The NBA is taking another swing at one of its oldest problems: how to keep the bottom of the standings from turning into a months-long race to lose.
According to ESPN’s Shams Charania, the league has begun gathering feedback from owners and general managers on a set of potential anti-tanking measures, discussed as brainstorming ideas at a recent Board of Governors meeting. None have been formally adopted or put to a vote yet, but the fact that they’re being workshopped at the ownership level signals how seriously the league views the current incentives.
The proposed concepts strike at three pressure points teams can manipulate late in the season. One idea would tighten the rules on pick protections in trades, limiting them to either top-four protection or top-14 (lottery) protection and higher, effectively removing the common “mid-lottery” protections that can create perverse incentives. In plain terms, the league wants to reduce the situations where a team benefits from losing not just for its own pick odds, but to avoid conveying a pick it already owes; an issue that has become increasingly complex as protections stack across multiple future drafts.
A second proposal would bar teams from drafting in the top four in consecutive years, an attempt to prevent multi-year bottoming-out from being rewarded with repeated elite selections.
In theory, it would push front offices to compete sooner rather than treating a two- or three-year tank as the cleanest path to talent.
The most dramatic lever is the third: locking in lottery positions as of March 1, essentially freezing the draft order for the 14 non-playoff teams at that date, so the final six weeks of the regular season can’t be manipulated through obvious late shutdowns, “injury management” in disguise, or lineup choices that prioritize ping-pong balls over wins. Reuters reported this idea as part of the league’s discussions, framing it as a direct deterrent to late-season intentional losing.
The NBA has been here before. It flattened lottery odds beginning in 2019 so the three worst teams each have a 14% chance at the No. 1 pick, hoping randomness would discourage outright tanking. It also introduced policies aimed at keeping healthy stars on the floor, including the Player Participation Policy approved in 2023.
Yet the core incentive remains stubborn: the draft is still the fastest way for a bad team to acquire a franchise player, and losing still improves your odds.
That’s why these new proposals feel more structural than cosmetic. They’re designed to attack the “math” of tanking rather than the optics, less about fining teams after the fact and more about changing what losing can buy you. But each comes with its own unintended consequences. Freeze the lottery on March 1, and teams may simply start the teardown earlier. Ban consecutive top-four picks, and truly bad teams could argue they’re being punished for lacking talent rather than for manipulating outcomes. Tighten protections, and you change the trade market, perhaps making it harder for rebuilding teams to take big swings, or forcing contenders to pay more cleanly for star upgrades.
The league’s conclusion, for now, is not that it has solved tanking, it’s that it’s ready to reconsider the incentive structure again. These ideas are still in the exploratory phase, but the message is clear: the NBA wants April basketball to matter for everyone, not just for teams chasing seeding.
