Can NBA fix egregious late-season tanking? Why freezing lottery odds at All-Star break is worth a look

Between 1949 and 1966, the NBA Draft order included a bizarre workaround called territorial picks. The typical, standings-based draft order was set every year, but teams could sacrifice their pick in order to circumvent the order if a player either grew up or played collegiately within the team’s region. A total of 23 players were selected this way, and 12 of them became Hall of Famers. The NBA needed to build up regional support in its infancy, so it tried to send stars to the cities that wanted them most. The system made sense at the time. It was also laughably exploitable.

In Robert Cherry’s biography of Wilt Chamberlain, “Larger than Life,” he revealed that Red Auerbach wanted the eventual all-time great to go to college in New England specifically so that the Celtics could swoop in and grab him later. He didn’t do so, but that doesn’t mean Auerbach didn’t find other ways to squeeze the system. In 1956, he nabbed Tommy Heinsohn and Bill Russell in the same draft because he didn’t actually have to pick Heinsohn. As a Holy Cross star, Auerbach could relinquish his own first-round pick, which would have come near the bottom of the round, to jump up for Heinsohn. Then he traded two veterans, Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan, to get Russell. He only had Macauley to trade because in 1949, the St. Louis Bombers used a territorial pick to get him, and then folded a year later. Auerbach got him in the follow-up dispersal draft and then turned him into Russell. This broken system built Boston’s dynasty.

It accidentally built another. In 1965, the Los Angeles Lakers were able to select Gail Goodrich despite having just lost the NBA Finals to those same Celtics. Goodrich won a championship for the Lakers in 1972, but more importantly, in 1976, he signed with the New Orleans Jazz. Back then, free-agent signings triggered compensation. The Lakers got three first-round picks in the exchange. The last, in 1979, became Magic Johnson. These were far from the only territorial picks of consequences (Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson were the system’s biggest stars), but they go to show just how impactful even a single bit of good fortune can be on draft night. The first several decades of NBA history were defined by this single rule.

In 1966, the NBA eliminated territorial picks. At that point, the sport was nationalizing. Fairness took priority over local business interests. The goal of the draft is, after all, to serve as a balancing mechanism. The best teams already have the best players. Therefore, the best new players should go to the worst teams in order to balance the league out. This endeavor has mostly been successful. But, like the territorial system, it has been successfully exploited.

The current state of tanking

You’re surely familiar with the concept of tanking. The draft process incentivizes losing with higher picks, and as long as that remains the case, teams are going to exploit it. As the territorial draft showed us, the concept of an inverted standings-based draft is a necessary bulwark against the strong getting stronger, so there is no reasonable alternative to the modern draft model. Tanking will never be fully eliminated. 

It can be managed, at least temporarily. Between 1966 and 1984, a coin flip was used to determine whether the worst or second-worst team would get the No. 1 pick. Teams abused this system for years, and when the Houston Rockets did so egregiously to secure Hakeem Olajuwon in 1984, the NBA decided it had seen enough. The lottery was instituted a year later. That lottery has been tweaked a few times recently in further tank-averting efforts. In 2019, the odds were flattened to an extent. The top three teams now have a 14% chance at the No. 1 pick compared to the 25% chance the worst team used to have. Teams in the middle have higher odds. The idea was to give teams less of an incentive to race to the bottom. The institution of the Play-In Tournament gave teams in the middle an incentive to try to win their way into the playoffs.

These efforts have been steps in the right direction, but given the degree of tanking we’re seeing on a night-to-night basis, it’s ultimately not enough. The Utah Jazz, competing for the worst record in the NBA, have already been fined $100,000 for violating the league’s player participation policy. The Toronto Raptors have discovered an innovative workaround: they still use their best players… just not at the end of games. Their three leading scorers this season are Scottie Barnes, RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley. Thus far in March, they rank 11th, 12th and 13th on the roster in fourth-quarter minutes. Quentin Grimes is doing everything in his power to ruin Philadelphia’s tank, but with Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey all out, there’s only so much he can do.

These teams all have good reason to tank. Utah may not be able to improve its odds at the No. 1 pick, which are essentially locked at 14%, but they can lower their chances of falling down. The furthest a team with the worst record can slip is to No. 5. Even if the third-worst team has an identical 14% chance at No. 1, that team can fall all the way to No. 7 depending on how the lottery plays out. Philadelphia’s motives are easier to grasp: the Sixers lose their pick if it falls outside of the top six. In the superstar trade era, situations like this are only going to become more common. Right now, half of all 2025 first-round picks belong to a team other than its original owner. If this trend continues (and it will), we’re destined to see more and more teams tank to protect their picks. Technically, that’s what the Jazz are doing too. Their pick goes to Oklahoma City if it falls outside of the top 10. They’ll be doing it again next year, as that pick goes to the Thunder if it’s outside of the top eight.

A possible tanking solution

Again, there is nothing the NBA can do to stop teams like this from tanking entirely. So long as there is any incentive for losing, even a small one, teams will abuse it. But every incremental step the league has taken has provided at least some benefit. It’s just time to take another. I’ll suggest one: the lottery odds should freeze at the All-Star break. While the 14 non-playoff teams would still be the 14 teams in the lottery, their odds would be based on where they stood in the standings at the All-Star break relative to one another.

Why the All-Star break? The 76ers laid out that case themselves. On Feb. 7, Philadelphia lead basketball executive Daryl Morey was still touting the team’s postseason hopes. “I know you have to squint a little, but we feel like this team can still [win the championship],” he said. That quote came just ahead of the break. When he said that, the 76ers were 20-30. Since? They are 3-18. Philadelphia entered the season hoping to win. Injuries were the biggest reason the Sixers couldn’t, but it’s not as though they’ve done much to stem the tide lately. They started losing more and more frequently once it became apparent that winning was not an option.

It’s worth asking, then, if the 76ers are really the sort of team we want winning the lottery? Isn’t the idea here to burnish the worst teams, not the most brazen or even the unluckiest? 

Consider the race at the absolute bottom of the standings right now. At the All-Star break, the Wizards were 9-45 and the Jazz were 13-41. Since then, however, the Wizards have gone on their version of a hot streak. They are 6-10 post-break, something that the NBA would likely prefer to treat as a positive. That is a young team making strides, building habits that will hopefully be applicable moving forward. But that progress has the potential to be quite damaging from a draft perspective largely because the Jazz, by the NBA’s own decree, are not playing by the rules.

That puts the Wizards in the awkward position. The Jazz are probably better than them. They have a more talented roster. In an honest season, they would be expected to finish with a better record and therefore a worse lottery outlook. But this hasn’t been an honest season. The Jazz have broken the rules. Yet, in practical terms, the Wizards are getting punished more for Utah’s gaming of the system than the Jazz are. Even with those identical 14% odds at the No. 1 pick, ask any general manager if $100,000 is worth the risk-mitigation of not being able to fall below the No. 5 pick as opposed to No. 6 or No. 7. They’d all say yes. It would therefore be prudent of the Wizards to tank harder themselves in an effort to protect their draft interests against the Jazz. They are being forced to choose between organic progress and manufactured losing. That’s not a choice anyone should want young teams to make.

Tanking begets tanking. The more teams are doing it, the harder they all need to push in that direction in order to outdo one another. This arms race intensifies late in seasons as a team’s possible range of outcomes narrows. The 76ers would have been insane to enter this season planning to tank. They had just signed Paul George to a max contract and had two other All-Stars ostensibly in their prime. From that perspective, the beginning of the season was a much truer assessment of where the 76ers actually are. As grim as things look right now, they are not actually a 12-win team. That’s the pace they’re winning at since Morey’s quote, and that pace will impact where their pick ultimately lands.

Teams will still tank full seasons, of course, but there’s an honesty to that approach that is beneficial across the board. If a team is willing to decide in July that it needs a top pick next June, well, then it probably does need that pick next June. It’s not something they’re stumbling into, and fans and television networks can plan accordingly. The last thing anyone wants is inadvertent tankers playing nationally televised games in March and April. Fans might even feel more comfortable buying tickets for games that late in the season if teams no longer had a reason to try to lose them.

It might also incentivize teams to keep players they might have otherwise traded. Look back on the Jazz. On Feb. 1 in both 2023 and 2024, Utah held Play-In Tournament spots in the Western Conference. At both trade deadlines, the team traded away several veterans: Mike Conley, Malik Beasley, Jarred Vanderbilt, Kelly Olynyk and Simone Fontecchio. You could argue that these trades still made sense for Utah’s long-term plans, but they were clearly made with an eye on late-season losing. Utah fell out of the play-in race in both seasons. Is that a good thing? Should fans be rooting for their teams to give away valuable players in the middle of a season just to help their draft pick?

Nets fans certainly did. Brooklyn paid a premium to the Rockets in order to regain control of their own picks in 2025 and 2026. They effectively traded for the right to tank. They just didn’t do so effectively enough early on. The Nets attempted to course correct, trading Dennis Schroder and Dorian Finney-Smith in the middle of the season, but fans expecting a top choice wanted more. Many called for them to trade Cam Johnson, the team’s second-leading scorer, just to ensure he couldn’t win them any more games that they wanted to lose. After the deadline passed and Johnson remained on the team, he expressed his frustration with fans who wanted to tank.

“We do not care what they say about that,” Johnson said on Feb. 12. “Listen, at the end of the day, the 15-18 guys on this team have a job to do; our job is to not try to get a draft pick. Our job is to simply win basketball games, and that’s what we’re gonna put our full effort towards.” In a league increasingly concerned about the mental health of its players, the tanking incentive puts their best interests in direct conflict with the team’s and fanbase’s.

Grimes is a great example of this. He’s headed for restricted free agency this summer, trying to earn generational wealth for the first time in his career. His mid-season breakout should be one of the feel-good stories of the season. His fans can’t even enjoy it because it could be the difference between Cooper Flagg and losing a pick to Oklahoma City.

Teams would still give away players in order to tank if the odds froze mid-season. Selling typically makes sense as a part of a multi-year vision, not just a short-term tank. But this structure would at least incentive them to do so during the offseason, which not only makes more basketball sense anyway, but makes it easier for players to adjust to a new locale. It’s hard enough uprooting your family over the summer, when you’re not traveling constantly and your kids aren’t in school. Doing so in February is far more disruptive.

Would it work?

The obvious question here is whether this would actually eliminate the late-season tank window or simply move it to January and early February? And the answer, probably, is a bit of both. Some teams would take steps to protect their draft interests, especially because each loss would have more impact under this system than the old one. If your draft slot depends on, say, a 50-game sample instead of an 82-game sample, it becomes that much more important to get bad quickly.

But the consequences to doing so become more severe. It’s harder to talk an owner into a full-season tank than an “our season is already lost let’s just punt on March and April” tank. It’s also a harder tank to execute because of the simple fact that players are healthier in January and February than they are in March and April. Finding excuses not to use them becomes harder, and players and agents would be less willing to work with tanking teams that want to hold them out at that point on the calendar. Stars don’t want to sit in January. They want to compete for All-Star slots and, even when it isn’t realistic, at least try to win their way into the playoff picture. You’d likely still see some shenanigans in this world. They just wouldn’t be as egregious as, say, Mark Madsen attempting almost 44% of his career 3-pointers in the last game of a season purely to protect a pick.

This change wouldn’t be perfect. It would be yet another incremental step, one that wouldn’t eliminate tanking all together, but could at least push back against some of its ugliest excesses. Nobody who buys tickets to a Raptors game wants Barnes on the bench in the fourth quarter. Nobody who buys tickets to a Jazz game hopes Lauri Markkanen sits out. But as the system currently exists, their teams are encouraged to make these choices. We can’t do away with that system entirely, but we can at least nudge things in a more honest direction. We have a far better chance of actually determining who the worst teams are if we lock that determination between October and February because, let’s face it, March and April at the bottom of the standings is usually a farce. It’s a contest to see who can find the most creative ways to lose. That system may not be as exploitable as the old territorial system, but just like those old rules, it’s something the NBA should at least try to do away with.