Commissioner Adam Silver told all 30 of the NBA’s general managers on Thursday that the league intends to enact rule changes to combat tanking ahead of the 2026/27 season, reports Shams Charania of ESPN.
According to Charania, Silver was said to be “forceful” about his desire to resolve the issue, which he addressed at his All-Star press conference. Silver said during that media session that the league is considering “every possibly remedy” to reduce the practice of tanking.
Sam Amick of The Athletic confirms Charania’s report, and hears from a person with knowledge of the meeting that a consensus among those involved — Silver, members of the league office and the GMs — was reached that tanking “threatens the integrity and long-term viability” of the NBA. The GMs also agreed that changes to the current system need to be made.
“We’re all to blame,” one GM said, per Amick.
Mike Krzyzewski, who is now a member of the league office (his title is special adviser to basketball operations), praised the GMs for “acknowledging the issue and attacking it,” according to Amick, who notes that the former Duke head coach is often present for GM and competition committee meetings. Charania hears Krzyzewski also told the GMs to prepare for the rule changes, which will reportedly be in place for next season.
The league already flattened the draft lottery odds in 2019, Amick observes, but that hasn’t prevented teams from trying to jockey for position at the bottom of the standings, particularly when there’s a draft class that’s viewed as particularly strong (like this year).
According to Charania, the league and its teams have discussed the following possible rule changes during January’s competition committee meeting and Thursday’s GM call:
- Restricting teams from including protections between top-four and top-14-plus on traded first-round picks.
- Prohibiting teams from having top-four picks in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes.
- Barring teams from selecting in the top four if they make the conference finals the previous year.
- Freezing lottery odds at the trade deadline or an unspecified “later date.”
- Flattened odds for all lottery teams.
- Lottery odds being allocated based on two-year records.
- Lottery extended to include all eight play-in teams (instead of the four who don’t make the playoffs).
Sam Quinn of CBS Sports explains (via Twitter) why he thinks all of those proposed changes are flawed.
2 year record is an interesting one. Freezing or flattening odds might be the easiest path.
make it so all lottery teams have the same odds.. nothing else needs to be done but that… period… full stop.. no need for the rest of the nonsense
Terrible idea. The difference in roster talent between the worst team and the 14th worst team is giant. If everyone has the same odds then wtf is the point of the lottery? Just have record determine where you pick.
Then people will tank.. period. Can’t have it both ways…. and no its not a terrible idea.. there’s a salary cap in the NBA.. if a GM sucks that’s on the franchise that hired them.. everyone has the same playing field… it’s not baseball where you can buy a title.
Teams have made trades with draft restrictions 6 years out already. When is this tanking rule supposed to be enacted?
Honestly I think the league is spending way too much time on this tanking stuff. I just want better games/play period
Silver is just bad at his job and doesn’t know how to run the league. In 22-23 season the spurs and pistons finished last in each conference. Look at them 3 years later. 90% of the nba gets good after being bad. Unless u can’t draft(see kings, etc). The nba is wasting way too much time on this
NBA has been on a sharp decline since the NFL punked them and started owning Christmas day entertainment. Really no reason to bother with regular season as 22 teams out of 30 make it. I don’t need to care about seeding until the last month. The transaction periods tend to get the most talk in NBA not actual games.
Maybe shortening the season would make it harder to tank as the games matter a bit more.
22 out of 30 make it? What sport are you watching bud?
It is 20 my bad big deal. Still having that many teams make a post season experience hurts the regular season. They should remove the play in.
NFL has 14 out of 32
MLB 12 out of 30
Both end up with more important playoff races in the regular season. Even with baseball having way more games.
The sports gambling companies have been complaining about their bets being affected by teams playing to lose. This is the real reason Adam LeSilver is pushing this change so much, nothing else matters but money to him.
How are you expecting to get better game play with tanking, the bottom 10 teams are trying to lose
I don’t think there’ll be a one-stop, all-encompassing solution to this ….. there are too many factors in play here, some teams have competent front offices, others not etc …… some of their proposals looks sound, but IMO the danger here is they over-do things and it brings about new issues down the road.
I wish the priority was looing into how to lessen all of these injuries.
Healthier teams, top players playing makes for more competitive games.
One big and enduring problem is too many games. There is no recognition as to how the 82 game schedule damages players long term, not to mention good players/teams play a lot more games due to the playoffs. There would be much less opportunity to lose games if there were fewer games, literally.
In truth, I used to have the same opinion about an-82 season being too long .or downsizing the number of teams …… but the quantity and quality of collegiate and international talent the past 20+ years, there’s no excuse to not having depth and using it.
Also, not unless a few more Jokic’s emerge and post-play becomes fad again, the game will remain fast and shots will be aplenty …… no bigger culprit for injuries, than the crazy pace at both ends of the court.
Like I said, I don’t see any one-solution to fix everything, it might take a few tweaks to sanitize tanking – just sanitize it some …… there’ll always be poverty teams, bad front offices.
Agreed, 82 games at the intensity level the games are played at today cannot help but increase injuries both in frequency and severity. Starting in 67-68 the number of games became 82 per team (75 games in 59-60) and while measuring intensity of play is a bit arbitrary, I’d guess most folks would agree that it has also increased. Add in significantly longer playoffs (in 82-83 the first round was still the best 2 of 3) and no matter the training staff players are bound to get hurt more. <<>> I simply can’t imagine that happening. The trend is the opposite with the advent of the play-in. What is the answer?
I think the league would’ve, and maybe tried to iirc, make injury reporting more transparent in the aftermath of the Terry Rozier and Billups scandals. It would at least tell teams fans what to expect when they buy a ticket. If teams can gamify it ultimately they will, this is competitive sports, and so franchise rebuilding like what the Jazz and Wiz are doing is part of that, but the whole league needs to find a better way to manage and report injuries as long as the league wants to be in bed with fan duel and draft kings SMH
Judging from that list, it does feel like the league is actually taking this seriously. Consider my optimism dial moved from a 1 to a 2.
None of these incentivize trying to win. They just make it a little less comfortable to lose. None of these will work.
On one hand they can’t pull the e brake and expect owners to get on board. On the other hand they need at least one rule with a little bite.
Please explain to me why the league needs to incentivize winning? If it’s not your goal to win, why are you allowed to be in the NBA?
I don’t know, but the Kings, Pelicans, Trailblazers, Wiz and the Utah Jazz (please change the name already) would like a word.
Go full bore. Make the draft three rounds. Round one – playoff and play-in tournament teams only. Round two – just like it is now. Round three – teams that didn’t make the playoffs/play-in.
Just WATCH how fast tanking stops!!!
The conference final rule is dumb. Teams trade picks 4+ yrs ahead of time, what if like OKC, Jazz, Grizz, whoever has multiple 1st from other teams they make the conference finals but the other team actually sacked? They shouldn’t be penalized and should still be able to get the pick. It should only be if your own actual pick.
I wonder if that would be part of the rule. It seems like the idea is aimed more at a team like the 2025/26 Pacers than the ’25/26 Thunder (who control the Clippers’ pick). The latter scenario has nothing to do with tanking — if anything, the Clippers are incentivized NOT to tank under the current system since they know it could result in OKC getting a top-four pick.
Everybody and their dog says that ‘mid is the worst’ and if a team is run like the Bulls, who, instead of bottoming out, always try to win, even when they have no realistic chance to achieve anything, then it’s the worst.
A bunch of team decided to do it ‘the right way’, and now suddenly it’s a scandal?
I don’t blame the teams for doing it but glad Silver is doing something today
It weakens the product Imo and the fans suffer in the end
Damage has been done, it was hard to not want to tank when you look up and see the fruits that it provided for the best teams in the league today in OKC SAS HOU and DET
I dont think we wanna see teams operate like that moving forward
Yes to that C&C, the path to getting better shouldn’t only be through the lottery, but there really isn’t a way forward without bringing in young talent (and blowing it up again if it doesn’t look promising, see Grizz).
Part of the problem is that teams have an advantage in resigning their own players, which is good in terms of building a team with familiar faces that the fans support, but bad because good players are locked into their teams unless the team, not the player, decides to move on.
Embrace the tank!
I mean, surely anyone can see that you can’t have a league where 30 teams play to win the championship, is unrealistic and it would be dreadful for the teams. You see, now you have the champions and a handful of teams disappointed by not winning… can you imagine having 29 teams frustrated by losing!!!
Worst ever to do it…Adam freaking Silver.
Know what would fix tanking? A relegation/promotion system and a second tier league to feed it.
this is a GREAT solution … 2 divisions? 3? what a perfect solution.
I am 110% in agreement with you, Gabe, but I fear we would have a better chance of flapping our arms and flying to the moon than this. I’m a Crystal Palace guy in soccer. Most years, YIKES, but once in a while …
There would be so many rich guys that would love to buy/start a second (or even third) league team, but the obstacle is obviously the group of rich guys at the top that don’t want to get relegated and risk their franchise valuations and yearly revenue dropping substantially. Still, it would make every game count. It would eradicate tanking instantly. Anything else, and teams will just find new ways to manipulate the system like they always have. So even though they say they want to fix it, that’s mostly just PR as long as they aren’t REALLY willing to fix it lol.
Making the lottery odds even is just going to make half of the league tank. Get rid of it entirely and less teams will purposefully lose because it won’t help their draft chances. MLB doing a draft lottery with no salary cap or penalties (outside paying more taxes) took the worst part of drafts and killed competitiveness completely. NBA still has a penalty for buying championships, but the lottery needs abolished. NBA should put in rules where a team can’t have the top pick back to back.
Nobody ever gets the top pick back to back anyway. The reason so many teams tank is each draft typically has 10 super prospect players or less, and it’s easy to get into position to get one of those guys. Teams shouldn’t be allowed to pick in the top 10 3 years in a row. Forget top 4. That’s a weak measure.
By making it top 10, teams that have already picked 2 straight years will then trade the 3rd year pick to try and get more competitive immediately. That makes the draft more interesting, the offseason more interesting, and especially the trade deadline more interesting.
Cleveland won 3 out of 4 and kept only 1 of the top picks in Irving long term. Bennett was a colossal bust and they traded Wiggins rights to get Kevin Love.
The guy thinks tanking is a massive issue that must be dealt with immediately, meanwhile the investigation into the Clippers and Aspiration draws into it’s 8th month with no end in sight.
flatten odds for the 12 worst records, simple as that.
Try this.
College kids have a choice.
You can declare for the draft or declare to enter the NBA as an amateur FA.
Nba teams make the same choice. Draft or sign from the amateur free agent pool
Theres a lottery draft scale
And a amateur FA scale
Anti-tank is you can have the #1pick but the guy you want might not be there
Benefit for college kid
Choose the team you want and make less
Or enter the draft and make more
All teams choosing to enter draft have a chance to pick number 1 regardless of record.
Here how you stop NBA tanking
– All 14 NBA non playoff teams get 1 ping pong ball eliminates race to the bottom , eliminates worst record)(record won’t matter if you 15-67 or 41-41)
– eliminates pick protections ( makes draft trades just as valuable as a regular trade in building your team
-Gold or points system the final 14 non playoff NBA lottery teams that are in the lottery get points from their head to head records against the other 13 non playoff lottery teams from the start of the season to the where the 14 lottery teams are set as follows:
* Wins
* Overtime losses
* Close 4th quarter game
No resting players
No bad game play
No bad coaching
No bad roster
No bad player development
No taking any NBA team lightly
No soft tanking
For years, people pretend all bad teams are somehow tanking, and its never made sense. Tanking is always obvious; not everything is tanking
Regardless, the amount people care about this in comparison to other issues is wild
It really is comical. Why did Silver even bring it up? He’s warning the GMs about what exactly? He’s just alerting them that some nuances to the rules are likely to change so the league can pretend its concerned, with a focus on eliminating some practices that have recently embarrased the league. Bigger picture, all but a few of his suggestions are as likely to increase tanking as decrease it. Of course, he has a history of those types of solutions.
The annoying thing is that it’s right there, a simple direct solution to a simple problem, and it’s guaranteed to work (just eliminate, in any form, draft position being tied to W/L record). If teams can’t get draft benefits by losing, then they won’t try to lose. If they can, then sometimes they will.
Those proposals are all flawed because what’s actually needed is integrity at the organizational level. It’s the only thing that needs to change. If the GMs won’t stop doing it, there is no way to police it effectively and fairly.
Expansion in future will just make it harder to win for the bad teams. Maybe time to look really good into less teams, less players per team or less games per season to get better overall quality of play across the league.
Another system could be 32 teams, Top 16 get playoffs for Title, Bottom 16 get playoffs for #1 draft pick so you actually have to win a series or single game for right to pick #1 and then no trading of #1 pick ever allowed.
The #1 pick must play at-least two full seasons or 160 games with team that selected him before he can be traded, released or even be off the payroll.
Here is the best way to stop tanking. After teams are eliminated from playoffs, their win% and #of games eliminated determine their draft spot. Meaning teams eliminated will now try to win games to secure a top pick
By win% I meant win % only after being Eliminated. Number of games eliminated factors in too because if you have a team that was only eliminated for one game but wins it’s only game after elimination it shouldn’t get a higher draft spot than a team that goes 5-2