By Jackson Posey | Sports Editor
I’ve been publicly complaining about the NBA Draft lottery for almost a decade.
The day after my 14th birthday, my article on fixing the “broken” system was published on Fadeaway World. At the time, tanking was — erroneous hyphenation aside — “the single-largest problem facing the NBA.” Today’s league faces the same problems.
“Overwhelmingly, everyone realizes changes are coming and they need to come,” an anonymous executive told The Athletic after a call between NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the league’s top executives last week. “It’s a matter of when and what and how. What changes you implement, do they last a year, five years, is this a quick band-aid? That’s not what we want.”
Silver, an accomplished commissioner and former lawyer, has suggested a plethora of potential changes, from lottery odds freezing after a certain date to preventing teams from picking in the top four in consecutive seasons.
But let’s ignore the head honcho for a minute. The tanking epidemic may just be widespread enough that NBA officials prefer to look externally.
Enter: an acne-riddled 13-year-old with braces, with nothing better to do than to daydream lottery reforms and pretend to know about politics. Now just a few months shy of the article’s 10-year anniversary, let’s see which (if any) of his 10 proposals still stand up.
1. Spin the wheel
The vertical wheel would be weighted to account for record, which begs an obvious question of physics: wouldn’t the heaviest side always wind up at the bottom? Posey’s worries of potential conspiracy theories simply don’t account for reality.
Fortunately, this idea was already deemed a “no-go” — not for logistical reasons, but simply because it’s “way less suspenseful than ping-pong balls, and it seems too much like an attraction at a carnival.”
Grade: D
2. No top-three picks in successive years
The NBA is currently considering this, actually.
Grade: There is nothing new under the sun
3. Relegation
This idea, Posey says, is “worth a passing mention, but only when accompanied by a chuckle.” The implementation would be impossible for numerous reasons, but it would certainly solve the issue of tanking.
Grade: B-/Show me the blueprints
4. Flattened odds
The Dallas Mavericks notoriously earned headlines for sitting their stars at the end of the 2023 season, even while the team still had a chance at making the play-in tournament.
Intentionally dropping out of playoff consideration would, undoubtedly, become standard practice. And as teams like the Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards have shown in recent years, most small-market franchises can’t simply choose to get better. They need stars. Flattened lottery odds would keep small-market teams bad for even longer.
Grade: D-
5. All of the picks are chosen live, via ping-pong balls
Ahem, allow me to quote my younger self:
“This makes a lot of sense. The danger, though, would be that it would drag on for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO0OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time. The real one can drag on for an hour or more though, and at least this way we could see it. FUN FACT: There is one zero in all of those O’s. Whoever finds it and tweets it to me first wins!”
Ah, yes. Some things never change.
Grade: F
6. Bottom three teams have the same odds
Hey, they actually did this one! (And it totally worked.)
Grade: Told you so
7. The teams with the worst end-of-year records have less ping-pong balls
First of all, that should read “fewer.” Second, this admittedly has some holes in it, including the difficulty of accounting for injuries, but a hard cut-off could benefit the tank race. If the worst three teams were barred from picking first overall, for instance, bottom-feeding teams could be motivated to add pieces at the deadline and play their starters down the stretch.
Grade: A- (docked for grammar)
8. Keep the same system (for now)
So, uh. What’s the point of this article?
Grade: Come on, man
9. Lottery odds are based on record post-playoff elimination
Depending on which metric(s) the league chooses to measure — win percentage, total wins, Pythagorean wins, point differential, etc — this could represent a meaningfully positive step, albeit a confusing and imbalanced one. If the goal is to measure effort, this is a move in the right direction.
As our intrepid Jonah Hill wannabe admits, though, this plan suffers from the same plight as many of his other harebrained schemes: being too difficult to implement. Does a team that narrowly misses the playoffs only need to go 1-0 to get the top odds? Or, if it’s based on sheer bulk, wouldn’t teams just tank until they’re ruled out?
There’s certainly some creativity here, but we need to take the scheming a step further.
Grade: Incomplete
10. Three-team rotation
I’m frankly not sure what I was yapping about here. The basic premise is that every team is grouped into a permanent three-team “capsule,” with the groups cycling through the draft order each year (excluding playoff teams). Non-playoff teams would be guaranteed top picks, with minimal influence on where they wind up.
For example: if the Pistons, Bucks and Bulls were in Group B, the playoff-bound Pistons would get their normal pick in the 20s, while Milwaukee and Chicago would fill in Group B’s spots in the lottery. If every Group A team makes the playoffs, Group B’s teams would automatically leapfrog into picks No. 1 and 2. Group C would fill in behind, and so on.
The 14 non-playoff teams (plus the worst playoff team, for some reason) are then assigned lottery odds based on where they and their pods fall within that year’s draft cycle. The NBA Draft lottery gets to keep churning out TV ratings, only a few teams have strong motivations to lose, and the case seems open and shut. At least, that’s how it seems to my idealistic twin.
“Like real life #10 picks Paul Pierce and Jimmer Fredette, this idea is a winner,” Posey wrote. “Literally and metaphorically, because it would de-incentivize losing.” Well, I can’t keep going with this article. I mean, we found the answer, and I kind of ran out of gas. No more gas in the bucket, you know?
“Why did I say bucket, you ask? Well, no one has gas in tanks anymore, because tanking got shut down by Pick 10.”
Grade: A+
