How can the NBA stop tanking? Breaking down the internet’s craziest solutions — and why most would never work

It has, by and large, been a fun NBA season thus far. The championship race is wide open. Five semi-recent All-Stars changed teams at one of the more active trade deadlines in recent memory. Even the All-Star Game was pretty fun for a change. But nobody’s talking about any of this. All we’re talking about is tanking.

For the record, I consider this a self-inflicted wound. NBA teams have tanked for 40 years. The Houston Rockets played a 38-year-old Elvin Hayes all 53 minutes in the second-to-last game of his career in an effort to secure Hakeem Olajuwon in the 1984 Draft. Mark Madsen attempted 16 3-pointers in his career; seven of them came in the final game of the 2005-06 season as the Timberwolves were tanking. This isn’t new. It was a mostly accepted practice among the league’s worst teams. But then Sam Hinkie and the Philadelphia 76ers were so overt about it that it created an uproar, so the league overcorrected by changing the lottery formula and flattening the odds.

Mathematically speaking, being bad today is less valuable than it’s almost ever been. The worst team has a 14% chance at the No. 1 pick. Even when the odds were totally flat when the lottery began in 1985, there were only seven teams in the lottery, so the worst team had a 14.29% chance at the first pick. There has only been one lottery in NBA history in which the worst team had worse odds at the No. 1 pick than it does now: 1989, when nine teams each had flat 11.11% odds. By 1990, the weighted system was introduced, yet tanking wasn’t treated as a crisis back then. If anything, the opposite was true. When the Orlando Magic won back-to-back lotteries in 1992 and 1993, the NBA changed the system to make the odds even more favorable to the worst teams. 

But two things changed in 2019. The first is that the lottery drawing changed from three teams to four. This meant that teams could drop four spots from where their record suggested they should draft rather than only three. This created even more of an incentive to tank from a defensive perspective. It wasn’t just about maximizing odds at the top pick, but maintaining the highest possible floor if the lottery didn’t go your way. The teams with the three worst records have identical odds for the No. 1 pick, but the third-worst team can fall as far as No. 7 in the actual draft order. That’s a nightmare scenario, one that amounts to wasting a season for nothing, so teams are more eager than ever to have the worst record.

Meanwhile, those lottery odds that the worst teams lost were suddenly up for grabs. By flattening the odds, the league created more of an incentive for teams in the middle of the lottery to get worse because the reward for being worse was suddenly greater from the middle than it had ever been. Suddenly, there was real value in having, say, the fourth-, fifth- or sixth-worst record. The worst teams are going to be awful no matter what, but the NBA invited teams that might otherwise have been competitive to intentionally get worse because the potential reward was suddenly greater. The last two lottery winners were Play-In teams. The unintended consequences of that 2019 change were enormous.

Yet at this point, it seems pretty likely that more changes are coming. In December, ESPN reported that the NBA was looking into a variety of ways to curb tanking. Last week, the NBA fined the Pacers $100,000 for violating the player participation policy and the Jazz $500,000 for “conduct detrimental to the league.” At his All-Star media availability, commissioner Adam Silver said that “there is talk about every possible remedy now to stop this behavior.”

So I’ve decided to take him up on that. Those ideas presented in December — altering the rules on pick protection, preventing teams from getting top picks in consecutive years and introducing some sort of cutoff line to prevent end-of-season tanking — have been talked to death. I already wrote about what I disliked about them. We already have an idea what further odds flattening would accomplish because we’ve watched it play out in real life. No, if Silver is going to consider every possible remedy to address tanking, we’re going to have to get a bit weirder. 

So I did what anyone would do when they need weird ideas: I consulted the internet. Drawing from established media figures, some selective Reddit searching and a Twitter bat-signal, I pulled together all of the basketball internet’s craziest tanking solutions. I’m going to evaluate these ideas seriously, hoping to figure out what the possible unintentional consequences could be before the NBA actually institutes any changes. The goal here isn’t to land on a single, best idea. It’s to flesh out all of the half-baked concepts — including a few of my own I tossed in at the end — so we have an idea of what’s realistic and what sort of direction the league should take any changes. So let’s dive in.

Let the players choose where they play

We’ve seen all manner of ideas in this fashion. Superagent Rich Paul suggested a raffle system. Veteran NBA reporter Matt Moore pitched a matching system similar to how medical residents land at hospitals. Countless others have called for the simplest answer here: remove the NBA Draft entirely. Make every rookie a free agent. Sure, you could give worse teams more money to spend on rookies, but the broad idea here would be that teams could no longer guarantee themselves any incoming player through record alone. They’d have to convince that player to sign with them.

This sounds great in theory. The worst teams would theoretically have more money to spend since, under a capped system, the best teams would eventually run out of money. The Lakers and Knicks can’t max everybody. But you know who can? Nike. Creating a system wherein players could choose their destinations creates a system wherein sponsors, unconstrained by a salary cap, could pay players more to play in certain cities. There’s this notion now that the world is flat and markets no longer matter. You can watch TikTok anywhere. That’s largely overstated. More people watch Laker games than Magic games. Sponsors, especially sneaker companies since that is basically the only product a player can actively endorse during a game, care about how many eyeballs are on their spokesmen.

Would the Lakers and Knicks run out of minutes eventually? Sure. There’s no amount of money Nike could pay the next Cooper Flagg to come off of New York’s bench. But assuming the Knicks and Lakers and Bulls need a franchise player, the shoe companies are almost always going to ensure that they get one regardless of how much actual cap space they can offer. This is before we contend with the idea that there are certain cities players would probably not choose to play in if all else is equal. Do we really want a world in which Memphis and Utah have to substantially outbid the competition to convince anyone to play for them? Small-market basketball relies pretty heavily on the idea that those teams are capable of getting superstars through the draft. Ultimately any system like this is too beneficial for teams in desirable cities and too detrimental to teams in smaller, less desirable ones to be viable.

The only version that might make sense would involve drastically scaling it down. Say, for instance, you created a system that allowed the top prospect in the draft to choose between the three worst teams in the NBA. That would at least create a measure of accountability. If you’re going to be terrible for 20 years like the Kings have been, you’re going to get penalized for it since prospects wouldn’t want to play for you. There would have to be some safety measure (like, say, once a team has been passed up a certain number of times, it just gets to pick a player unilaterally), but some tiny version of this might have some merit. Ultimately though, the NBA has a mechanism players can use to pick their teams. It’s called free agency. These players gain access to it as their careers progress. That gives incumbent teams enough time to build equity with those players. It’s easier to convince someone to stay in Utah than it is to get them to come to Utah. That’s why any system like this probably isn’t viable.

Better teams get higher picks

The current model incentives losing. We shouldn’t incentivize losing, people say. We should incentivize winning! Well… good news… we do. Just not through the draft order. You know how we incentivize winning? Money. Trophies. General regard around the sport and the world. Teams already have hundreds of reasons to win. They don’t need another one.

I don’t think anyone has seriously suggested giving the NBA champion the No. 1 pick every year, but I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a bad idea. A more common suggestion is something like giving the best team to miss the playoffs the No. 1 pick and then working backwards, with the worst team in the NBA getting the last pick before the playoff teams start drafting. As we covered above in real life, this just shifts the tanking incentive. Bad teams will still be bad. However, there’d suddenly be a whole lot of incentive to lose your Play-In games and get a top pick. I somehow doubt the idea of losing in the first round of the playoffs is more appealing to most teams than a chance at Victor Wembanyama.

Take what Masai Ujiri said in 2021 when asked about the Raptors potentially competing for a Play-In spot. “Everybody’s like ‘why don’t you get in the Play-In?’ Play-In for what? We want to win a championship here.” A year later, he called the season a victory. “Last year, the Tampa tank year, we won. You know why we won? Scottie Barnes.” You’re still incentivizing losing. Just a different kind of losing.

The flip side here is that taking top picks away from the worst teams makes it harder for them to actually rebuild and get better. You’re essentially trapping certain teams at the bottom until they hit a home run in the middle of the first round or some other means of team-building. “Just build through free agency!” What free agency? The NBA’s looser extension rules ensure that very few top players actually become available in July. The best player to change teams through free agency last year was Nickeil Alexander-Walker. Building through free agency isn’t viable anymore. You’d have to essentially rewrite the rules governing contract extensions to create this path for bad teams, something the NBPA would never agree to. In some fashion, you have to give bad teams access to top picks if you expect them to stop being bad. 

The Lottery Tournament

This is theoretically similar to giving top picks to better teams, as you’d expect better teams to win any sort of tournament setting. In truth, it’d still be pretty random. Anything can happen in a single game setting. We’ve seen No. 16 seeds beat No. 1 seeds in March Madness. The talent gap between non-playoff teams in the NBA is much, much smaller than that. Imagine if Cooper Flagg’s fate came down to which team got hot from 3 across a random week in April. It would be high drama, if nothing else, and I suspect that’s where this idea’s appeal comes from. It would be incredibly entertaining and, if keeping fans of lottery teams engaged is the goal, this is a way to do it. It would basically ensure that every team plays a high-stakes game at least once per year.

There are a number of issues with the idea here that we’d need to iron out. The first is the obvious one: NBA players probably don’t want to help their team draft their replacement. How would you get them to care enough this tournament to achieve the desired effect? It would have to be financial. Sure, you could just handle it like the NBA Cup in which players get a predetermined cash prize, but I have a much more fun idea: every player on the winning team gets a player option added to the end of his contract for one extra year worth the same amount of money they are currently set to make in the last year of their existing contract. I bet Zach LaVine would play pretty hard for the Kings to get the No. 1 pick if it meant getting a $49 million player option for the 2027-28 season. As a secondary effect, this creates a real drawback to getting the No. 1 pick. Sure, you’re getting a top prospect, but suddenly all of your bad contracts are a year longer.

Next order of business is format. Basketball Business on Twitter made an interesting suggestion: structure the tournament like the West Coast Conference Tournament. That tournament forces lower seeds to win more games in order to actually win the whole thing. A No. 10 or 11 seed would have to win six games win that tournament, whereas a No. 1 or No. 2 seed would only need to win two. Give the teams with worse records a higher seed, but give the better non-playoff teams a chance to defy the odds and win their way into a top choice. You could argue that doing this would make the early games of the tournament more dramatic than the late ones as they’d involve better teams, and whichever better teams advance would then theoretically have an edge over the worse teams waiting for them after byes, but hopefully a rest advantage would cancel that out.

The other issue we’d need to address would be gap year teams. Imagine Tyrese Haliburton sitting out all season, but then returning for this tournament to win Indiana the No. 1 pick. We couldn’t have that. Twitter user @bjpivonka had an interesting idea for a workaround: just apply the NBA’s 65-game awards eligibility rule to the Lottery Tournament. If a team was bad all year because of injuries, it couldn’t bring back all of its players and score an easy top pick. Some teams might not have many players who reached 65 games. We could address this either by lowering the threshold to 58, which is the minimum for end-of-season leaderboards, or, in my preferred method, by allowing teams to use their G-League players. This forces teams to really invest in their G-League developmental structure. We’d probably have to include a minutes minimum of some sort as well to make sure that teams don’t just bench their best players in the fourth quarter to rack up losses for seeding purposes, but that’s a solvable problem.

Do I think this is the fairest way to hand out top draft picks? No. Do I think it’s any less fair than the lottery? No, at least not if you use the bracket to give the worst teams an easier path through the tournament. That may incentivize losing, but the 65-game minimum is a nice counterbalance since you couldn’t intentionally sit players out for the purpose of preparing for the tournament. Ultimately, this would be fun. If you consider the NBA primarily an entertainment product, this is a great idea. If you consider it primarily a competitive product? We can do a lot better.

The Lottery Committee

I’ve seen a number of ideas in this vein. Twitter user @PepeBrasin suggested a committee, sort of like the NCAA uses for the College Football Playoff or March Madness. The danger you run into with any sort of committee is that there’s no such thing as true independence. Say the committee was comprised of media voters, like awards are. Well, the media has financial incentives to send top prospects to more popular teams. More people watch Laker games than Magic games, and more people read Laker stories than Magic stories. This is the same reason the league couldn’t set up an internal committee. The league office has incentives as well and, given the sheer number of conspiracies the lottery already creates, the last thing anyone in the league would want would be the appearance of impropriety if, say, another Cooper Flagg-to-Dallas situation emerged. There’s only way I could see any sort of committee system being fair and impartial enough to make sense…

Teams vote on who deserves the top picks

Twitter user @automaticnba suggested this to me, and The Ringer’s Zach Lowe pitched a theatrical, papal conclave-themed version of it on his podcast Tuesday. Here’s the basic premise: all 30 teams would be given a single vote. The team that gets the most votes to pick No. 1 ultimately picks No. 1. You’d presumably play out the same process for the next few picks, perhaps even the entire pool of non-playoff teams.

There are two reasons I think this could work. The first is balance. Equal representation among all 30 teams. That’s necessary and I don’t think it could be achieved through an NCAA-style committee. The second, and more important reason, is naked self-interest. Teams are going to vote to send the No. 1 pick to the team that least threatens them, right? Well… isn’t that inadvertently who we want picking No. 1 overall? If everyone agrees that teams like the Jazz, Wizards, Nets and Pacers are making themselves worse in an effort to get a top pick, but the Kings are just organically awful, then it stands to reason that teams would vote to give the Kings the No. 1 pick not out of pity, but out of self-interest. They would rather a team they aren’t scared of get that pick rather than a team that is merely pretending to be bad.

There’s a possible stalemate we’d have to address here and it would be the conferences. Every Eastern Conference team would want the No. 1 pick going to the Western Conference and vice versa for the sake of keeping that top player out of their own court. Maybe the conferences would have to alternate “lottery” picks, say, by ensuring that Eastern Conference teams make only odd picks one year and then only even picks the next in order to break any possible stalemates. Another way to do so might involve trading “votes.” Say we have a 15-15 tie for the No. 1 pick. Well, how much is one of those teams willing to pay someone in their conference in exchange for a tiebreaker? And how much would it take for a team to ensure a top prospect is in their own conference rather than the other one? I don’t think lottery votes could be traded in advance simply because we don’t know if a team will actually wind up in the “lottery” a year in advance, so this might be too complicated, but it’s something to think about.

I sadly think there’s one significant reason this wouldn’t work, and it’s traded picks. Say the Kings are the worst team in the NBA, but they traded their pick to the Thunder five years earlier. Well, now that pick is suddenly far less valuable, because no team in its right mind would vote to give the Thunder a top choice. You’re essentially capping the value of traded picks based on where they land, and since we currently have picks owed out as far as six years into the future, you’d effectively have to freeze future trades while we wait for all of those picks and then implement this system after they’ve all conveyed. That just isn’t viable and I don’t have a solution for trades involving picks whose placement are subject to votes.

Mess with the money

A number of people have suggested versions of financially punishing teams for losing. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons suggested cutting teams out of luxury tax distributions. Twitter user @SundaySpectator wanted to use these punishments to help fans, offering 50% price reductions at arenas and 50% refunds to season-ticket holders depending on record. I’m going to put a stop to this with two words: Steve Ballmer.

When there’s an owner in a sport worth more than $100 billion, there’s no feasible financial deterrent to any behavior he might perceive as beneficial on the court. If other teams are afraid to tank because they can’t afford it, but the Clippers aren’t because Ballmer can, that would give them too great an advantage in the draft process over the rest of the league for this to make sense. On a much smaller scale, you could say big-market owners have this advantage over small-market owners. The Lakers and Warriors are certainly better positioned to trade cash for draft position than the Pacers and Grizzlies are. But really, Ballmer is the ultimate outlier here. It places way too much value on your owner’s net worth, and he laps the field. 

Fortunately, you can rest assured that this will never happen. Owners would never vote on something that could cost them money.

Fining with a different currency

When the Jazz were fined $500,000 for conduct detrimental to the league, longtime Miami Heat beat writer Ira Winderman argued that the Jazz were fined with the wrong currency. Rather than taking away money, they should take away lottery odds. That could either be done by adding wins to their record, or, I think more plausibly, taking away lottery combinations.

As a refresher, here’s how the lottery works: there are 14 ping pong balls and the lottery machine spits out four of them. There are 1,001 possible four-number combinations between 1 and 14, and every team in the lottery is assigned a certain amount of combinations based on how bad their record was. The worst teams get 140 of them. The team that owns the first combination that the lottery machine produces gets the No. 1 pick. This process is repeated three times for picks No. 2, 3 and 4.

In theory, the league could set up objectively definable “tanking” behavior. That could mean certain players missing certain games, or not playing enough minutes within those games. Whatever it is, it would just have to be defined in advance. And then, if any team commits that behavior, it would simply surrender a predetermined number of combinations. If one of those combinations is called, the lottery would just be redone. This doesn’t necessarily end tanking, as some teams might determine that there are more total combinations to be gained by tanking than would be lost through violations unless the punishments were overwhelmingly draconian, but it at least creates some sort of deterrent.

The tricky part here would be defining what constitutes tanking behavior. It would have to be objective and no two situations are identical. How would the league differentiate between an injury that a player could and couldn’t play through? Who’s to say an unconventional coaching decision wasn’t in good faith? There are so many ways to lose games if a team wants to badly enough, and any sort of “you know it when you see it” standard would be ripe for selective enforcement and conspiracy theorizing. This isn’t crazy; it would just need to be fleshed out and thoroughly vetted.

The wheel

This was a concept created by Celtics executive Mike Zarren and shared by Grantland’s Zach Lowe in 2014. The basic idea is that draft order would be determined 30 years in advance on a rotating basis. Each team would make each pick between No. 1 and No. 30 exactly once on a fixed schedule. Record wouldn’t matter at all and we’d know the order for every draft until a fixed point decades in advance.

The obvious concern here would be the inevitability of a dominant team landing a top prospect. Imagine the uproar if the Thunder had landed Wembanyama. We’d wind up with some version of that eventually. It wouldn’t even have to be the No. 1 pick. Since everyone would wind up picking everywhere, we’d likely have a contender at the top of most drafts. Some might say the randomness of it makes it fair. Everyone gets the same allotment of picks in the long run. I’m not convinced that’s fully the case. Not all No. 1 picks are made equal, after all. Inevitably, certain teams would get lucky in landing certain picks in certain seasons and others wouldn’t. Prospects themselves could also game this system. Why enter the draft to join a bad team if a great one is picking No. 1 a year later?

The other drawback: once you start the wheel, you can’t stop it until it’s completed a spin. It wouldn’t be fair to realize five years in that the system isn’t working and alter it because not every team will have gotten its No. 1 pick by then. What happens if the league expands in that window? What happens if the system doesn’t work? Zarren has proposed five- and 10-year alternatives that would offer a bit more flexibility, but the adoption of any systemic change like this would be a massive, long-term undertaking.

As scary as the idea of a top team getting a top pick would be, what about the opposite? How could the league keep fanbases of struggling teams engaged if those teams had already swung and missed on their No. 1 pick, or if they know their next few picks are going to be low? There’s not a good answer for that, though to be fair, we already sort of see versions of that now when teams trade control of their first-round picks away for several years at a time. A system like this is so drastically different than anything any American sport has ever used before that the unintended consequences would likely be enormous, and frankly, unpredictable.

Multi-season standings

Twitter user @GoodPointJoe suggested separating draft order from the current season’s standings. A team’s draft slot would be determined a year in advance based on their cumulative record in the three preceding seasons. The idea here is that a team being bad over several years is a much bigger indication that it needs an infusion of young talent than being bad over a single year. Of course, the flip side to this is that it encourages multi-year tanking, especially because a team could then benefit from that tank across multiple drafts if it was willing to tank long enough.

Joe’s idea of a solution would be setting some sort of minimum number of wins in order to retain eligibility for a top pick, but that immediately gets hard for fans to follow and it once again creates some incentive to be bad in the middle. After all, if there are teams in danger of losing their pick for being too bad, then you stand to benefit if you’re only sort of bad. A lot can change over a three-year sample as well. Do we really want teams benefitting from things that happened so far in the past? What if a team is so capped out that it sees no path to winning, so it tanks while it waits out the expiration of bad contracts, then emerges three years later with clean books and multiple years of top draft choices? There are just too many ways teams could exploit a system like this for it to really work.

To the victor go the spoils

Twitter user @ocksportello offered an idea that I’ve seen some version of quite a bit over the years, but comes with a pretty glaring flaw. What he suggested was that, at the end of every game, the team that scores more points gets to decide if the game counts as a win or a loss. The idea here would be that a bad team could play to win without it affecting their draft position, but competitive teams would still take the win for playoff seeding purposes, so broadly, the worst teams would still wind up at the bottom of the standings.

My biggest concern here would be those playoff teams. Say two teams are fighting for a No. 1 seed down the stretch. One of those teams loses a game against the worst team in the league, but that team chooses to count it as a loss, so the contender gets the win anyway. That’s unfair to the team it’s fighting for seeding against. Heck, it’s also pretty exploitable. Wouldn’t contenders just rest everyone against teams that wanted to rack up losses, since those teams would just choose the loss and hand you a win regardless? How would teams handle the beginning of a season? Would we never see surprise playoff teams, because bad teams would plan from the start of the year to count all of their wins as losses?

This is an unintended consequence rabbit hole I have no intention of climbing down. I could see it working in very targeted circumstances, such as late in the season between two teams that have already been eliminated from playoff contention. Beyond that, there are too many potential ways for this to go south.

The musical chairs solution

Probably my favorite creative concept: what if teams didn’t draft with their own picks? I’ve seen two interesting concepts on this front, neither of which are perfect, but both of which have some merit.

The first came from a user on the Bill Simmons subreddit. Essentially, every year, teams would hold a draft in which they would select someone else’s first-round pick. The team with the worst record would go first and it could choose any team besides itself. That pick would be based on where the team it chooses finishes. All 30 teams would pick this way. Since nobody controls its own pick in a given season, there would be less reason to overtly attempt to lose games for positioning. There would still be some incentive to lose since you would get a higher pick in the next team draft, but nobody would want the embarrassment of handing over the No. 1 overall pick.

You’d likely feel pretty good picking anywhere near the top of this draft, so landing in a specific slot wouldn’t be essential. We tend to be pretty bad at knowing who is going to have the worst record in the NBA a year out. The team with the lowest win-total line in Vegas this season was Utah, which currently has the sixth-worst record in the NBA. In fact, the team with the lowest preseason win-total line in Vegas hasn’t wound up with the worst record in the NBA since the Nets did so in 2017. If anything, this rewards smart teams for being able to correctly identify who will be bad. You might have playoff teams winding up with consistently strong draft picks because they’re good at figuring out who’s going to fall off a year in advance. 

I don’t think this is realistic, though, because the NBA would view it as uncouth to so publicly declare a lack of faith in another team. It’s probably one of the reasons the popular concept of higher seeds picking their opponents in the playoffs has never gained steam. It’d be very fun for fans, but probably not the best look for the league if one team basically declares “yeah, we don’t think this other team is good.”

There’s a slightly amended version that I think gets around this idea, though, and it’s one I’d seriously consider. From Twitter user @GriffinHilly: what if teams weren’t allowed to win the lottery with their own first-round pick? The concept here is enormously simple and very refreshing. The lottery drawing selects the first four picks. If you control your own pick, it cannot land in the top four. You surrender your ping pong balls and land wherever your record dictates you should after the lottery plays out.

What this really does is supercharge the trade market. The worst teams would all want to trade their own first-round pick because they’d know they couldn’t win the lottery with it. The easy solution here would be for the bad teams to link up and trade with one another. We’d surely get a lot of that and, once those teams did so, they could try to win in peace while hoping the other team fails to do so. 

But inevitably, it wouldn’t always be this simple. What if more teams were suddenly motivated to make win-now trades using their unprotected picks because they’d know those picks couldn’t be any higher than fifth? Would we see teams getting rope-a-doped here, where one team starts out badly, trades its pick to another bad team for their pick, and then, with no more incentive to lose, pivots into a win-now trade knowing it would still have a path to winning the lottery through someone else? Could certain teams decide they’d rather take the guarantee of a fairly high pick that can’t be in the top four than the risk of trading with someone else and falling way down? Teams would take all sorts of creative approaches to utilizing their picks as assets in this world and I think most of them would be a net gain for the league purely in terms of generating interest. We’d see a lot of cool trades and novel roster-building strategies.

Again, it’s not perfect. There is still some incentive to lose here, since it would make it easier to trade your own pick for another bad team’s pick. But it probably does away with the most visually offensive versions of tanking since teams wouldn’t need to be so aggressive for every last slot. If I were going to endorse any solution in here, it would probably be this one.

What about the Play-In Tournament?

There seems to be something pretty close to a consensus among fans, media and executives that there’s no worse place to be than the middle. Even Silver mentioned that idea in his All-Star press conference. When you’re in the middle, you’re presumably not good enough to seriously compete with the best teams, yet you’re not bad enough to get the sort of talent infusion from the draft it would take to bridge that gap. You’re sort of trapped. If the league wants teams to build from the middle, it has to give them the tools to do so.

What about a second mid-level exception handed to the eight teams in the Play-In Tournament that is immune to luxury tax and hard cap calculations? Essentially, you’d be giving teams in the middle an extra salary slot to use in free agency or trades to try to take the next step from decent to good to hopefully, eventually, great. You could apply similar logic to the draft. Maybe the eight Play-In teams get an extra pick between the first and second round. The goal here would be to reward teams that don’t tank with some tangible, team-building advantage to incentivize them to try to go up from the middle rather than down.

The Play-In Tournament has by and large been a success. The games are great. Fans love it. But teams should view it as a stepping stone, not a trap. Giving those teams the top picks in the draft is a bridge too far, but giving them something might help convince them that it’s ok not to be terrible.