The NBA's new '3-2-1 lottery' proposal penalizes tanking to the bottom. It's about time

The NBA has proposed an anti-tanking lottery system called “the 3-2-1 lottery.” In this new concept, the lottery would expand from 14 to 16 teams, flatten chances at the top overall pick, and feature all 16 picks chosen in the lottery.

Here is how lottery balls would be distributed in tiers with the odds at the top pick:

Play-in teams would be involved under this proposal. The two losers of the 7-seed vs. 8-seed matchups would receive one ball (2.7% odds). The four 9-seed vs. 10-seed teams would each receive two balls (5.4% odds).

Most interestingly, the three worst records in the league would have lower odds (5.4%) than the seven other teams that miss the playoffs and play-in (8.1%).

Those bottom three teams would enter what the NBA is calling “draft relegation” and lose one of their lottery balls to avoid a race to the bottom. This draft relegation concept was floated during the GM meeting in early April, as first reported on Yahoo Sports. It was met with great enthusiasm by NBA commissioner Adam Silver because of how the mechanism would work to deter teams from bottoming out.

All 16 picks would be selected in the lottery as part of this proposal. But the draft relegated teams would have a floor of the 12th pick.

I am all the way in on the draft relegation zone. It's time. The league has spent 20 years subsidizing the race to the bottom, and the case for cutting that subsidy is overwhelming.

The standard objection is that draft relegation makes it harder for the league's worst teams to climb out of a rebuild. I don't buy it. In recent years, plenty of organizations with functional front offices have fallen into the lottery and climbed back out in a hurry. The teams that don't climb back out — the ones that stay bad year after year — generally have the same problem, and it isn't bad luck. It's the people running the teams. Enabling horrible front offices by handing them higher odds would return the league to even more extreme levels of tanking.

The relegation zone also flips the sign on losing for the teams sitting in it. No longer will fans squint at a March and April schedule and root against their own roster. If this rule were in place this year, the Wizards, Pacers, and Nets would have been fighting like hell to get out of the top three. The Jazz and Kings, and Grizzlies all would have been trying hard to avoid it. Fans of the Mavericks wouldn't have been disappointed by some of the wins they picked up in April, which hurt their lottery odds. For the league's worst teams, winning would mean the same thing it's always meant to fans of every other team: it would be good.

Well, sort of. This proposal does have one big issue. To understand, here is how odds would be distributed by range:

The best place to be in the 3-2-1 Lottery is clearly out of the play-in while avoiding the bottom three. Because this new proposal aims to eliminate tanking at the bottom of the league, and it certainly does so with the draft relegated teams.

But there is a cliff between each tier. If you’re a 9th or 10th seed, you might rather be one of the seven non play-in teams for greater odds. If you’re the 7th or 8th seed, you might rather be in the 9th or 10th slot for double the odds. If you’re the 5th or 6th seed, you might rather get in the play-in.

I am concerned about this step in the lottery odds. The winners of those play-in games get the 7th seed and a zero percent chance in the lottery. The loser gets a chance to still make the playoffs and a 2.7% chance at the top pick, an 8% chance at the top three, a 15% chance at the top five, a 35% chance at the top 10, and a 100% chance at the top 16. That seems like a significantly better outcome.

This concern is why I was originally in favor of extending the lottery to 22 teams — the 10 teams that miss the playoffs, the four play-in losers, and the eight first-round exits — to further flatten the odds and reduce the cliff between each tier. I think this would go a lot further in eliminating tanking at every level of the league, and hope it makes a return. But given that the league has already moved from 18 teams in the past proposal to 16 teams in this one, it seems unlikely to make a return.

Regardless, the differential between each tier is narrow enough that the NBA hopes that no front office is going to instruct its coach to start dropping games in March in pursuit of it. But it could happen. Which is why the proposal also includes a clause granting the NBA expanded disciplinary authority with the ability to reduce a team's lottery odds or move its pick outright. A franchise visibly losing its way into the play-in, or visibly losing its way out of the play-in, is the exact scenario the league has in mind when it writes a sentence like that. The threat is the deterrent.

There is one more wrinkle, and it is the most quietly aggressive piece of the whole proposal: No team would be allowed to win the top pick in back-to-back years. And no team would be allowed to win three consecutive top-five picks.

Apply it retroactively, just for an idea of how this would manifest: The Spurs would have gotten Victor Wembanyama in 2023 and Stephon Castle in 2024, and would have been ineligible to take Dylan Harper second in 2025. The Pistons could have drafted Cade Cunningham in 2021 and Jaden Ivey in 2022, but would have been frozen out of the top-five for Ausar Thompson in 2023. I’m fine with a rule that is meant to break multi-year tanking cycles and eliminate the chances of a team getting super lucky multiple years in a row.

The 3-2-1 proposal is not the finished product. League sources say the odds may be tweaked, the relegation zone may shift, the lottery field may grow back to 18 or shrink to its current 14. The current language prevents teams from protecting picks in the 12-to-15 range, which feels like a placeholder for something more definitive. Owners don’t vote until May 28 and five weeks is a long time in league politics.

There is a natural pushback to the league’s approach that it just becomes much harder for teams to improve. The collective bargaining agreement already makes it harder to improve through free agency due to all the apron rules. Trades for veterans can be extremely expensive. Sometimes, the draft is the only way for teams to dig their way out of the bottom, or to crawl out of the middle into the top of the league. There will be unintended consequences. But teams intentionally losing games is an abomination that in no way should be celebrated and never serve as a solution.

The NBA is moving in the right direction. The bottom of the standings are about to become an uncomfortable place to live on purpose. Good. It should be.