NBA lottery reform winners and losers: Spurs and Thunder get richer, Kings and Nets slip further behind originally appeared on The Sporting News.
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The NBA’s new 3-2-1 lottery reform proposal became official on Thursday, and it will take effect next season. The league set out to create a proposal to curb tanking, instituting aggressive changes to the current system. There are bound to be unintended consequences, and there are a lot of teams whose outlook drastically changed as a result of the rules.
As a refresher, those new rules include the following:
- The lottery is expanded from 14 to 16 teams, with each receiving one, two, or three balls
- One ball teams: The losers of the 7/8 play-in game
- Two ball teams: The three worst teams in the league (the relegation zone), along with the No. 9 and 10 seeds in each conference
- Three ball teams: Teams 4-11 in the reverse standings
- Teams can no longer pick No. 1 in consecutive drafts or in the top five of three consecutive drafts, dating back to the 2025 draft.
The NBA’s new draft lottery odds, visualized ⬇️ https://t.co/bUdgWPReF9pic.twitter.com/IizHm5nL3M
— Lev Akabas (@LevAkabas) May 28, 2026
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People who hate tanking
If you think tanking should be eliminated no matter the cost, then these new rules are for you. The payoff simply isn’t there any more, and we are going to see teams start to try to win much more aggressively.
This is obviously better for the end of the regular season in particular, which has become a total slog as half the league tries to intentionally lose games. The penalty for finishing with a bottom-three record is going to make the worst teams try desperately to win what were otherwise meaningless March and April games.
There are significant downsides to the new rules, but this is the biggest upside and it’s somewhat undeniable.
Spurs
The Spurs have been hoarding first round picks for years. Some of those teams made those trades under the assumption that they wouldn’t be bad enough to fork over top picks in future drafts. That logic is now out the window.
Some of those picks could pay dividends soon. They own the following future picks:
- Hawks 2027 pick
- Right to swap with the Celtics in 2028 (top 1 protected)
- Right to swap with the Wolves or Mavericks in 2030 (top 1 protected)
- Right to swap with the Kings in 2031
That Kings swap looks particularly juicy. San Antonio paid an extremely low price for that asset, taking on Harrison Barnes’ contract back in the 2024 DeMar DeRozan sign-and-trade. They got a useful rotation player and a potentially amazing pick without having to give up anything but cap space in return.
Thunder
The Thunder still have a ton of future picks in their war chest. The new system gives them two shots at a top four selection. Those include the Spurs’ 2027 first-rounder and a very juicy right to swap first-rounders with the Mavericks in 2028.
Dallas might still be bad by then, giving Oklahoma City potentially an eight percent chance at the No. 1 pick two years from now.
Teams in the middle (Bulls, Heat, Hawks, Blazers, Warriors, Suns)
Under the old system, being in the middle was the worst place that you could be. You weren’t quite bad enough to get saved in the lottery, and you weren’t good enough to do anything meaningful in the postseason.
The new system rewards the 4th through 10th-worst teams with the best odds at jumping up in the draft. Teams that have been perpetually stuck in Play-In purgatory, such as the Bulls, Heat, Hawks, and Warriors, could see a massive influx in talent with the No. 1 pick. That should be enough to turn a middling franchise into a serious contender in the span of just a few years.
This is a complete reversal of the incentives under the old system, and it’s going to take some getting used to. Smart teams will try to build in the middle now rather than bottoming out in the standings.
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Teams at the start of rebuilds
The best way to rebuild your team has always been through the draft. It’s going to be harder to plan that path now that the luck factor has increased so substantially.
That is going to mean that teams at the bottom of the standings are going to be much harder-pressed to dig themselves out. There are other ways of improving your team aside from high draft picks. Salary cap management, savvy trades, and free agency are going to become more important components of team building for the worst of the worst.
There is only so much that you can do though through those avenues of roster construction. The teams that are bad right now are probably going to be stuck there indefinitely until the league revisits the changes in the rules three years from now.
Kings, Nets, and Wizards
Speaking of the bad teams, these three are hurt the most by the changes.
The Wizards should be a lot better this year with the additions of Trae Young, Anthony Davis, and whoever they select at No. 1 (probably AJ Dybantsa). They are precluded from winning the No. 1 pick in the 2027 draft though due to the new rule forbidding back-to-back selections of that pick.
The Kings and Nets are in significantly worse spots. They don’t have a superstar to build around yet, and they don’t have a clear path out of the bottom of the standings.
Grizzlies
The league decided to make its new rules act retroactively, which hurt the Grizzlies the most out of any team (not coincidentally, they were the only team to vote no on the proposed changes).
Memphis will get the best first-round pick between the Jazz, Cavs, or Wolves in 2027. But since the Jazz have selected in the top 5 in both 2025 and 2026, their pick is blocked from landing in the top five in 2027.
The Grizzlies had no idea that this rule would be in effect when they traded for that pick, and that obviously lowers the value of that pick considerably.