NBA Draft lottery reform is coming, Adam Silver wants it and what the NBA Commissioner wants, he gets. The only question is what it will look like.
There is a growing momentum behind a formula that would expand the lottery to 18 teams and flatten the odds, reports Sam Amick at The Athletic.
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Yet according to league and team sources, a heavy front-runner has emerged among the three proposed solutions… 18 teams would be part of the draft lottery (rather than the current 14) and the bottom 10 teams would all have an 8% chance of landing the No. 1 pick. The remaining odds — 20 percent in all — would be divided among the remaining eight teams.
There’s a lot to unpack, and a lot of questions about this:
• Nothing can become official until the Board of Governors meets and votes on it next month. Meaning nothing is set in stone.
• Expanding to 18 teams means that not only are the four teams that lose in the play-in going to be in the lottery, but so are the four teams with the worst record that make the playoffs but lose in the first round. If it were in place this season, teams such as Toronto and maybe Phoenix would be in the lottery.
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• While the odds are small, wait for the outcry the first year one of the playoff teams wins the lottery and gets the No. 1 pick, something Amick gets into at The Athletic:
As several general managers pointed out, there is a fear that implementing Option No. 1 might simply create new problems that will eventually need to be addressed. What might the league-wide reaction be, for example, when one of those two lottery teams that actually took part in the playoffs gets lucky by landing the No. 1 pick?
• If Adam Silver and the owners vote to do nothing, just leave the system as is, there will be far less tanking next season because it is seen as a much weaker draft class. That said, you can be sure a year from now Silver and the NBA league office will take a victory lap about how great their tanking solution worked.
• Giving all 10 teams that miss the playoffs entirely an equal 8% chance to win the No. 1 pick does reduce the incentive to race all the way to the bottom and have the worst record in the league. It could mean that at the end of the season, struggling teams will play their young players and develop them a little more… so long as it doesn’t get them into the play-in and hurt those lottery odds. And in the years there is a Victor Wembanyama or Cooper Flagg in the draft — or another crazy deep draft like this year — teams will tank to get into the bottom 10 if needed.
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• This new system gets further away from the reason to have a draft in the first place. Teams tank — or are just bad and end up in the lottery — because they lack the high-level talent, they don’t have a Cade Cunningham, Anthony Edwards, Luka Doncic or Victor Wembanyama, and the best way to get a franchise-changing player like that is through the draft. (For middle and small market teams, it can be the only way.) The more the odds are flattened, the harder it becomes for the worst teams to get those players, forcing them to be bad for longer and making the fan base suffer more.
The entire point of the draft is to help the worst teams get the best players — the Las Vegas Raiders are the worst team in the NFL, they get to draft Fernando Mendoza. Simple. Clean. The NBA continues to move away from that: Last season, 11 teams had worse records than the Dallas Mavericks, but the basketball gods smiled on them and their 1.8% chances, and they got the No. 1 pick and Cooper Flagg. How does that help struggling teams?
