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Why proposed ‘3-2-1 lottery’ is bad news for NBA’s tanking problem
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Does the NBA have a tanking problem? The executives certainly think so. The last few weeks of the 2025-26 NBA season had a few instances that seemed to show teams intentionally trying to lose games to get a better draft position. It sparked a debate amongst fans on what the best way is to fix this long-standing problem of the league.
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Today, a report came out regarding the NBA’s proposed solution to the tanking problem. Dubbed as the “3-2-1 lottery” system, the proposal makes sweeping changes to the current lottery format . The points of emphasis in the proposal are as follows: extending the lottery to 16 teams, flattening the odds even further, and the biggest change of all: penalizing the bottom three teams by reducing their odds of nabbing a top pick.
This is an interesting proposal with one clear target: penalize teams trying to lose games on purpose. Last season, the NBA fined the Utah Jazz and the Indiana Pacers for what they deemed to be blatant tanking measures. One of these measures was the Pacers taking out their starters for the entire fourth quarter in a close game, which led to Indiana losing, obviously. That drew the ire of a lot of fans.
Is this the solution to the tanking woes that the NBA has been looking for all this time? While it does disincentivize teams from intentionally trying to lose games, this move might end up not helping the issues that cause teams to tank in the first place.
Why NBA’s proposed “3-2-1 lottery” is bad news for NBA’s tanking problem
The biggest problem with this proposed new system is the part where the bottom three teams have lower odds of getting the first overall pick in the NBA draft. It’s easy to see how the NBA got to this solution: the teams trying to lose games on purpose are trying to get the worst record in the league. By penalizing the teams in the “relegation zone”, teams will be disincentivized from getting there, right?
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The problem is that there’s another group of teams that will be penalized heavily with this new system: the teams that are bad, but aren’t intentionally losing games. This may be a young team early in their rebuild, a playoff contender who suffered a ton of injuries in the regular season, or something of that sort. These teams aren’t trying to lose games, but they are just not competitive enough to win enough games.
True parity will never happen in any league. To have good teams, you must have bad teams. The way that bad teams improve, especially in the new NBA landscape, is to get a top draft pick and hope to build around them. The best prospects are typically found at the top. Think Victor Wembanyama . Jayson Tatum . Luka Doncic . Anthony Edwards . These foundational pieces were drafted with a top-3 pick by their respective teams.
When you punish bad teams by lessening their chances of getting a homegrown star, you all but force them to stay at the bottom. The NBA is basically telling teams to be better at building competitive teams, but a fundamental part of building good teams (especially for small-market teams) is drafting a young player to be the franchise cornerstone. These proposed changes lower the chances of that happening.
Of course, a bad team can still get a star player in the middle round of the draft. For every Wembanyama and Edwards, there are the Nikola Jokics and the Giannis Antetokounmpos: players who weren’t high draft picks but still ended up being franchise stars. However, those players are an anomaly. You are much more likely to get a star player at the top of the NBA draft.
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The NBA needs to accept that there will, unfortunately, always be bad teams in the league. That’s just the nature of any league. What they need to do is to give more avenues for these bad teams to improve. They’re on the right track by fining teams that blatanly tank: they just need to avoid getting other teams in the crossfire of their actions.
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