NBA Commissioner Adam Silver believes that tanking is a scourge and the biggest current threat to the league. Now he has his radical solution to “fix” this problem.
By a 29-1 vote, the NBA Board of Governors voted to approve the new “3-2-1” lottery system that will go into effect next season. The new system both expands the number of teams in the lottery to 16 (up from 14) and dramatically flattens the odds, making it less likely that any one team will win. This new system actually punishes the teams with the three worst records in the league, they will have less of a chance than teams that finish 4-10, providing an incentive for teams to win games near the end of the season.
It also is set to make the NBA Lottery draw into a live televised event — not an unveiling of picks drawn in a back room, as is currently done, but the picks will come out live on air.
How the “3-2-1″ system works
Here’s how this system breaks down:
• It’s called the “3-2-1” system because of how many ping pong lottery balls a team gets.
• The lottery now includes 16 teams: The 10 teams that miss even the play-in, the four teams that finish ninth or 10th in their conferences, plus the loser of the 7/8 play-in game.
• Also, the lottery will be drawn all the way through the No. 16 pick (currently, only the top four are drawn by the lottery and it is reverse record order after that). However, the teams with the three worst records can fall no further than 12th.
• The three teams with the worst records will be “draft relegated” (still a terrible name) and be penalized for their struggles by only getting two lottery balls, giving them a a 5.4% chance at the No. 1 pick.
• The teams with the 4-10 worst records will receive three lottery balls each and an 8.1% chance at the No. 1 pick.
• The teams that finish as the No. 9 and 10 seeds in each conference will each get two lottery balls and a 5.4% chance at the No. 1 pick (the same as the teams with the three worst records).
• The teams that lose the 7/8 play-in for each conference get one lottery ball, and with it a 2.7% chance of landing the No. 1 pick (for example, this season that would have been Orlando and Phoenix).
• The first 16 picks of the second round would be the reverse of the first round. To use this year’s draft as an example, because the Wizards have the No. 1 pick, they would pick 46th overall in the second round, while a team that slid to 16th would have the 31st pick, the first of the second round. (That is different than the current system, where the second round is based purely on record. For example, Brooklyn had the third-worst record in the league, dropped to sixth in the first round because of the lottery, but will have the No. 33 pick, the third in the second round, regardless.)
• Teams cannot win the No. 1 pick in consecutive years.
• Teams cannot have top-five picks in three consecutive years. (Consider this the Spurs rule, it is clearly a direct reaction to them after some people were unhappy the Spurs got to draft Victor Wembanyama No. 1, Stephon Castle No. 4 and Dylan Harper No. 2 in three consecutive years.)
• This new plan also grants Silver dramatically expanded, unchecked authority to punish teams he perceives as tanking, including fines of up to $10 million, taking away ping pong balls, or even forcing them to surrender draft picks.
• This system is set to sunset after three lotteries (after the 2029 draft) and will either be retained, modified (again) or scrapped.
What are pros and cons?
On the positive side, this system is going to do what Silver and the owners intend: There is far less incentive to tank, and more teams will compete through the end of the season to avoid landing in the bottom three. If you believe that tanking is the biggest blight the league faces today, this is a huge win.
On the negative side, there are real concerns about how this change, starting next season, will affect already-traded picks or might dampen the market for trading future first-round picks. If a team sees better odds of potentially moving up in the draft, those picks become more valuable and less likely to be traded.
The lone no vote on the new plan was from Memphis, because they are screwed over by one of the odd provisions of this system, where the restrictions on a pick stay even if it is traded. Memphis owns the rights to Utah’s first-round pick next year (part of the Jaren Jackson Jr. trade), but because Utah drafted fifth last year (Ace Bailey) and will pick second this year, their pick cannot fall in the top five — even though that is now Memphis’ pick. Meaning Memphis can’t pick higher than sixth next year with the Utah pick (Memphis did not know that at the time of the JJJ trade).
The timing of this new plan is crucial for the perception Adam Silver wants. Next year at this time, he will be taking a victory lap about how there was no tanking (even as unintended consequences quickly start to appear), but the reality is there would have been less tanking next year because it’s seen as a much weaker draft class. This year saw nine teams tanking by the end because it is a particularly deep class with multiple franchise-changing, cornerstone players at the top and quality players well down the board. Next year, nobody was tanking for that class before this was approved.
The other knock is that this moves the league further away from the original purpose of a draft — to redistribute talent and allow the worst teams to draft the best players. It’s how the NFL does it: The Las Vegas Raiders had the worst record, so they get to pick Fernando Mendoza. Now, a genuinely bad NBA team could be screwed over and drop dramatically multiple years in a row.
On the positive side, it will force those same front offices to be far smarter and more creative in building out a roster rather than hoping for lottery luck.