In addition to planning to reform the draft lottery in an effort to deter teams from tanking, the NBA is also interested in expanding its ability to penalize teams who manipulate player availability and rotations in an effort to lose, reports Joe Vardon of The Athletic.
The Jazz were fined $500K in February for what the NBA deemed “conduct detrimental to the league” after they sat star forwards Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. in the fourth quarters of consecutive games.
Under the proposed policy changes, the NBA would have the latitude to increase those fines into the millions of dollars, Vardon writes, as well as either moving a team’s draft pick to the end of the lottery or the end of the first round — or taking it away entirely.
The NBA is considering implementing one of three lottery reform proposals presented to its Board of Governors at this week’s meetings, but apparently recognizes that none of those concepts would entirely eradicate tanking on its own. It sounds as if the goal would be to implement more punitive penalties for tanking in concert with those changes to the lottery.
“Without stricter penalties, you could still have crazy behavior,” one league source told The Athletic. “You have to have something in place that is so drastic, a team would actually think twice about tanking. And if a team tries it and gets caught, then the other teams need to see the penalties and realize it isn’t worth it to try.”
This proposal is short on details for now, but presumably the NBA would like to implement an anti-tanking policy along the lines of its player participation policy, which lays out specific guidelines and calls for increasingly harsher penalties for teams who repeatedly violate those guidelines. In other words, any anti-tanking policy would likely start with fines before rising to the level of draft pick devaluation or forfeiture.
The NBA’s Board of Governors is scheduled to meet again in May to discuss and vote on the issue.
Tanking isn’t a problem. The real problem is GAMBLING.
Maybe instead of going all Darth Vader with punitive actions taken against teams in inconsistent ways at the whim of NBA leadership we should turn the whole thing upside down and give the teams with the best records the best draft picks.
Might it create dynasties? Maybe.
…but the current system already creates dynasties.
If you want more teams to focus on winning, you need to reward winning. It is b/c the NBA rewards losing that the problem exists to begin with. You reward losing, you get losing, it isn’t rocket science!
How about a system where the top 2teams in each conference get the bottom 4 picks, and the teams with the best records after that are in the lottery, based on their record (you could even make it flat for teams 5-16, giving them the same % odds, and then a step down for the next 8 teams, then a step down for the rest. This gives you either (1) home court advantage for the first 2 rounds of the playoffs or (2) the same shot as everyone else at a top pick the next year.
Trying to punish teams for tanking while also rewarding them for tanking is just going to continue to make the league a mess of many teams not even trying to win. The competition is poor most nights – b/c of the structure. You need to change the structure entirely and reward winning if that is what you want to see.
I appreciate this way of thinking, but I think a less cynical or extreme way to do this is to just have all teams have equal chance at the #1 pick, remove the playoff barriers. Also do not have a corrupt drawing system. Have the public do it.