\u2022 Limiting pick protections on traded picks to either top-four or top-14 and beyond, which would eliminate the situation I enumerated above.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Not allowing a team to draft in the top four two years in a row.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Locking lottery positions after March 1.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll speak briefly on the last two, because they seem a bit more like solutions in search of a problem and could have unintended consequences.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m lukewarm on the March 1 lottery lock, which may have limited utility. We have seen a few instances of egregious late-season tanking to improve draft position (most notably by the Portland Trail Blazers in 2022 and Jazz in 2024), but the flattened lottery odds of recent seasons have made this much less of an issue. Additionally, variance in schedules before and after March 1 may make it harder to set this up fairly.<\/p>\n
Finally, it seems obvious that this might merely shift the timing of tanking more than the occurrence of it; teams might be encouraged to take some extraordinary measures between the trade deadline and March 1 to lock in their record before they resume competing March 2.<\/p>\n
As for not allowing a team to draft in the top four two years in a row, this is the typical NBA move of shutting the barn door after the horses left \u2014 yes, the San Antonio Spurs landed in the top four three years in a row, and that can\u2019t be undone. But it also took incredible luck. Moreover, changing the rule sounds fair until you realize that finishing with one of the worst three records normally comes with a 52.1 percent chance of picking in the top four. If you\u2019re bad for multiple seasons, you should be picking in the top four more than once.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the other part nobody talks about: Once you wipe four teams out of the lottery, all of this probability transfers to the other teams in the lottery. That in itself negatively alters everyone\u2019s tanking incentives.<\/p>\n
For instance, can you imagine how the end of the 2023-24 season would have played out if teams knew the Spurs, Hornets and Blazers couldn\u2019t pick in the top four when they had three of the five worst records? It would have nearly doubled the probability for every other lottery team to land in the top four, with the best odds weighted toward the worst teams, of course. As a result, middle-bad teams that year, such as the Brooklyn Nets and Memphis Grizzlies, who both had fairly ethical finishes to their seasons, would have instead pulled the rip cord \u2026 and quite possibly done it rather early.<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s go back to the first bullet in the list above, because that one is a slam dunk. It\u2019s a case that hasn\u2019t been talked about enough and, per my example at the top, is very relevant to the current season.<\/p>\n
Most people think the most egregious form of tanking is the Philadelphia 76ers Process-era stuff, and while that was bad, it\u2019s become less blatant in the current era of flattened lottery odds. It also hasn\u2019t involved teams overtly conspiring to lose individual games.<\/p>\n
To wit, teams are always going to make a conscious choice to be bad in certain years as part of a rebuilding plan, much as the Nets and Wizards are this year, for instance. But that playbook has always been much more a case of \u201cwe\u2019re not all that worried about winning\u201d rather than \u201cwe\u2019re doing whatever it takes to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n
Protected draft picks, on the other hand, fall into another case entirely. Virtually every example of egregious tanking in league history involves a team losing on purpose to protect a draft pick. (There are also one or two legendary tank games that involved playoff seeding, which is both rarer and more difficult to fix.)<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t a speculative tank to possibly improve lottery odds. Teams engaging in this tankcraft know exactly what they\u2019re getting: a free lottery pick. Moreover, the history of this grift says that crime pays:<\/p>\n
\u2022 The 2006 \u201cMark Madsen game\u201d remains the gold standard for protected pick tanking, when the Minnesota Timberwolves needed to lose their final game to Memphis to prevent themselves from catching the Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors in the standings and, depending on lottery results, possibly losing a protected draft pick as a result. Madsen launched five 3-pointers in the second overtime to lock up a loss to Memphis that landed Minnesota the sixth pick; the Wolves grabbed Brandon Roy with that choice, but alas traded him to Portland minutes later for Randy Foye.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The Warriors set their season on fire in 2012 to keep a top-seven protected pick that otherwise would have gone to Utah. It was arguably the most ambitious draft-pick tank ever, as the Warriors shut down key players (including Steph Curry) and glided from playoff contention to the league\u2019s seventh-worst record. The tank had added oomph due to a lockout-shortened 66-game schedule, but still: Golden State\u2019s 3-17 blitz to the finish only assured it a tie with Toronto for the seventh-worst record. However, the Warriors won a coin toss to keep the seventh position and stayed in that spot after the lottery. The Warriors picked Harrison Barnes, a key starter on their 2015 championship team.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The 2023 Dallas Mavericks were fined $750,000 by the league after blatantly tanking their final two games to protect a top-10 protected pick that would have gone to New York. Dallas ended up selecting 10th and, after a draft-day trade, picked center Dereck Lively II, who was a key cog in their run to the NBA Finals the next season.<\/p>\n
Last season\u2019s Sixers owed a top-six protected pick to the Thunder and ended up with the fifth-worst record after going 4-28 in the 32 games after the trade deadline. Merely landing fifth-worst was an amazing feat considering that, by the trade deadline, they had already won too many games to finish in any of the bottom three spots. The freefall gave the Sixers a 64.1 percent chance of keeping their pick, which they did when it landed third, and they selected VJ Edgecombe.<\/p>\n
Nobody is anxious to see more episodes like this, and putting a constraint on protections in draft-pick trades shouldn\u2019t be so cumbersome as to prevent trades from happening. In fact, some execs I talked to thought they might be easier: Sometimes trade talks get bogged down in haggling over protection minutiae \u2014 top eight versus top 10 and the like \u2014 and the clean line between top four and top 14 takes that out of play.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a good time to put this rule in play, too. After Washington and Utah this season, we have only a couple of outstanding future picks with similar mid-lottery protection situations \u2014 the most notable is a top-eight protected pick owed by the Sixers to Brooklyn in 2027. They\u2019d be grandfathered in, obviously, but after that, we could be done with pick-protection tanking forever.<\/p>\n
Good riddance. This rule change would be long overdue.<\/p>\n
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\n Once again, Nikola Joki\u0107 is making history on a regular basis. (Sam Navarro \/ Imagn Images)<\/p>\n
Stat Geekery: The ridiculous Joker<\/p>\n