NBA Draft lottery changes are shortsighted, confusing, and create new problems

Adam Silver heard the outcry over tanking ahead of a loaded 2026 NBA Draft and was determined to find a solution. The league has now settled on its preferred system of lottery reform, and it essentially reduces the distribution of top young talent entering the league to complete randomness.

ESPN insider Shams Charania revealed the NBA’s new “3-2-1” lottery system on Tuesday night. Here’s what you need to know:

• The three worst teams in the league are in the “relegation zone,” which means they lose ping-pong balls.
• Teams that finish 4th through 10th in the reverse standings get three lottery balls in the drawing.
• Teams in the “relegation zone” get two lottery balls, and can’t fall further than the 12th pick
• “The Nos. 9 and 10 play-in seeds in each conference receive two lottery balls each, and the losers of the 7-8 play-in games receive one lottery ball each.”
• The lottery is expanded from 14 to 16 teams.
• Under the current system, lottery balls are only drawn for the top-4 picks. Now, the first 16 spots in the draft will be up for grabs in the drawing.
• Teams can’t land the No. 1 pick in back-to-back years, and they can’t pick in the top-5 three times in a row.

Got all that? Probably not, because it’s pretty complicated. When Adam Silver was weighing multiple options to reform the NBA Draft lottery last month, I wrote “in rushing to find a medicine to cure tanking, the NBA risks giving itself bigger problems from the side effects.” While this system likely will curb tanking to some extent, it opens up a ton of new problems for the league.

It’s pretty wild that Silver rushed this system through so hastily with it slated to take effect for the 2027 NBA Draft. Teams already made long-term roster decisions based on the incentives of the old rules. The Chicago Bulls traded Ayo Dosunmu and Coby White at the deadline after years of floundering in mediocrity to increase their chances at finding a star. This system rewards mediocrity. It would have been nice if Chicago actually knew the rules before making its February deals. The Memphis Grizzlies traded away Jaren Jackson Jr. and Desmond Bane because they felt like they couldn’t get out of the middle of the Western Conference standings. Would Memphis had made the same decisions if they knew the lottery format would change like this?

It’s no surprise the league is giving itself the option to opt out of this plan after the 2029 NBA Draft, per Charania’s report. This lottery format feels like an extremely slippery slope for a few reasons. Let’s get into it.

The new lottery system kills hope for diehard fans of bad teams

Teams had the ability to go from worst-to-first under the current lottery system despite the fact that the worst team in the league literally never won the lottery since the last round of reform went into effect in 2019. The Detroit Pistons, San Antonio Spurs, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Minnesota Timberwolves all made the worst-to-first jump in the 2020s.

Those are all small market teams who used the draft to land their franchise player. They still had to get lucky to land the top pick. It’s just going to require way more luck for bad teams to get good under this system.

The risk of this system is that it creates a permanent NBA underclass. Now the worst team in the league can fall to the 12th pick. Given how rarely good players change hands in free agency these days (more on that later), it feels like bad teams could get stuck in a cycle of being bad for a long, long time.

If teams can’t sell wins, they need to sell hope. What hope would fans of bad teams have now knowing they could fall out of the top-10 in the draft? The risk here is that diehard fans of bad teams just choose to give up because there’s no path forward.

Lottery reform feels like it should be coupled with free agency changes

How are bad teams supposed to get good players if they can’t do it through the draft? Free agency and trades are the only other options, but the prospect of bad teams overpaying free agents to land them only offers more downside, especially in this more punitive CBA.

It feels like the league needs more good young players to hit free agency if it doesn’t want teams to tank for the draft. One idea I saw elsewhere that I liked was eliminating restricted free agency. Under the current system, the Pistons still have the ability to match any contract offer to Jalen Duren even after failing to reach an extension with him. What if Duren was just an unrestricted free agent this year, and could be had for any team?

Something like that would open up more avenues for talent acquisition outside of the draft. For now, it feels like bad teams that don’t get lottery luck are simply screwed.

The NBA already killed free agency. Will these changes kill trades, too?

Silver heard the outcry over Kevin Durant signing with the Golden State Warriors, and essentially made rule changes that kept superstars away from free agency. The last true superstar to change teams in free agency was Kawhi Leonard signing with the Los Angeles Clippers in 2019. Since then, the biggest player to change teams in free agency is … washed Paul George in 2024?

The NBA gets a lot of attention from offseason player movement. I wonder if these changes will make teams more reluctant to trade their future first-round picks, thus diminishing the trade market, too.

First-round picks are the currency of trades. A team that was around .500 was more incentivized to trade a future first because it had a lower probability of turning into a premium pick. Now that’s been flipped on its head.

This is all pretty speculative for now, but it’s something to monitor. This new lottery system will have unintended consequences, and it would be a net-loss for the NBA if it resulted in fewer trades.

Tanking will still happen under these lottery rules, just in different ways

This lottery system should curb tanking, but it won’t eliminate it entirely. If the goal of these changes is to preserve the sanctity of March and April games, I’m not sure that’s going to happen.

Let’s say a team enters the All-Star break in 10th place in their conference. They might not want to risk losing a ping pong ball by making the 7/8 play-in game, so they will still rest players as long as they have a big enough cushion not to finish in the bottom-3. The sweet spot in this reform is the 4-10 range. Given how often injuries play a factor in team performance — and given how many significant injuries there are in the modern game — it feels likely a team can still rest players/try to lose on purpose from an organizational perspective and still enter the lottery sitting pretty.

Tanking was never the NBA’s biggest problem anyway

Adam Silver is a reactionary. He reads online criticism, and he acts quickly. My complaint with rushing through this tanking reform is that fans of teams that are tanking aren’t the ones doing the complaining. It’s usually coming from football fans after the Super Bowl who will just find another way to criticize the NBA even if tanking was solved.

The NBA’s biggest issue is that the regular season lacks anything resembling meaningful stakes. Silver thinks that these lottery reforms will fix that problem, but I’m extremely dubious. If the NBA wants to give the regular season more stakes, it needs to reduce the number of games. Play every team twice and call it a season. Once the NBA adds its two expansion teams in Las Vegas and Seattle, that would create a 62-game schedule. It gives the players more rest in between games, and cancels a lot of the end of season games where tanking tomfoolery is happening.

The point of the draft is to give the worst teams the best young players. The NBA apparently doesn’t see it that way, and they’re instead leaving it all up to chance.

This lottery simulator shows how much randomness is in the new system. Play with it yourself:

On my first spin, the Miami Heat drew the No. 1 pick and the Washington Wizards fell to 12th. Is that the type of system the NBA really wants?

The biggest winner of these lottery changes feel like … the Oklahoma City Thunder. Check out all of the future first-round picks OKC owns here. Now their future picks coming from the Nuggets and their swap rights with the Clippers could be even more valuable, as those teams likely wouldn’t have been near the bottom of the standings, but could be in the middle ground that is now more fruitful.

Back in 2017, the great Tom Ziller wrote a column at this site titled “Kill the NBA Draft.” Subscribe to Tom’s newsletter here for more great NBA coverage.

Given how much randomness is in this new system, I find myself far more open to just killing the draft entirely starting in 2030. Give every team a rookie exception they can offer top players. Let teams with cap space offer them more money beyond that. It would make sense if a bad team has more open cap space and could hypothetically offer the next Cooper Flagg a max deal out of college. If Flagg prefers to sign with his childhood favorite Boston Celtics instead, so be it.

The NBA is opening up a whole new can of worms with this lottery system, and the people it hurts the most are loyal fans of hopeless franchises. The NBA really does not want a world where those people check out of the league entirely. I feel like it could happen after these changes.