The NBA Is Actually Going to Change the Draft
The NBA has long been considering major changes to combat tanking, an issue that may be overblown by the league office. They teased changing the draft, with commissioner Adam Silver even half-seriously saying he might do away with it and make rookies free agents.
Now that things are winding down on the 2025-26 regular season, Silver has said he does still want to change the draft. Provided he gets support from the board of governors, the draft as we know it might be gone forever.
NBA looking at changing draft to combat tanking
Tanking and expansion are seemingly the two things Adam Silver cares most about. He wants more teams, but he wants those teams not to aggressively pursue franchise-altering upgrades through the top of the draft. It's a little bit hypocritical. Changing the draft is aimed at fixing tanking.
"I do think ultimately this is a decision that needs to be made at the ownership level," Silver said about changing the draft. "It has business implications, has basketball implications, has integrity implications for the league. So, it's one that we take very seriously, and we are going to fix it. Full stop."
The league plans to meet to address this in May so that all teams have all the information before the 2026-27 season. This way, they don't gameplan to tank when it won't help them. "Certainly going into next season, the incentives will be completely different than they are now," Silver added.
Hard to tell?
Unfortunately, it's hard to tell which NBA teams are tanking versus which ones are bad. For years, the Charlotte Hornets were bad. They weren't tanking; they just couldn't play good basketball. Did they deserve to be punished alongside outright tanking teams?
It's difficult to discern, which Adam Silver admitted. It's also unfair to try to discern. Some teams are bad, but preventing others from tanking will keep those bad teams bad. Even though Silver knows that, he doesn't think it's viable to let it go on like this, even for the sake of those rebuilding teams.
"There is an aspect of team building that is called a genuine rebuild, a rebuild with integrity," Silver said. "The problem we're having these days is it's become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild."
The NBA has tried this already
The league has tried to combat tanking before, and it didn't work. As long as there are bad teams and really good prospects, teams will always care about losing more than winning. It's the only way for small market teams that can't attract star free agents to get better.
The league has tweaked the lottery before, including giving the worst three teams the same odds of winning. Theoretically, there's no incentive to be the outright worst other than falling no lower than fifth. In Adam Silver's eyes, that didn't do enough to prevent this supposed issue.
"There's such a subtlety to this when incentives don't match, when we're now into it with coaches' decisions on lineups and when players come in and out of the game, injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other, pain levels of players," the commissioner said, "that my sense is when I say fix now, yes, we need to do something more extreme than we did with those incremental changes the last four times along."
It is unclear what Silver will do about the draft. It seems virtually impossible that he'd actually suggest abolishing it and making rookies free agents who can sign wherever. Even if he did, he'd never get support from the majority of owners. Every team outside of LA, New York, and other massive cities, or those with currently elite NBA teams would be totally disadvantaged.
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