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Stop us if you've heard this before: the NBA is apparently unhappy with its league-wide tanking epidemic. After several attempts at lottery reform and the adoption of the Play-In Tournament, the league, according to ESPN, is considering several more drastic steps to attack the problem. Solutions being considered include:

  • Limiting the legal protections on traded first-round picks to top-four or 14 or above, theoretically eliminating the incentive to tank down to a specific slot or try to lose when a Play-In berth is at stake.
  • No longer allowing teams to draft in the top four in consecutive seasons.
  • Locking lottery positions after March 1.

While each of these concepts at least has some merit, the drawbacks in each case are often just as significant if not worse. 

The problems with the solutions

Take locking lottery positions after March 1. If teams know they need to get their tanking in before March 1, they'll just start tanking earlier. Take the 2023 and 2024 Jazz. Utah started hot in both seasons. Then they intentionally made trades to get worse in order to facilitate tanks. What sounds likelier in a world in which tanking was off the table for them: that they would have shrugged and, in 2024 at least, risked handing Oklahoma City a protected pick by leaning into their success and trying to win, or just made their tanking trades earlier, perhaps in the offseason? 

If anything, you could argue this approach would actually lead to a lower quality of basketball than the current system. Why? Because removing the incentive to lose does not automatically create an incentive to win. If a teams suddenly start doing their tanking earlier and build putrid rosters in order to lose as many games as possible before March 1, it's not as though those teams will suddenly, magically improve after March 1. 

Perhaps injured superstars would return earlier, as there would no longer be any incentive to turn minor aches and pains into season-ending diagnoses for the sake of a draft pick. The league would surely welcome this. The player participation policy exists for a reason. They want these players available as draws for nationally televised games. But think about non-draft incentives. If a team is already out of the playoff race, why would it risk further injury to a key player with little to gain by using them? Oftentimes caution is just as significant a driver of extended absences as lottery position. If a team has nothing to gain by winning this season, its focus shifts to next season, and bringing an injured player back for meaningless games risks recurrence for no tangible benefit.

Limiting pick protections would solve certain niche tanks. Charania cites the 2023 Mavericks as an example. They owed the Knicks a top-10 protected pick, so they tanked for it rather than trying to make the Play-In Tournament. Notably, though, they tanked only for two games. It's bad optics, sure, but a far smaller problem than teams throwing away big chunks of seasons. This solution wouldn't have changed much for the 2025 76ers. The moment they knew their championship ambitions were unattainable, they would have tanked just as hard to keep a top-four protected pick just as aggressively as they did to keep the top-six protected pick they actually traded.

The most obvious detrimental effect of creating limitations on pick protections would be imposing yet another road block on trades. The 2023 CBA has already made trading hard enough, and even if the league doesn't want to admit this, trade rumors drive a substantial amount of interest in the sport. The last thing anyone should want is a good player languishing on a bad team because a contender that might once have been willing to give up a top-eight protected pick for him suddenly thinks a top-four protected pick is too rich for their blood.

What about disallowing teams from picking in the top four in consecutive seasons? Last year's top four was an outlier, but again, most teams picking the top four are there because they're among the worst teams in the league. Banning them from receiving another top-four pick isn't magically going to make them better. What it will do is incentivize the teams picking between No. 5 and No. 8 to tank like crazy next year, because their path to a top-four pick just got significantly easier.

The real beneficiary of a change like this would be so-called "gap year" teams. Say you're a team like Indiana or Boston, dealing with an injury that could cost your best player most or all of a season before it even begins. If the four worst teams from the previous season are suddenly out of the mix for a top-four pick, the league is practically begging you to take a year off, nab a top prospect, and then deal with no consequences because you wouldn't have picked in the top four in the following season with your star back anyway. Boston is having a remarkably successful and exciting season despite Jayson Tatum's injury. In a world like this, they might have prematurely traded away veterans, decided organizationally not to bring Tatum back under any circumstances and gone whole hog for a top draft pick.

Heck, we might even see teams actively plan for this gap-year approach. Look at Memphis. The Grizzlies traded Desmond Bane before the season, but kept core players like Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. Jackson got hurt in the offseason. Morant did early this season. If they saw four of the worst teams in the NBA ineligible to pick in the top four, they might have intentionally packed it in then and there planning to ride out a wasted season before rebounding next year. Instead, they've clawed their way back into a Play-In spot. If they only needed to tank until March 1. Suddenly teams in the middle of the standings might realize strategically sacrificing four months could get them the superstar they need to jump into true championship contention.

Curbing tanking curbs parity

This begs the question: do we want winning teams to get top draft picks? Or, more broadly, what sort of teams do we want making top picks? The mere existence of the NBA Draft answers that question. The purpose of any reverse-standings order draft is to assign the best incoming talent to the worst teams for the sake of parity. While the exact mechanics may differ, every major American professional sports league uses some version of a draft for this exact reason. This isn't European soccer. American fans want a somewhat level playing field. Adam Silver does, too. Parity has been one of the prevailing themes of his commissionership. "We set out to create a system that allowed for more competition around the league, the goal being to have 30 teams all in the position, if well managed, to compete for championships," Silver said last June.

And this is where the problems arise, because any effort to curb tanking also attacks that mission of parity, because it makes it harder for the worst teams to improve. The mere existence of a reverse-standings order NBA Draft creates some incentive for teams to lose games. So long as the NBA Draft exists in this form, teams will tank. If anything, the anti-tanking measures the league has taken forces teams to tank even longer. The two worst teams last season were the Jazz and Wizards. They are both predictably bad again this year. The top prospect in the 2025 NBA Draft was Cooper Flagg. He went to the team with the 11th-worst record, a Mavericks franchise that just traded a 25-year-old star for a 31-year-old and was therefore obviously not planning to tank in 2026. If the Wizards or Jazz had gotten Flagg, maybe they would have tried harder to win. Instead, they're forced to keep tanking in the hopes that they land the next Flagg. Either that, or try to win without such a player, and likely get stuck in the middle.

Silver says he wants any well-managed team to be able to compete for championships. Though the Wizards and Jazz may have taken an approach that is distasteful and harmful to the league's product, it is undeniably in their best interest within the incentive structure the league has created. They are well-managed teams. They just aren't lucky ones. How different would their fortunes be if they had even one of Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle or Dylan Harper? Because lottery luck gave the Spurs all three. The Spurs are also exceptionally well-managed, but pretending that luck isn't the foundation of their current success would be extremely naive. Frankly, the lottery has created a system in which it's more important to be lucky than smart.

What about more drastic solutions?

The NBA could achieve versions of Silver's well-managed utopia by eliminating the draft altogether, or altering the pick-assignment mechanism so drastically that there is no longer an incentive to tank. There's a reason they haven't done this. They know doing so would be catastrophic.

Say you eliminated the draft altogether. Rookies would be treated as standard free agents, able to sign with any team they wanted. You know who wins in that world? Nike. Sneaker companies don't have a salary cap. They can pay prospects as much as they see fit, and those prospects are more valuable to them in New York than in Memphis. Sure, smart management could still win in this world. Nike wasn't going to bother steering a second-round prospect like Nikola Jokić to the Lakers, after all. But let's be honest. Most of the league's best players arrive with more fanfare than that, and while early access to the best young talent in the sport doesn't necessarily guarantee championships, it would give big-market teams such a massive and unfair advantage that the situation just wouldn't be tenable.

How about Mike Zarren's wheel? The basic concept, for those unfamiliar, would be to set up a fixed rotation across 30 years in which all 30 franchises would make each pick between No. 1 and No. 30 exactly once. The obvious first issue: this locks the NBA into a specific draft format for three decades. If it's not working in five years, it would be unfair to change it before everyone has gotten their No. 1 overall pick. How could it account for possible expansion?

It also assumes balance that frankly does not exist. Sometimes the No. 1 overall pick is Wembanyama and sometimes it's Zaccharie Risacher. No two picks are exactly alike. Inevitably, some teams would get far luckier with where they pick in certain years than others, once again minimizing the impact of wise management. Then there's the obvious concern of a top contender landing a top pick right as a star prospect becomes available and extending its window indefinitely. This approach sounds balanced, but would ultimately be impractical and harm Silver's stated mission of "parity of opportunity."

That's what makes this debate so complex. Silver is being torn between his two competing professional priorities: the NBA as a financial enterprise and the NBA as a competitive enterprise. Tanking is fundamentally bad for the former. Fewer fans want to watch tanking teams, to buy tickets to their games or merchandise for their players. Yet as we've covered, any move made to curb tanking could very well do more competitive harm than good, which in turn could make the NBA less balanced and therefore potentially less popular.

This is a calculation every other American sport has made. All of them still broadly land on the side of rewarding losing through a reverse-standings order draft. Why the NBA seemingly has more of a problem with tanking than the rest of them is debatable and ultimately pointless. The cons of that system may be harsher for the NBA than other leagues, but the pros are still an absolute competitive necessity.

That makes tanking not just an unsolvable problem, but frankly, a necessary evil. Every minor step the NBA takes to curb it has unintended consequences that create further problems. Any major step the NBA could take to eliminate it entirely would fundamentally alter roster-building in ways that would do more harm than good. The cure can't be worse than the disease. Bad teams are an inevitability. Whether they're bad naturally or intentionally is irrelevant. These bad teams are all trying to turn things around as quickly as possible. Tanking is the easiest path to do so no matter how badly the NBA wishes otherwise.