yahoo - 4/9/2026 8:50:25 PM - GMT (+2 )
This much we know: The NBA owners have scheduled a vote for May 28 on steps to reform the NBA Draft Lottery and install their latest anti-tanking measures, news broken by Shams Charania of ESPN.
What we don't know: What the owners will be voting on.
There is no consensus among owners on which anti-tanking measures the league should use, reports Anthony Slater at ESPN. Last month, the league put forward three concepts for the owners to consider to "fix" tanking, and all of them expanded the lottery to at least 18 teams and flattened the lottery odds.
The trouble for the league is the wide array of opinions on what exactly is the best fix and the fact that many of the favored concepts -- like flipping the benefits for lottery odds from losses to wins midseason -- are extremely difficult to explain simply to the casual consumer.
One idea that reportedly has some momentum gives the 10 teams that do not make the playoffs or play-in an 8% chance at the No. 1 pick, and the remaining odds (20%) get divided among the eight play-in teams.
The disconnect about tanking around the league is more fundamental — tanking has become an intrinsic part of a rebuild, and teams are not eager to do away with a tool they may want to use in the future.
"There is an aspect of team building that is called a genuine rebuild, rebuild with integrity," Silver said recently after the NBA Board of Governors meeting. "The problem we're having these days is it's become almost impossible to distinguish between a tank and a rebuild."
That's because tanking and rebuilding are intertwined: If a team is trying to do a tear-it-down total rebuild, then there will be a couple of seasons of tanking in there to give themselves the best odds of getting the kind of players who can get them wins and change a franchise. Every team tanking — even the ones the league thinks are doing it "unethically" (whatever that means in this case) — is literally doing it to improve their chances of landing a star player that can help turn a franchise around.
Fans are on board with tanking — right now in Utah the fan base is all in on tanking for this season to add another piece of the puzzle that will turn things around next season. That is true in Washington and Sacramento and Indiana and across the league with the nine teams considered to be tanking the final month of the season.
The NBA's problem with this level of tanking is it's a business, and while those fans may want their teams to tank for a season or two, those same fans go to fewer games and watch less of them while it is happening — the NBA tracks attendance and viewership of tanking teams and there is a steep drop off.
The league's other challenge is this: Put more teams in the lottery and flatten the odds and you may remove incentives for a team to tank, but the league also makes it much tougher for bad teams to get the good players they need to turn things around — teams will have to be bad and tank longer to get the players they need.
There is no easy answer here, but Silver said, "We are going to fix it… full stop." So the owners are going to vote on something come May 28.
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