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.
Pro: Fewer egregious tankers
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.)
Con: Pick restrictions for repeat winners
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.
Pro: Incentive for play-in teams to keep pushing
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 reason to lose. (One extreme example of this was inverting the draft order for the top 16 teams in the second round of the draft, rather than just going by record -- a proposal that feels a step too far but also removes another potential incentive for a team to lose).
The one place in the system that still accounts for this is going from three ping-pong balls for finishing 11th in the standings to two for finishing 10th, but even then you’re giving a team a chance to make the playoffs and a shot of moving up in the lottery, which is a pretty good way to even out the risk.
Con: Changing value of traded future picks
This is probably the most controversial ripple effect of the rule change.
Because this is such a radical departure from how the league has previously done business in the draft, the fact that a lot of picks have already been moved in the 2027, 2028 and 2029 drafts now could have a much different value assigned to them.
A team immediately affected is Memphis. Because the Utah Jazz had the No. 5 pick last year, and the No. 2 pick this year, their pick will be unable to land in the top five next season. That immediately devalues an asset Memphis acquired only 3½ months ago in exchange for Jaren Jackson Jr. Though sources said there was a chance -- though remote -- the system could be amended to account for that Memphis pick, and thus giving the Grizzlies a chance at a top-five selection.
It’s an odd move for the NBA to make such a significant change midstream, one that would affect just about every team in some form. But, as Silver said in March, it was clear change was going to be coming, and any time a push like this is made, teams will be stuck in between. Memphis, though, can at least take solace in landing the No. 3 pick in this year’s draft before any changes take effect.
Pro: More creativity in team-building
This is the exciting part. For many years, the league’s bottom-dwellers have fallen into a standard way of thinking: spend up to four years losing a ton of games and accumulating picks before trying to flip back into contention.
And it has worked. Arguably the two best teams in the league, the Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs, did just that. The New York Knicks, meanwhile, signed Jalen Brunson as a free agent and traded for the other four members of their starting lineup in Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart. Similarly, the Cleveland Cavaliers landed Evan Mobley (and before him, Darius Garland) with top-five picks in the draft but later traded for Donovan Mitchell, James Harden and Jarrett Allen.
It will be interesting to see how the league’s next elite teams are built. Will the value of draft picks in trades change? Will teams try to hoard as many as possible, or be less cautious knowing how random the lottery system has become?
Con: The floor for bad teams is pretty low
Giving the bottom three teams reduced lottery odds already takes a big step toward ensuring the worst teams actually finish with the worst records. On top of that, the NBA is now saying those teams could finish with the 10th, 11th and 12th picks in the draft if they fail to be selected in the lottery before those spots.
There was robust debate among stakeholders studying the topic, sources said, about where to put the line for the floor for these teams. Some argued it should be closer to eighth, whereas 10th feels about right to push even bad teams to be competitive. But, like the No. 1 and top-five pick restrictions, this could be a step too far.
Pro: A live lottery!
While ESPN’s Brian Windhorst wrote about the “secret” room, sources expect the lottery itself -- not just airing of the results -- to become a live, televised event. No more conspiracy theories. All of it happening in real time. The potential for tremendous theater.
How a new lottery would play out is yet to be determined. The NBA’s current method -- the first ping-pong ball selected determines the first pick, and so on -- is certainly one possibility, although that would eliminate much of the drama. Picking the 16th team first and going backward to No. 1 makes more sense as a television product. (The league would accomplish this by using a team’s final drawn ping-pong ball, rather than its first, to determine draft position.)
Con: There is already talk of more changes
The proposal largely accomplishes Silver’s mission, but it’s not perfect. In fact, from the moment it was created, the proposal has been accompanied by a “sunset” clause. The entire process will be revisited before the 2030 draft.
Overhauling a critical component of the NBA ecosystem, only to potentially do it again in three years, doesn’t exactly scream “long-term solution to curb tanking.” Perhaps the format changes will stick beyond 2030. Perhaps, as league insiders have mentioned for weeks, that a new “draft credits” system will eventually be put into place that will emphasize smart roster management even more than the current rules.
But, for now, providing the new lottery system with an out before it even takes effect sends the wrong message: More changes are probably coming.
