The NBA is reportedly considering a new “3-2-1” lottery system designed to discourage tanking. This proposal will be presented to team owners in late May. Under this system, the three worst teams in the league would actually have worse odds at the No. 1 pick than teams ranked fourth through tenth from the bottom.
In other words, the teams with the worst records would be punished even more for being bad.
And honestly, I don’t understand the logic at all. Do teams tank? Yes. Do some teams just actually suck sometimes? Also yes. Now those teams are going to have an even tougher time rebuilding, whether they are actually tanking or not. But at this point, it feels perfectly on brand for Adam Silver’s NBA.
Instead of fixing actual problems — constant replay reviews, foul-baiting, flopping, and inconsistent officiating — the NBA keeps introducing artificial twists and gimmicks designed to “increase excitement.”
To be fair, I understand what the NBA is trying to accomplish. The league wants to discourage tanking, create more regular-season urgency, and keep more fan bases engaged deeper into the year. Those goals are understandable. I just think the league keeps choosing artificial solutions instead of improving the basketball product itself.
The Play-In Tournament. The NBA Cup. And now this potential new lottery.
The Play-In Tournament
I’m going to keep this brief, as I’ve already gone into more depth why I think the Play-In Tournament is pointless. If you want to check that out, here it is: Why the NBA Play-In Tournament Is Completely Unnecessary.
To start, no 7 or 8-seed has ever won the NBA Finals (0 for 168). So from a competitive standpoint, it instantly makes no sense to also give the 9 and 10-seeds a chance. Sure a 7 or 8-seed has made a run every now and then, but those are few and far between and none have ever actually won the Finals.
There are also 82 games in an NBA regular season, which is a lot of games. Under the old format, 16 out of the 30 teams made the playoffs. Eighty-two games is plenty of time to determine who the best and most consistent 16 teams are. Now we are giving 20/30 teams a shot at the playoffs? It’s unnecessary and honestly punishes the teams that were more consistent and earned that 7 or 8-seed. Now those teams need to go play an elimination style tournament where anything can happen. Even though they proved they were better after all those regular season games.
The NBA Cup
This Cup idea doesn’t add any games for teams as they all tie into the regular season, except for the Championship game, but this still feels completely unnecessary as well. The NBA Cup feels like manufactured stakes and is an idea taken from soccer leagues.
But I think Adam Silver may have missed the point as to why soccer leagues have these cup tournaments. It’s because they don’t do playoffs. Cups exist in soccer to add knockout drama and “win or go home games.” There is no postseason in major soccer leagues across Europe, and the league is won by the team with the most points at the end of the season. The cup adds that drama that a playoff style tournament can bring.
For the NBA, they obviously use a playoff system. The league did not need a Cup tournament to add drama, win or go home games, or opportunities for underdogs. Because the playoffs already do all of that! The NBA didn’t need another tournament to create urgency. It already has one — it’s called the playoffs.
Now the 3-2-1 Lottery
I really just don’t understand this new proposed lottery system at all. How should the three worst teams in the league have worse odds at the No. 1 pick than teams that were objectively better? Tanking absolutely happens, yes, but some teams are just really bad. Punishing the worst teams doesn’t eliminate tanking — it just punishes bad teams.
Let’s look at the Wizards as an example, one of the three worst teams this season (the three worst teams have even odds to get the No. 1 pick in the current lottery system). The Wizards have made the playoffs once in the last eight seasons. So have they been tanking for eight years, or do they maybe just stink? This is the type of franchise that could remain stuck at the bottom for years without elite draft access. Terrible teams often need that elite draft capital to recover. Ironically for this example, the Wizards got exactly that and won the top pick in this very talented 2026 draft. Perhaps they would not have landed that pick under this proposed system.
It is also so difficult to rebuild in the NBA, especially for a small market team. If you take the NFL for example where there is no “max contract”, smaller market teams have a much better chance to sign free agents if they have more cap space and can offer more money. In the NBA, there is a max contract so you can’t really outbid each other. So now bad smaller market teams will get hurt in the draft under this new system, and already have a hard time attracting talent to their teams via free agency. For God’s sake the Cleveland Cavaliers had LeBron James from 2003 – 2010 and even with a player like that they weren’t attracting talent.
Sports leagues shouldn’t punish losing teams more than they already are punished by losing. Rebuilding is hard enough for teams in the NBA. If this new system gets instituted, those teams may be stuck at the bottom for a long time.
Meanwhile, the Actual Product Suffers
So we have Cup tournaments being added, unnecessary play-in tournaments, and an odd lottery idea; all while we have players flopping and flailing all over the place and officials ruining the flow of games. My first ever blog was about how the NBA is tougher to watch even with all this talent, and you can check that out here if you want: The NBA Is More Talented Than Ever – So Why Is It Harder to Watch?
Let’s start with the replay reviews. It’s simple, there are WAY too many of them. Basketball has become so soft recently, and it’s incredibly frustrating when they stop the natural flow of these games for reviews. So many of these stoppages for technicals and flagrant fouls are not only unnecessary and soft, they take forever. The flow and momentum of the game is being disrupted because a grown man fouled another grown man a little hard in the heat of competition. Shit we’ve seen technicals for players clapping and high-fiving before. Sometimes you tune into these games and you get the ref show, which is not what we want. The NBA is a fast-paced game filled with extraordinary athletes, and that gets halted far too often for meaningless reviews.
Then we have the players, who don’t help the viewing experience with all their flopping and foul-baiting either. Joel Embiid is a 7′, 280 pound beast and yet probably spends more time on the floor than playing basketball. Watch SGA for ten minutes and you’ll probably see five head flails. These are just examples, and it is a league wide issue that goes way deeper than just these two. It’s ugly to watch and, honestly, I blame the league for not cleaning it up.
SGA shoots so many free throws. Why would he stop if it keeps getting him to the free throw line? I remember Mike Brown actually calling out SGA’s foul-baiting, which I blogged about HERE too and how foul-baiting is a real issue in this league. Steve Kerr has complained about the foul-baiting as well in the past. So even coaches are getting fed up with it. And to be fair to the officials, players constantly flopping and foul-baiting also makes their job significantly harder.
This is exactly the type of problem Silver and the league should be looking at, as it really impacts the product. And I don’t even understand how it’s that difficult. The league could absolutely implement stronger anti-flopping penalties if it truly wanted to clean this up. But if you are gonna ignore it instead and refs keep rewarding it, the players are absolutely not gonna stop. And it does not help the game at all seeing nonstop flailing around from the players.
The NBA’s real problems are constant replay reviews, foul-baiting, flopping, and inconsistent officiating. But these issues are consistently ignored by the league in lieu of unnecessary changes and additions. The NBA doesn’t need constant reinvention. Basketball is already popular. The league should focus on making the actual game better instead of constantly adding gimmicks around it.
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