The NBA presented three broad anti-tanking concepts to its Board of Governors on Wednesday as part of this week’s meetings in New York, sources told ESPN’s Shams Charania, with each expected to be amended before a formal vote in May.
Each of the three concepts would be a radical departure from the current setup. They have one thing in common: bringing teams that make the playoffs into the lottery process. From there, they change dramatically.
In the first proposal, sources told Charania, 18 teams – the final 10 that missed the play-in tournament, and the eight that qualify for it – would all be part of the draft lottery.
The bottom 10 teams will have the same 8% chance of advancing in the lottery, with the remaining 20% odds divided among the eight play-in teams in descending order from 11th to 18th.
All 18 places will be drawn as part of a lottery in that format.
In the second proposal, sources told Charania, 22 teams – the bottom 10 teams that missed the play-in tournament, the eight that qualified for it and the four playoff teams that lost in the first round – would all be included in the lottery, and would be ranked according to their records over the two seasons. The final part, weighting teams based on their record over the past two seasons, is how the WNBA weights its lottery system.
Under that system, each team would be required to reach a minimum win total each season, to minimize the need to lose every possible game. For example, if the minimum floor for an individual season was 20 wins, a team that went 14–68 would be 20–62 for lottery purposes. And if a team wins 40 games one season and 20 games the next season, it will count as 30 wins for the lottery.
In this system, the top four places would be drawn as part of a lottery, as is currently the case.
The third proposal is the “five-by-five” method, sources told Charania. In it, the same 18 teams from the first concept – the final 10 that missed the play-in, plus the eight that made it – will be entered into the lottery. The teams with the five worst records will have equal odds, and they will be seeded from there, and there will be a lottery drawing for each of the top five picks in the draft.
After those five selections are selected, another lottery will be held for the remaining 13 teams. If none of the teams with the five worst records finished in one of those top five spots – such as last season, when the first-place teams ( utah jazz), Second (washington wizards) and fourth (New Orleans Pelicans) The worst records all fell back to fifth, sixth, and seventh, respectively – the lowest they could get was 10th in the second lottery drawing, preventing a poor team from falling too far down the draft board.
Over the next several weeks, owners are expected to discuss detailed concepts with their respective team leadership groups in basketball operations to better digest the potential impacts and unintended consequences. Governors, Presidents and General Managers are expected to continue open dialogue with the league office on the concepts and amendments to them prior to the May vote.
NBA begins brainstorming changes to deal with dating tanking back to December. Does not involve new concepts thoughts sinceSuch as limiting pick protection on trades and freezing lottery odds on a certain date.
At his press conference at the conclusion of this week’s meetings in Manhattan on Wednesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver made it clear that things going to change The league has faced significant criticism this season regarding teams wildly chasing one of the top spots in the 2026 NBA draft class, and that the incentive structure for teams is “obviously” going to change for next season.
“I think ultimately it’s a decision that needs to be made at the ownership level,” Silver said. “It has business implications, basketball implications, it has implications for the integrity, the integrity, the league.
“So this is something we take very seriously, and we’re going to fix it. Full stop.”
To that end, the fact that the NBA is holding a special meeting of the Board of Governors in May is a sign of how important the league believes it is to deal with the problem. Standard meetings take place in Las Vegas at the end of the regular season in late March or early April, at the beginning of the new season in September or October, and in July during the Summer League each year. Holding a separate meeting to accomplish this is a highly unusual occurrence.
Still, Silver said Wednesday there is no clear solution to the problem — and even suggested more changes could come in future collective bargaining discussions with the National Basketball Players Association, although the current CBA runs through the end of the decade.
“There’s an aspect of team-building called real rebuilding, rebuilding with integrity,” Silver said. “Our problem these days is that it has become almost impossible to distinguish between tanks and reconstructions.
“There’s so much nuance to it that when the incentives don’t match, when we get into it now with the coach’s decisions on the lineup and when players come in and out of games, the injuries, the doctors going back and forth with each other, the players’ pain levels, when I say fix it right now, my sense is, yes, we need to make something more extreme than those incremental changes we’ve made the last four times. [we’ve made changes]”
