TORONTO — The Toronto Raptors draft situation couldn’t be more mundane going forward:
They own all their own first-round draft picks and their next five second-round picks.
As well, they are a team that pretty firmly has their foot in the ‘we’re trying to win’ camp, coming off a 46-win season, a fifth-place finish in the Eastern Conference and a solid showing in the first round of the playoffs. A veteran starting lineup slated to earn 99 per cent of the salary cap next season is another bat signal.
But did their team building options get just a little bit better after the NBA confirmed its plan for lottery reform Thursday?
They may well have. We’ll get to that.
The reforms were made in response to what can fairly be described as an epidemic of tanking — multiple teams focussing on losing as many games as possible in order to improve their draft position — that swept the league in recent seasons.
Whether the NBA got it right or overreacted will take time to sort out.
That the league recognizes it’s a work in progress is reflected that the new rules will be up for re-evaluation in 2029. It also says a lot about how difficult it has been to thread the needle between creating a system (a draft based loosely on reverse order of finish) that provides struggling teams a pathway to improve while not making losing games and crashing entire seasons — sometimes several of them — the most viable strategy to build winning teams.
Part of the league’s problem is that with a little luck and some expertise, tanking really works.
There’s not just a little irony that the same week the league reached agreement to solve tanking, the three teams remaining in the NBA playoffs, have benefited hugely from previously losing in some shape or form.
The Spurs have a dynasty in the making thanks to drafting Victor Wembanyama first overall in 2023, Stephon Castle fourth in 2024 and Dylan Harper second in 2025. The Oklahoma City Thunder are still benefitting from the foundation they laid when they drafted Kevin Durant No. 2 in 2007, Russell Westbrook No. 4 in 2008 and James Harden No. 3 in 2009. More recently 22- and 24-wins seasons — during which then emerging star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s injuries were managed very conservatively, let’s say — allowed them to draft Chet Holmgren No. 2 overall and acquire Alex Caruso by later trading former No. 6 overall pick Josh Giddey. The Knicks used their former No. 3 overall pick, RJ Barrett — their reward for a 17-win season — as part of a trade to acquire OG Anunoby.
The basic details of the new lottery format are these:
• Blatant, years long efforts to tank aren’t as beneficial anymore. The most significant changes to the lottery system are that the teams with the bottom three records aren’t eligible to pick in the top three of three draft. Instead they fall back in the lottery order — are relegated — and can end up picking anywhere from fourth to 12th.
• As well, teams can’t pick first overall in consecutive years or pick in the top five in three straight years. By that construction the highest pick the Spurs could have had in 2025 (when they picked Harper No. 2) would have been sixth. The Washington Wizards, with the first pick in 2026, can’t pick first in 2027.
• The lottery odds have never been flatter. There are now 16 teams in the lottery rather than 14. Teams with the fourth-worst record can fall all the way to 16th (compared to the current system when teams can only fall by four positions). The league is calling it the “3-2-1” lottery because some teams will have three lottery balls, some two and some just one out of a total of 37. In practical terms, the teams that finish in the bottom three of the regular-season standing will have a just 5.4 per cent chance of winning the first pick, because they’ll have just two lottery balls. The teams that slot in 4-10 will have three lottery balls and an 8.4 per cent chance at the first pick. The teams that finish ninth and 10th will get two lottery balls (5.4 per cent) while the teams that lose the 7-8 play-in game with get one lottery ball, representing a 2.7 per cent chance at the first pick.
• Going forward teams can’t attach top 12 through top 15 protections when they trade draft picks. The purpose being to avoid a scenario where a team intentionally loses a play-in game in order to keep their draft pick, as an example.
• Now that there seems to be less incentive to tank, the NBA has given itself more leeway to punish teams that it judges are tanking, including fines, reducing draft lottery odds or modifying draft position.
Will it work to curb the kind of egregious manipulations we’ve seen in recent years, where teams were falling over themselves to finish in the bottom three and get a 52.1 per cent chance of picking in the top four?
I think so, especially since the rewards for being bad aren’t as significant or predictable as they were, and the league has more tools to police a preserved tanking problem.
Was it overkill? Too drastic?
I think it will likely prove to be. Simply limiting pick protections would have solved a lot of tanking issues — Utah doing everything they could to make sure they finished with a bottom eight record so that they wouldn’t owe a pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder, for example, or last season the Philadelphia 76ers going all in last year to hold on to a top-six protected pick.
As well, 2026 is the second consecutive of what had long been projected deep and productive draft classes, creating a situation where the incentives to tank were unusually high, with teams acting accordingly.
Would changes to pick protections and possibly restrictions on how many years a pick can be in the top five, for example, have done enough to change behaviours while still giving bad teams a similar chance to improve through the draft that the teams they have to beat now had?
And now for the Raptors.
It seems that the first-round picks the Raptors do have are more valuable than they were before, for two reasons.
If the Raptors keep them and say they stumble into the play-in next season or in following seasons — not implausible given they were only one game out of the play-in this season and three games ahead of 10th place in the East — they might find themselves with a 5.4 per cent chance at the first pick, compared with 0.5 per cent Charlotte had this season at the draft lottery this past May.
The same benefits could apply if they choose to use some of their draft equity in a trade this summer. A trade with the Raptors in the previous system would most likely turn out to be for future first-round picks that would land — most likely — at the end of the lottery or in the middle of the first round. Nice to have, but not the kind of asset that teams normally dream on.
But a 5.4 per cent chance at No. 1 overall? That’s not nothing. Is it possible that a team might look at the Raptors and figure they could slide back out of the play-in and generate an 8.4 chance at the first pick?
In general the changes seem to favour organizations that are adept at building from the middle of bottom third of the league, rather than rock bottom, which is pretty consistent with how the Raptors have handled their business for the most part, the ‘Tampa Tank’ that yielded Scottie Barnes at No. 4 in 2021 being the most obvious exception.
There is plenty still to be learned about the consequences of the new lottery system — especially the unintended ones — but in some small ways the Raptors as constructed could be better positioned to move ahead than they were before.
