What is the purpose of a draft in any professional sport? It’s ultimately meant to be a balancing mechanism. Give the worst teams the best incoming players and they won’t have to remain the worst teams for much longer. This is a function the modern NBA Draft is no longer serving.
For a variety of reasons, no league invites tanking to quite the extent that the NBA does. As such, it has been the most aggressive sport in averting it. It was the first major professional sports league to adopt a Draft Lottery, and it has reformed that lottery frequently. The most recent change came in 2019, when the league grew tired of Philadelphia’s brazen tanking attempts during its “Process” era and lowered the odds any single team could have at winning the No. 1 pick. In 2018, the worst team had a 25% shot at No. 1. In 2019, the odds were flattened so that the worst team only had a 14% chance at the top pick.
That did little to quell tanking. We still had three teams win less than 20 games this season. Philadelphia won 24 with a team that entered the season with championship ambitions because its pick would have gone to Oklahoma City if it had fallen outside of the top seven. From that perspective, it would hard to say that the reform fulfilled its intended purpose. However, the change did prevent the draft itself from fulfilling that purpose. That was obvious the moment the Dallas Mavericks jumped up from No. 10 to No. 1 in Monday’s NBA Draft Lottery to secure the chance to pick Cooper Flagg, but the problem runs much deeper. Consider the lottery results as a whole since those 2019 reforms.
Recent NBA Draft Lottery history
- The team with the worst record has not picked No. 1 once since 2019.
- The team with the worst record has now fallen to No. 5 three years in a row.
- Of the 28 top-four picks handed out since 2019, more than half (15) have gone to teams starting in the fifth slot or later.
- Of those same 28 top-four picks given since 2019, seven have gone to teams starting in the eighth slot or later, so the second half of the lottery.
- Play-In Tournament teams have now won consecutive lotteries, as both the Mavericks in 2025 and Hawks in 2024 reached the postseason (but not the playoffs).
That last point feels especially egregious. If the idea of the draft is to give the worst teams the best young players, then how on Earth can the NBA justify giving the best prospect in consecutive drafts to teams that technically played in the postseason? Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose?
Ironically, this isn’t the first time the NBA has found itself in this situation. In 1992, the Orlando Magic won the lottery from the No. 2 slot. Great. That’s the lottery system broadly working. They had a 15.15% chance of winning. Only the Minnesota Timberwolves at 16.67% had stronger odds. Fast forward to 1993. The Magic win it again, this time jumping all the way up from No. 11 with 1.52% odds.
The outcry was big enough for the NBA to change the system again. In 1994, the team with the worst record saw its odds increased from 16.67% to 25%. That is where they remained through 2018. The No. 11 slot Orlando won from, meanwhile, was reduced to 0.5%. As more and more teams were added to the lottery over the years, the exact percentage at the bottom stayed in that range.
It took 25 years for the NBA to forget about this and flatten the odds back down to roughly where they were in 1993. Now, we have a similar situation on our hands. The wrong teams are winning, but the wrong teams are also losing. Salvation isn’t coming for the NBA’s worst teams.
The Wizards have won 33 games over the past two seasons. The Mavericks won 39 this season alone. It’s pretty apparent which of those teams needs the help more. Maybe Washington finds a star at No. 6, but more likely, the Wizards are near the bottom of the standings again. The same is probably true of the Hornets. The Jazz have been so determined to remain at the bottom until they can draft a star that they’ve made a habit of trading away veterans at the trade deadline just to preserve their lottery odds. Again, the 2019 reforms failed if their goal was to avert tanking.
The reality here is that any system that incentivizes losing in any way, shape or form is also going to incentivize tanking. So long as a draft in which the worst teams pick vaguely near the top exists, so will tanking. The NBA can’t stop that. But it can at least preserve the original function of the draft by sending the best prospects to the worst teams. Teams only stop tanking when they’re winning. If their simplest path to winning is top prospect, the NBA is actively making it harder for the worst teams to stop tanking by conducting the lottery in this way.
The major change that is needed
This doesn’t mean the lottery needs to go away entirely. It just needs to be reformed to serve that intended purpose. The concept of play-in teams winning it is patently ridiculous. A team should be in the postseason or in the lottery, not both. At a minimum, the last few years have made it clear that teams in the Play-In Tournament need to be banned from the lottery and their odds dispersed among the league’s worst teams.
Would there be unintended consequences of such a change? Sure. Some teams would tank out of the Play-In Tournament, but that’s already happening. Masai Ujiri essentially admitted that the Raptors did so in 2021. “Everybody’s like, ‘why don’t you get in the play-in?’ Play-In for what? We want to win a championship here,” he said. Tanking, in some form, is always going to happen.
The cure has become worse than the disease. This system is not working. It shouldn’t have taken perhaps the greatest front office bailout in NBA history to show us that, but we’re here. It’s time to make another change, because the lottery structure we have now is missing the entire point of why a draft exists in the first place.
