During a panel at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, NBA commissioner Adam Silver discussed the issue of tanking. He confirmed that the league plans to make significant changes to its rules by the 2026-27 season, as reported by Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic.
“We are going to make substantial changes for next year,” Silver stated. “One idea is to completely separate the draft from teams’ records. This would remove incentives for tanking. For example, a team could win the finals and still get the first pick. However, there are various options to consider.”
While Silver hinted at a major overhaul of the NBA’s draft lottery system, he acknowledged that the changes may not be as extensive as suggested.
“I’m not going to predict exactly what we’ll do, but I tend to be cautious,” he said. “We need to be careful about making huge changes at once. I’m not excluding any possibilities, but I’m also paying attention to the implications. Any changes would be more significant than just small adjustments.”
Last month, various approaches to reduce tanking were discussed by the NBA, including:
- Limiting teams from placing protections on traded first-round picks.
- Preventing teams from having top-four picks in consecutive years or after finishing in the bottom three for multiple seasons.
- Disallowing teams from selecting in the top four if they made the conference finals the previous year.
- Freezing lottery odds at the trade deadline or another unspecified date.
- Flattening odds for all lottery teams.
- Assigning lottery odds based on records from the past two years.
- Extending the lottery to include all eight play-in teams instead of just the four that miss the playoffs.
Silver mentioned that one noteworthy idea is to base lottery odds on a team’s performance over the last two seasons, a method used in the WNBA. He expressed concern about penalizing teams genuinely trying to win with young rosters but acknowledged that this season’s tanking, especially with a strong draft expected in 2026, has gone too far.
“This season is unique because of the perception of a very deep draft,” the commissioner said. “While predictions can be misleading, there seems to be a consensus on a few players being real game-changers. Coupled with forecasts that the drafts in the next two years may not be as strong, this creates a strong incentive for teams to tank.”