The next step toward NBA Draft reform will take place on Tuesday, when league officials are hosting a general managers’ meeting on Zoom that was added to the schedule as a way for all 30 front offices to continue taking part in this pivotal process.
Yet according to league and team sources, a heavy frontrunner has emerged among the three proposed solutions to curb the widespread tanking problem that put such a stain on this season: Option No. 1, in which 18 teams would be part of the draft lottery (rather than the current 14) and the bottom 10 teams would all have an 8 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick. The remaining odds — 20 percent in all — would be divided among the remaining eight teams. In the current system, the bottom three teams all have a 14 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick and the odds decline from there.
Nothing can be finalized until at least 23 of the league’s 30 owners vote at next month’s Board of Governors meeting, and tweaks to the various proposals are still expected to be made along the way. Still, league and team sources say Option No. 1 has all the momentum and appears likely to win out. And as NBA Commissioner Adam Silver made clear during a GM call in mid-February, when he expressed a deep concern that tanking was doing serious damage, the forthcoming changes will be implemented by next season.
“You should assume for next season your only incentive will be to win games,” Silver said during the call that was, at times, contentious.
But will the changes be enough to restore the competitive integrity of the game once and for all? That’s still up for debate.
As several general managers pointed out, there is a fear that implementing Option No. 1 might simply create new problems that will eventually need to be addressed. What might the league-wide reaction be, for example, when one of those two lottery teams that actually took part in the playoffs gets lucky by landing the No. 1 pick? It seems unlikely, of course, but then you remember what happened the last two years.
The Atlanta Hawks had a 3 percent chance in 2024, only to land Zaccharie Risacher with the top spot. Then came the Dallas Mavericks last year, with their 1.8 percent odds that, in the end, led to the Cooper Flagg era. If you zoom out even farther, there’s still reason for concern on this front. Per RealGM.com, eight of the last 20 teams awarded the No. 1 pick had single-digit odds (and five of them were below five percent).
By all appearances, this GM meeting is yet another example of Silver attempting to take a collaborative approach to this situation. He has fielded feedback from all corners, with the league’s competition committee leading the way and the National Basketball Players Association also taking part. Draft reform won’t be the only item discussed in the Tuesday session, but it will be their primary reason for the convening.
The (Playoff) Hot Seat Discussion
A quick reminder about the coaching hot seat discussion as these NBA playoffs carry on: Strange as it might sound, the owners and GMs who make these sorts of decisions do actually take the final results into account. It’s a crazy notion, I know.
So while it’s easy for us to handicap which coaches whose teams are still alive might be in trouble, we tend to skip over the part where the actual outcomes of the games can change the landscape in a drastic way. Take Orlando’s Jamahl Mosley, for example.
There has been chatter about him being in trouble since October, and it spiked even more when the underperforming Magic somehow lost to Boston’s B-Team in their regular season finale. Former Bulls coach Billy Donovan and Milwaukee associate head coach/former Lakers head coach Darvin Ham have already been pegged as likely options to replace him. Mosley, meanwhile, has even been tied to the vacant New Orleans job. He’ll have a hard time filling it if he’s still employed in Orlando.
But in the plot twist that few saw coming, his eight-seeded Magic have found their way at the perfect time and are up 2-1 in a battle of the bruisers against top-seeded Detroit, with Game 4 on their home floor Monday night. The prospect of knocking off the East’s top contender en route to the second round — or maybe going even farther if they got past the winner of the Cleveland-Toronto series — would certainly warrant a second look at his situation from the Magic’s power brokers, no matter how much speculation might be swirling about his ousting.
One would think that would be the case for Portland’s Tiago Splitter, too, what with everything he and his team have been through. Then again, new owner Tom Dundon has made it quite clear that conventional wisdom does not exist in the early days of his regime (if you haven’t read Jason Quick’s fantastic piece on this sordid state of affairs yet — enjoy.
It’s not every day that your head coach (Chauncey Billups) has to step down because he’s the focus of a federal investigation , but Splitter, who was an assistant, has been at the helm since late October and received rave reviews for his ability to salvage the Trail Blazers’ season. Even with Portland’s 3-1 deficit against San Antonio, merely getting to the postseason was widely seen as a success for this group.
At minimum, he should be a legitimate candidate when the coaching search begins at the start of the offseason. Instead, as Quick reported, Dundon has already been canvassing the basketball world for Splitter’s possible replacement while clearly not caring about the awful optics. Still, Splitter — who is still known to be in the running — has only strengthened his position in these past few weeks.
Not every coach’s case is quite so clear cut, though.
The noise surrounding the Knicks’ Mike Brown won’t die down unless they reach the NBA Finals, and even that might not be good enough for the first-year New York coach to be safe. Fair or not, those are the finals-or-bust parameters set by owner James Dolan when he gave that rare interview in which he said as much earlier this season . In the here and now, though, Brown and his staff making the necessary adjustments to respond in the Knicks’ 114-98 Game 4 win over Atlanta to tie the series is far better than the alternative.
The Sixers’ Nick Nurse is widely believed to be under pressure too, meaning Sunday’s loss to Boston, which put them in a 3-1 hole, qualifies as a step in the wrong direction. The same can be said for Cleveland’s Kenny Atkinson, whose Cavs did the James Harden deal in February with the expectation that they would return to title-contender status but who, after falling 93-89 to Toronto on Sunday, are now tied 2-2 with the Raptors. Game 5 is in Cleveland on Wednesday.
All the Right (Roster) Moves
As awful as the latest round of injuries has been — specifically with the Los Angeles Lakers (Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves) and Minnesota Timberwolves (Anthony Edwards and Donte DiVincenzo) — there’s another side to these situations that merits mention. Those teams’ respective front office heads, Rob Pelinka and Tim Connelly, should take a bow for making moves that have mitigated the damage.
Pelinka added Marcus Smart in mid-July, when the veteran guard and former Defensive Player of the Year agreed to a buyout with Washington and signed a two-year, $11 million deal with the Lakers, with a player option worth $5.3 million for next season. Luke Kennard came their way at the trade deadline, when the Lakers sent Gabe Vincent and a 2032 second-round pick to Atlanta for the 29-year-old marksman, who is earning $11 million this season and will be a free agent this summer.
Little did the Lakers know that Dončić (hamstring) and Reaves (oblique) would go down heading into the playoffs, but their backcourt backups, Smart and Kennard, had everything to do with their ability to jump out to a 3-0 series lead against Houston (3-1 after Sunday night’s loss). They combined for 42 points in a Game 1 win (with Smart adding eight assists), 48 points in Game 2 (with Smart adding seven assists and five steals and Kennard getting three steals), and 35 points in Game 3 (with Smart posting 10 assists and five steal and Kennard dishing six assists).
That’s a whole lot of production from two players who spent much of the season trying to find their way. But that’s also the point of adding depth, and those moves likely extended the Lakers’ season while giving their stars a chance to make their way back with games still to play. The Timberwolves can certainly relate. Sort of.
When DiVincenzo (Achilles) and Edwards (hyperextended knee) went down in Game 4 against Denver on Saturday, it was safe to assume the Nuggets would take control of the game and the series. Or … not. Enter Ayo Dosunmu, the 26-year-old guard who came their way with forward Julian Phillips via trade with Chicago at the February trade deadline for Rob Dillingham, Leonard Miller, and four second-round picks.
Never mind that Dosunmu has averaged 11.1 points in his six seasons — he showed out like an All-Star when it mattered most, finishing with a career-high 43 points (13 of 17 shooting overall; 5 of 5 from 3) as Minnesota took a 3-1 series lead with the 112-96 win. That outing followed a strong Game 3 showing, too, as Dosunmu had 25 points (10-for-15 shooting) and nine assists in that 113-96 win.
Minnesota’s outlook isn’t as hopeful as the Lakers’, what with DiVincenzo, who was a team-best plus-45 in four games, likely out for most of next season and Edwards expected to need several weeks to return. But without Dosunmu, the prospect of surviving this first-round series that is worthy of a West Finals matchup would be nonexistent.