst teams a chance to land the best young players. The goal is simple: acquire a potential franchise player and become competitive. As I mentioned before, the lottery often contradicts that core purpose. Sure, some teams find loopholes or exploit the system, but more often than not, the teams in the lottery are simply bad, and they’re being punished because of overcorrections to a problem that shouldn’t even be the NBA’s top priority.

My proposed fix is straightforward: abolish the lottery. Other leagues, like the NFL, handle this differently. The draft order is just the reverse of the standings, the worst team gets the first pick, the second-worst gets the second pick, and so on. No luck involved.

Yes, this won’t completely eliminate tanking, some teams might still try to lose on purpose. But it would prevent the yearly carousel of near-top picks that we’ve seen recently, where mediocre teams like the Wizards and Jazz keep picking near the top because they might have landed the No. 1 pick in one year and drastically changed their trajectory. This approach ensures a poor team gets a top player, and in theory, the next season, they should be better. Obviously, they still need to draft wisely, but it keeps the system fairer.

Let’s be real: tanking will always exist as long as there’s a draft. And abolishing the draft entirely, turning rookie acquisition into free agency, would be disastrous. Fans love parity, variety in winners, and fresh stars. The draft promotes exactly that: if the worst teams get the best picks, they can acquire elite young talent and eventually compete.

Here’s a quick thought experiment using the last seven years of drafts:

Jazz - Cooper Flagg

Pistons - Zaccharie Risacher

Pistons - Victor Wembanyama

Rockets - Paolo Banchero

Rockets - Cade Cunningham

Warriors - Anthony Edwards

Knicks - Zion Williamson

Sure, some of these picks look weird in hindsight because some of these teams are good now. But at the time, giving these teams the No. 1 pick could have drastically altered trajectories. Imagine: Zion as the face of the league in New York, Steph Curry with Anthony Edwards as a backcourt partner post-dynasty, Rockets getting both Cade and Paolo after Harden, the ripple effects are huge. The Pistons would have drafted differently depending on which top pick they got, and the Jazz likely wouldn’t be “tanking” if they landed Cooper Flagg today.

Does this solve every problem? No. Nothing will. But compared to some of the extreme proposed changes floating around, this is simple, fair, and stays true to the purpose of the draft without overcorrecting or punishing the wrong teams.

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