NBA draft lottery reform: Pros and cons of the new...

playThe moment the Wizards won the NBA draft lottery (0:44) Adam Silver made it clear that changes are coming to the NBA draft lottery. "It seemed unanimous in the room that we needed to make a change and we needed to make a change for next season," Silver, the NBA's commissioner since 2014, said at the league's board of governors meeting in March. "Incentives need to be fixed. We will fix them." On Thursday, the board will vote on -- and all but certainly pass -- a new anti-tanking reform called the "3-2-1 lottery," a fairly revolutionary overhaul of the system designed to immediately curb the league's annual race to the bottom and incentivize more teams to compete late in the season. Here's a rundown of the pros and cons of the new lottery format, and what they could mean for the future of the draft lottery and NBA roster and asset management. play2:17Michael Wilbon calls NBA's new anti-tanking draft reform 'nonsense'Michael Wilbon details why he believes load management is a bigger problem to the NBA than tanking. All types of measures have been discussed throughout the league's generation-long battle with tanking, including radical fixes such as giving the best teams the top picks or even abolishing the draft entirely. But though there is no perfect system -- unlike in many European sports leagues that feature promotion and relegation, losing NBA franchises have no incentive to stay out of the standings basement -- this proposal should blunt the most extreme cases of taking. This season, the Washington Wizards lost 27 of their final 28 games to ensure the league's worst record at 17-65. Their two high-profile additions -- Trae Young in December and Anthony Davis just before the February trade deadline -- played a combined five games as the franchise chased a guaranteed top-five pick. Similarly, the Memphis Grizzlies finished the regular season 5-28 to sink to sixth worst in the league -- much like the Philadelphia 76ers did down the stretch of 2024-25 in an attempt to keep the top-six-protected pick that became Rookie of the Year finalist VJ Edgecombe. But a 16-lottery team system -- one that also prevents protecting picks in the Nos. 12-15 range to guarantee keeping them -- removes the vast majority of reasons teams use to justify losing down the stretch. And with teams looking to escape the bottom three instead of joining it, there will now be incentive for bad teams to win. (Though not as much as there could be.) Given this proposal heavily slants toward random luck, it's odd to include restrictions that would reduce that: A team cannot win back-to-back lotteries or pick inside the top five for three consecutive drafts. This is a pretty clear push from the league to prevent situations such as the one that occurred for the San Antonio Spurs over the 2023, 2024 and 2025 drafts -- when San Antonio landed the first, fourth and second picks, respectively, and with them selected Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper. Though that amount of good fortune will be celebrated in San Antonio, as it has potentially laid the foundation for what could easily become the next NBA dynasty, the league would prefer to spread around talent more, if possible. The problem: not all drafts are created equal. For every Wembanyama, LeBron James or even the 2026 star-studded class, there are examples like Andrea Bargnani, Anthony Bennett and Greg Oden -- No. 1 picks who never lived up to their billing. It shouldn't be seen as a disappointment for a team, or its fans, to land the first pick in a weak draft and have no chance at doing so the next year in a better one. It's also one thing to say a team can't pick in the top five three consecutive seasons when they land the first and fourth picks, as San Antonio did. Under this new format, the Spurs would not have been in position to draft Harper at No. 2 this past summer. It's quite another to pick No. 5 two drafts in a row and then not be able to land another the following year. This feels like an unnecessary step in a system that's already well designed to deliver on the league's vision. A 16-team lottery lends itself to a wild scenario, where a team could make the NBA Finals -- such as the eight-seeded Miami Heat did in 2023 -- after seeing their own draft pick vault to No. 1 in May. But by including the loser of the 7-8 play-in game and both 9- and 10-seeds, more teams have reason to keep pushing for the playoffs. Another win for competitiveness. One question that has come up since the proposal was put together was why the NBA chose to stop at 16 teams in the lottery. Going to 18 would allow for every play-in team to have at least one ping-pong ball and would remove the possibility of a team losing a play-in game to stay in the lottery. But adding two teams means there is a chance a legitimately bad team could fall in the draft order. And, again, the goal for the NBA was to eliminate as many ways for teams to manipulate any game by having a rea

NBA draft lottery reform: Pros and cons of the new...

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