The NBA has taken the next step toward draft-lottery reform.
According to ESPN.com’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the NBA’s competition committee has officially recommended the latest lottery reform proposal, which means the Association’s board of governors will be putting it to a vote later this month. Woj has more details:
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has been determined to pass a plan that deters the tactic of tanking games to gain access to better odds at higher picks in the league’s annual player draft.
The competition committee also recommended a plan to the board of governors to curb the resting of healthy players in the regular season, league sources told ESPN.
The board of governors will vote on instituting the changes at a meeting in New York on Sept. 28. The plans will need a two-thirds majority to pass into legislation.
The included changes, as Woj notes, would take effect as of the 2019 draft and include flattened odds at the top of the lottery order. The worst team in the league currently has a 25 percent chance of taking hope the top pick, while the second- and third-worst squads own declining odds. This latest proposal would give all three the same chance of securing the No. 1 overall pick.
Such a change definitely makes for an interesting wrinkle, and it gives teams the slightest incentive to avoid tanking altogether. But these rules, coupled with the new hardline stances on player rest, won’t fix everything.
Certain squads will still jump at the chance to nab top-three lottery odds, with the assurance of falling no lower than seventh in the order, even if they’re not allowed to pick in the top three for consecutive years.. As many have already pointed out, the best way to get a superstar, particularly as a small-market team, is still through the draft. And so long as that remains the case, and so long as the NBA is rewarding those with bad records to some degree, there will always be those willing to roll the dice on tank jobs.
