BOSTON — NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Friday that the league must figure out a resolution to deter teams from tanking and said that something will be implemented for next season.
He also hinted that while “substantial changes” are coming for how the league’s draft lottery system will operate, there may not be a wholesale shift from its current format.
“We are going to make substantial changes for next year,” Silver said while speaking on a panel at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. “I think where I’m on the fence — on one extreme, you could completely divorce the draft from teams’ records. Just argue we could take all 30 teams regardless of the outcome, that would completely disincentivize tanking. You could win the finals, you know, and get the first pick. But then there’s gradations of that.”
Silver said the changes are likely to be smaller in scale.
“Not to exactly forecast where we’re going, but I think I’m sort — I am an incrementalist,” Silver continued. “I think we got to be a little bit careful, you know, about how huge a change we make at once. I’m not ruling anything out, but I am paying attention to that. And then there’s something significantly more than, I would say, just tinkering with the existing system.”
Silver mentioned the WNBA as an example. The WNBA takes the last two seasons of records into account for non-playoff teams and bases the lottery odds on those.
He also noted that the NBA currently has pick protections that serve as issues to work around as well. Teams can trade picks and protect them up to a certain pick, which creates an incentive to keep that pick by finishing poorly enough to maintain it. This season, the Jazz’s first-round pick will transfer to the Thunder unless it is a top-eight pick. The NBA, Silver said, calls those “cliffs.”
“Where you have sort of arbitrary lines of protected draft picks, creating huge incentives, you know, to be the sixth-worst record instead of the fifth,” Silver said. “So there are a bunch of things we’re looking at now. We have to address it. I just lastly end by saying, I do think, and this is the tension, there are legitimate rebuilds where you have young teams, they’re genuinely trying to win games. They’re out there trying to win night in, night out. There are also situations where you have teams this used to be more toward the end of the season … where you want to see the young players playing under game circumstances and those wins aren’t as important. I don’t view that as the kind of tanking we’re experiencing right now. So incentives are off.”
Silver has personally gotten involved in finding a solution to tanking, and the NBA has escalated punishments for teams it believes are intentionally skirting competitiveness.
The Jazz were fined $500,000 last month for not playing its top players in the fourth quarter of a game, and the Pacers were fined $100,000 for fielding a rotation in a game devoid of its main players.
Silver held a conference call with league general managers last month, which got feisty as he implored teams that it was an issue that all had to solve.
Silver also noted that the 2026 draft might serve as an outlier that has facilitated the mad rush for lottery balls. The projected top three picks — AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson and Cam Boozer — are seen as quite strong, and there is a talented group right after them that makes the depth at the top of the lottery unusual.
The next few drafts are not projected to be as strong. That could influence the behavior of teams in future years as well.
“It’s a little bit of a perfect storm this season, that you have a perceived, very deep draft,” Silver said. “Again, I say perceived because scouts’ predictions are wrong. But there’s a sense that you have four players in particular, maybe five, who are true game changers. You add to that a forecast that the next two years drafts won’t be as good, and you create enormous incentive for teams to tank and I add on top of that, and this also goes to this basketball’s life notion there’s been sort of destigmatization around certain behaviors.”