But there is.<\/p>\n
First, eliminate the lottery. No televised suspense. No probabilistic theater. For non-playoff teams, draft order would be determined by two parts of the season. During the first two-thirds of the season, ending at the All-Star break, losses improve a team\u2019s draft position. During the final third of the season, wins improve it. While others<\/a> have floated the idea<\/a> of rewarding late-season wins with better draft odds, this proposal replaces the lottery with a simple points system. Each team\u2019s final draft position would reflect a combined score based on its losses in the first 55 games and its wins in the final 27.<\/p>\n The early season would still reward genuinely bad teams. The late season would reward teams that actually try to win.<\/p>\n Because it mirrors how the league already works, this structure addresses concerns that teams would tank during the first two-thirds of the season. For most of the year, nearly every team is sincerely competing. Coaches are coaching. Players are chasing playoff spots, contracts and reputations. Tanking, when it happens, is concentrated in the final third of the schedule. Moreover, any temptation to lose before the All-Star break would be tempered by the fact that wins will matter later in the season, and winning plays and habits cannot simply be switched on.<\/p>\n By anchoring most of the draft calculation to the part of the season when teams are still plausibly trying, the system continues to identify who truly struggled and ought to receive a higher draft pick in the name of competitive parity. But by flipping the incentive after the All-Star break, it removes the reward for orchestrated collapse. Once a team knows it is out of the playoff race, the rational strategy would no longer be to lose. It would be to win as many games as possible down the stretch to improve its draft position.<\/p>\n The side effect would be a dramatic improvement in the most lifeless stretch of the NBA calendar for much of the league. For fans of struggling teams, February, March and April often feel like extended preseason. With this system, the end of the season would suddenly matter for everyone. Imagine your team needing to win the last game to secure the first pick rather than the second. Last year, that would have meant the difference between Cooper Flagg (astonishing, franchise-altering) and Dylan Harper (promising).<\/p>\n Would all this hurt the legitimately awful teams that ought to benefit from higher draft picks? Not really. If a team is bad, it will post a poor record across the first 55 games and still receive a strong draft position under the primary component of the formula. Even a perfect late-season run can affect only one-third of the draft calculation. What teams would lose is the ability to improve their position by becoming strategically worse in the final few months.<\/p>\n That is not punishment. It is accountability.<\/p>\n Tanking is a predictable response to how the rules are written. The cleanest reform is not a further tweak to the lottery. It is a draft system that finally makes winning the only rational move \u2014 from opening night to the last game of the season.<\/p>\n About this story<\/p>\n Design and development by Yan Wu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jacob Bronsther is an associate professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law. Every spring, professional…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":554512,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-554511","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-nba","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Basketball\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/basketball.png\")
<\/p>\n