NBA’s new proposed lottery system actually makes things worse and doesn’t fix tanking

People attend the NBA draft lottery in Chicago, Monday, May 12, 2025. | Nam Y. Huh, Associated Press

I have been under the impression for most of my life that the NBA draft exists to inject new talent into the NBA and that the inverse record system by which the draft has operated was meant to promote parity and give the worst teams a chance at high-end talent that could help them improve.

I guess I was wrong.

Dead set on “fixing” the tanking problem in the NBA, the league’s highest ranking officials, owners and team executives have been meeting regularly over the last few weeks to come up with a new lottery system that would discourage tanking. Finally, this week, a memo was sent to all 30 NBA teams defining the proposed new system in broad strokes.

It’s called the “3-2-1 lottery,” with the 3-2-1 representing how many lottery balls are available to teams. Here’s how it works:

• The lottery expands from 14 to 16 teams.
• Teams that do not qualify for the playoffs or play-in tournament, but stay above a bottom-three record (spots four through 10), receive three lottery balls each.
• The teams with the three worst records are penalized, receiving two lottery balls each. They can fall no lower than pick No. 12.
• The Nos. 9 and 10 play-in seeds in each conference receive two lottery balls each.
• The losers of the Nos. 7-8 play-in games receive one lottery ball each.
• No team is able to win the top pick in consecutive years.
• No team is able to win three consecutive top-five picks.
• Teams cannot protect picks in the 12 to 15 slots.

If you’re a more visual person, Sportico’s Lev Akabas made a great chart that demonstrates the new odds for each of the lottery teams.

There are so many problems here that it’s difficult to know where to start. But let’s start with the play-in teams.

The play-in tournament is one of Adam Silver’s proudest creations. It was a shiny new thing to sell in the new media rights deal, it added intrigue at the end of the season and leading into the playoffs, and in general, it’s been a success. Think about how this new lottery system is going to impact the way play-in teams view their draft situation.

The ninth and 10th teams in each conference — teams that for the past few years have known that their lottery odds are low and they might as well just compete as hard as possible and maybe get a play-in or even an unlikely first-round playoff series — are now going to be incentivized to lose just a few more games so they can be in the pool of teams with the highest lottery odds.

This has the potential to increase the tanking pool rather than decreasing it. The last time the NBA flattened the lottery odds (after the 2018 season), it led to more bad teams, not fewer. This new iteration of flattening the lottery odds and opening up the lottery pool, does not give me confidence that NBA teams will all of a sudden decide that an 8.1% chance at the No. 1 overall pick isn’t worth going for.

Now we move to the bottom-three teams only getting two lottery balls each. Tanking teams have to work really hard to lose as many games as they do. They have to manufacture and embellish injuries and sit players for outlandishly long periods of time and reach into the bottom of the barrel for G-Leaguers to fill out their rosters.

For teams that are truly tanking, they just have to try a little less in order to land in the higher odds zone of the new lottery system. They can tank with a little more subtlety — shorter injury rehabs, not as many fire sales needed. The teams that are manipulating rotations and rosters can continue doing so under this new system, they just don’t need to bottom out anymore. Sure, the percentages at a No. 1 pick are smaller, but that hasn’t stopped them yet.

But if you’re a team that is really and truly awful, and even if you’re trying to win more to try to get out of the bottom-three basement of the NBA standings but you can’t, and you’re penalized by the NBA with a smaller chance at the No. 1 overall pick, what is the avenue to improving your team?

Bad teams under the new system could continually end up with low-level lottery picks, no stars and nothing to incentivize free agents. This could go on for years and years. Meanwhile, the No. 1 pick could end up going to a team that finished seventh in the Western Conference, creating an even wider gap between that team and the teams below it.

On May 28, team owners will have a final vote on this proposal, and between now and then, things can be amended. This new system also comes with a sunset provision in which the system expires after the 2029 draft, allowing owners to either continue on with it or go with something different.

I would urge owners to think about this system, what it really incentivizes, who it really helps and if it actually fixes anything at all. Think about how this impacts the draft assets that each team has, how it diminishes the value of first-round picks in future trades, how it changes the value of picks in trades that have already been made.

If you’re a team that has been struggling to climb up from the bottom of the standings, if you’re a team that is worried about the high number of injuries happening in the game and how those could impact records in the years to come, these are all things that should be discussed and valued more than anything this new system is introducing.

Because the way I see it, this new lottery system could ruin the play-in tournament, provides a pathway to more mediocre basketball, allows the wrong teams to be rewarded and could lead to less parity than we’ve enjoyed in recent years.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver opens the NBA basketball draft, Wednesday, June 26, 2024, in New York. | Julia Nikhinson