NBA’s new lottery gives teams reason to compete, and few reasons to get clever

The NBA can change the lottery. It can flatten the odds, punish the worst records and make it harder for the same franchise to keep collecting premium picks.

What it can’t do is make 30 front offices stop looking for an advantage.

That’s the issue raised by John Hollinger of The Athletic in a detailed examination of the league’s new lottery rules. His conclusion is encouraging, with a catch: The changes should substantially reduce the incentive to lose, but a few unusual situations could still make losing the preferred outcome.

And some of those situations involve teams that don’t even control their own first-round pick.

Yes, really. Welcome to the NBA, where trying to fix one set of incentives requires checking about six other sets first.

Hollinger deserves credit for working through those complications. His analysis also raises a broader question about how we should judge the overhaul. The reasonable goal is a league in which fewer teams spend the spring treating victories as a setback.

Demanding a system that eliminates every possible advantage to losing is a much tougher assignment. By that first standard, there’s plenty to like.

A better reason to play

As Hoops Wire previously outlined, the new system expands the lottery to 16 teams and reduces the chances of the three teams with the worst records landing the No. 1 pick.

Under the distribution Hollinger details, those bottom three teams receive two lottery balls apiece. Teams with the fourth- through 10th-worst records receive three each. Four more teams, the ninth- and 10th-place finishers in each conference, receive two apiece, while the two losers of the seventh-versus-eighth play-in games get one each.

There are 37 balls in all. The important distinction is easy enough to follow: Finishing at the very bottom no longer gets you the best shot at the top.

That changes the conversation for a struggling team.

Previously, winning a few late games could leave fans wondering whether their team had damaged its future for the privilege of finishing a little less badly. Now, getting out of the bottom three carries a lottery benefit.

For coaches trying to establish standards and young players trying to learn how to close a game, that’s useful. There’s enough pressure attached to developing in the NBA without having everyone debate whether your game-winning shot was actually bad for the franchise.

It should help the product, too. Fans buying tickets in March shouldn’t have to study next June’s draft class to find a reason to care about the fourth quarter.

None of that means a bad team suddenly becomes good. A roster short on talent will still lose plenty. The improvement comes from giving that organization a stronger reason to keep trying to win.

Where the math gets strange

Hollinger’s most interesting example concerns the Nets and the rules restricting repeat lottery success.

Teams cannot win consecutive lotteries under the new structure. According to Hollinger, that restriction follows the original team’s lottery result even when another franchise receives the pick.

That creates a peculiar possibility for the Nets, whose 2027 first-rounder is subject to a swap with the Rockets, as Hollinger explains. Brooklyn controls its own 2028 pick. If the Nets’ selection wins the 2027 lottery and goes to Houston, Brooklyn would still be barred from winning the lottery the following year.

So the Nets could watch another team receive the No. 1 pick and then carry the restriction into a draft in which they keep their selection. That’s a fairly unpleasant two-year sequence.

Here’s the complication Hollinger identifies: If Brooklyn is struggling badly enough, finishing in the bottom three would reduce the chance of that happening. Its odds of producing the No. 1 selection would fall from roughly 8.1 percent to 5.4 percent.

In that specific situation, losing more could help protect a future opportunity.

This is Hollinger’s example and his analysis, not evidence that the Nets have decided to pursue such a strategy. There’s a meaningful difference between finding an incentive in the rules and establishing that a team intends to act on it.

Still, the incentive is worth examining. Ordinarily, owing your pick to someone else takes much of the lottery calculation out of your season. This wrinkle puts some of it back.

The cost can follow the wrong team

There’s a reasonable argument for preventing a franchise from repeatedly landing at the top of the draft. At some point, rebuilding should involve more than waiting for another lottery drawing. The harder question is how that restriction should work when picks change hands.

From this corner, that’s the part deserving the closest review. If the purpose of a rule is to limit repeated access to elite talent, it’s fair to ask how well it works when the team carrying the penalty didn’t receive the player.

There may be good reasons to attach eligibility to the original selection. Changing that approach could create another set of opportunities for teams to exploit. But the Nets scenario shows why traded picks require special attention.

Hollinger also examines the restriction against receiving top-five selections in three consecutive drafts. That provision creates additional complications when past lottery results, future obligations and pick protections overlap.

The details are different, but the concern is similar: A rule intended to discourage prolonged losing can, in a narrow set of circumstances, give a team another reason to consider it.

That’s useful work for the league to have in front of it now, before one of those situations becomes a late-season controversy.

Don’t confuse a possibility with a plan

There’s another piece of Hollinger’s column worth emphasizing. He’s skeptical that a team would intentionally lose the first seventh-versus-eighth play-in game just to gain a small lottery opportunity. That skepticism makes sense.

A front office can calculate the potential draft benefit. A coach still has to prepare a team, and players still have to compete with a playoff berth available. Deliberately passing up a chance to secure that berth would be a considerable gamble for a modest chance at lottery success.

Basketball decisions involve people whose interests don’t always fit neatly inside the same calculation. A player fighting for a contract has his own reasons to win. So does a coach trying to keep his job.

That won’t prevent every questionable decision. It should caution against treating every theoretical loophole as something a team will actually use.

Hollinger’s overall assessment is favorable to the reforms. The remaining concerns are limited cases, and he makes clear that their likely impact is much smaller than widespread late-season losing.

That’s the right scale for this discussion. The NBA doesn’t need to declare tanking defeated. It needs more teams playing meaningful basketball for longer, fewer games compromised by organizational priorities and a willingness to adjust when the rules produce an unintended result.

The new structure, scheduled for review after the 2029 draft, gives the league a chance to do that.

At the moment, though, Hollinger has supplied a useful list of places to watch. The next test comes when a struggling team reaches the spring, checks the standings and has to decide what a win is worth.