This is not a flex, nor an attempt to drop coal in the NBA’s Christmas stocking.
Tanking is a real, real problem for the league, which corrodes in ways much more dangerous than just losing games to get the best chance at a top pick in the draft. That the NBA recognizes this and knows it has to address the danger emanating from inside the house is commendable. (It is, also, an act of economic self-preservation, of course.) Having gambling and gamblers around multiple teams not trying to win in a given season is a portent for disaster, and the NBA’s attempts to do what it can to make fewer teams run the risk of year-over-year losing shouldn’t be dismissed as show.
But the league, 20 years into its attempts to “fix” the lottery, continues to tilt at windmills.
Trying to make the lottery somehow “fairer,” while at the same time discouraging teams from embarking upon it as a roster-building tool, is a contradiction of purpose — a fatal flaw in the whole apparatus of letting ping-pong balls determine the fate of billion-dollar franchises, rather than significant investment in infrastructure, coaching and development to make the players you have get better. Standing on your own two feet as an organization, not praying for lottery luck, is a much better predictor of adding difference-makers in free agency and/or trades, as more great players think your shop is where they want to be.
But you’re either all in and competing for real, or you’re not. And there’s no way to reconcile those two contradictory approaches.
The NBA’s latest reported ideas for reform — freezing future draft pick protections, fixing the lottery teams in place on March 1 and limiting a team from having top-four picks two years in a row — won’t stop teams from tanking, whether they do so all season long, or via “soft” tanks begun midstream, as teams ground down by injuries or subpar results decide the best play is to live to fight another day, rather than chase the Play-In. This was the method the Philadelphia 76ers chose last season to keep a top-six spot in the lottery.
If bad teams know they’ll be locked into their lottery positions on March 1, why on earth would they try to do anything to win before then? The tanking would be even more obvious and egregious. The Washington Wizards and Utah Jazz are again terrible this season, but some of their young guys are showing real signs of growth, as they get big minutes and gain experience and strength. But even those small road marks of hope might be eliminated with the quickness if teams like them had an incentive to shut down their emerging players as soon as possible to ensure more losing.
There is also simple fairness. Now, after the San Antonio Spurs have built themselves into a budding colossus, with three top-four picks in the last four years, including Victor Wembanyama in 2023, you want to turn off the spigot?
This, it must be stated as clearly as possible, is not San Antonio’s fault, or a dig at it for its good fortune. The Spurs were the top-to-bottom gold standard for organizational excellence for a generation. Yes, they went No. 1 when it mattered most — in 1987, when they took David Robinson first, and a decade later, when it was Tim Duncan. But the Spurs surrounded those Hall of Fame centers with incredible talent and character, and developed a slew of non-lottery players, from Tony Parker to Manu Ginóbili to Kawhi Leonard, into superstars.
They are doing the same now, with Brian Wright replacing R.C. Buford in the front office as general manager — Buford is still involved, as CEO of Spurs Sports and Entertainment — and Mitch Johnson taking over for Hall of Fame coach Gregg Popovich early last season, following Popovich’s stroke in late 2024.
Wembanyama is the existential base, of course. But the Spurs haven’t just put elite prospects like Stephon Castle (fourth, 2024) and Dylan Harper (second, 2025) around him. They’ve again made internal development vital to their success.
Devin Vassell, taken 11th overall in the 2020 draft, has become a key starter. Keldon Johnson was the next-to-last pick in the first round in 2019. He’s shooting 58 percent from the floor and 39 percent from deep, in his seventh pro season. Julian Champagnie was claimed off waivers from Philly in 2023; he’s played in 177 of a possible 185 games the last two-plus seasons.
And the Spurs have gradually moved up as their talent matured: back-to-back 22-60 seasons under Popovich in 2022 and 2023, then a 34-48 campaign last season, mostly under Mitch Johnson.
The Spurs are 23-7 out of the gate this season, having given the Oklahoma City Thunder three of their five losses including one on Christmas Day. They’re fifth in offensive rating; sixth in defensive rating. They’re a growing monster, having reached the NBA Cup finals, after beating the Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Lakers and Thunder before falling to the New York Knicks in the title game. They certainly look capable challengers to the defending champion Thunder.
“I’ll be lying if I said it was easy, ’cause nobody likes losing,” Keldon Johnson said Monday. “But, you know, in the midst of all the chaos and all the down times, you’ve really got to look at the bigger picture, and realize that we’re doing this for a bigger reason. Tough times don’t last. And ultimately, I can tell you, I’ve been a testament to that. I really just lock in and buy into what the Spurs organization, the plan that they have for me. Not only me, but the team that’s here and been here for a couple of years. We just stayed together and locked in, and this year has just been a great year. We’ve been winning and having fun, and playing some good basketball.”
So, the Spurs have been present for their own re-creation. But they also got a lot of assistance. Each high draft pick made it easier for San Antonio to spend future draft capital more easily to supplement the young core now, as when the Spurs got De’Aaron Fox from the Sacramento Kings in a three-team trade last season.
Now, though, the NBA would like to close the door behind San Antonio, leaving teams in the same position the Spurs were in a few years ago in a bit of a predicament, and without the means to improve their rosters as rapidly as the Spurs could. (I’m on record: I’d get rid of the lottery and the draft, and let incoming players sign with whomever they wanted. But that’s not going to happen.)
Major League Baseball changed its draft rules in the 2022 collective bargaining agreement with its players, introducing a draft lottery that covers the top six picks in MLB’s draft. MLB’s lottery borrowed from the NBA’s reforms, flattening the odds for the top three picks in the draft at 16.5 percent for the top three teams. But, just as the NBA is proposing to do going forward, MLB’s lottery/draft reform also limited the number of years a team could bite from the draft apple with high picks.
Small-market MLB teams that get money from the league’s revenue-sharing program can’t have a lottery pick three years in a row. And no team that either pays into the revenue-sharing program or is a large-market team can pick in the lottery two years in a row. Any team ineligible for a top-six pick in either category cannot pick earlier than 10th in the first round of the following year’s draft.
You can imagine, after the Houston Astros tanked their stars off in the early 2010s — going 162-324 from 2011-13, and winding up with the top pick overall in 2012, 2013 and 2014, and the second (compensation for not signing their 2014 first-round pick) and fifth picks overall in 2015, and using those picks on key members of what would become a World Series-winning team just a few years later, like Carlos Correa and Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman — how well MLB’s attempts to now square the circle have gone over with fan bases of the league’s worst teams that had to try and build what Houston did, under completely new rules.
Instead of encouraging teams to compete, wouldn’t locking out teams from consecutive years in the top four just encourage more teams to tank, knowing that teams A, B or C, after being in the top four the previous year, are now ineligible for top-four spots this year? And, wouldn’t that ultimately lead to more good teams getting more high picks, which defeats the entire purpose of a draft based on inverse order of record?
Worse yet, for a league that swears up and down that it wants parity to bore as deep as possible into the league’s marrow: There’s a real, real possibility that the defending champion Thunder could get the top pick in next year’s draft, because of the unprotected 2026 first-rounder from the LA Clippers that the Thunder owns — yet another Easter egg from the Paul George trade in 2019 that brought Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and multiple future firsts to Oklahoma City. The Clippers’ collapse to start this season has put the Thunder in the unimaginable position of adding yet another marquee talent to their championship core.
And, as an addendum, OKC also gets the rights to Utah’s 2026 first-rounder if it falls outside of the top eight.
No fault of the Thunder; they planned ahead. But is the game served better if, say, Darryn Peterson or AJ Dybantsa or Cameron Boozer goes to the Thunder, adding to their largesse, instead of teams that don’t have a single marquee player to build around and market? If the Wizards, who haven’t had the top pick in the draft since 2010, or the Jazz, who’ve never moved up in the lottery once in the 11 times they’ve participated, or the Brooklyn Nets, who got out of the marquee free-agent business after their team imploded in 2023, are iced out yet again next spring from adding their SGA or Jokić or Giannis via the draft, what are they supposed to do?
Imagine a wildly successful and popular band — U2, maybe — adding Derek Trucks to the band, or H.E.R., because it could, and because it’s already a legendary band, and who wouldn’t want to join it, and because it already has a worldwide following that would gladly accept people who can shred guitars like those two can. Would that make U2 even better as a group, even more influential? Would it be great for the careers of Trucks and/or H.E.R. to do guitar duets with The Edge? Certainly.
But what’s better for the music industry: an even greater U2, or an already great U2, along with an up-and-coming H.E.R./Tedeschi Trucks Band, providing their own sound and growing their own fan bases? What if you wanted to see Trucks/H.E.R. do their own thing, with their own bands, rather than just riffing with Bono?
The NBA continues to try to fix the lottery because the lottery continues to fail at what it’s supposed to do — get teams in and out of it, in short fashion, making room for the next group of teams that need immediate help. Maybe the problem is the lottery, not the attempts at reforming it.
