Adam Silver: 'Substantial changes' coming to deter tanking

Addressing the issue of tanking during a panel appearance at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, NBA commissioner Adam Silver reiterated that the league intends to adjust its rules in a major way ahead of the 2026-27 season, per Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic.

“We are going to make substantial changes for next year,” Silver said. “I think where I’m on the fence — on one extreme, you could completely divorce the draft from teams’ records. Just argue we could take all 30 teams regardless of the outcome, that would completely disincentivize tanking. You could win the finals, you know, and get the first pick. But then there’s gradations of that.”

Despite teasing a complete overhaul of the NBA’s draft lottery system, Silver admitted that the rule changes likely won’t be quite that significant.

“Not to exactly forecast where we’re going, but I think I’m sort — I am an incrementalist,” he said. “I think we got to be a little bit careful, you know, about how huge a change we make at once. I’m not ruling anything out, but I am paying attention to that. And then there’s something significantly more than, I would say, just tinkering with the existing system.”

As reported last month, some of the ideas that the NBA has discussed to discourage tanking are as follows:

• Restricting teams from including protections between top-four and top-14-plus on traded first-round picks.
• Prohibiting teams from having top-four picks in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes.
• Barring teams from selecting in the top four if they make the conference finals the previous year.
• Freezing lottery odds at the trade deadline or an unspecified “later date.”
• Flattened odds for all lottery teams.
• Lottery odds being allocated based on two-year records.
• Lottery extended to include all eight play-in teams (instead of the four who don’t make the playoffs).

That second-to-last item — basing the odds for lottery teams on their records over the last two seasons — was one Silver cited on Friday, noting that the WNBA uses it. He also noted that he’s hesitant to punish teams in the midst of “legitimate rebuilds” who are “genuinely trying to win games” with young rosters, but he suggested that tanking this season ahead of a strong 2026 draft has gone well beyond that.

“It’s a little bit of a perfect storm this season, that you have a perceived, very deep draft,” the commissioner said. “Again, I say ‘perceived’ because scouts’ predictions are wrong. But there’s a sense that you have four players in particular, maybe five, who are true game-changers. You add to that a forecast that the next two years’ drafts won’t be as good, and you create enormous incentive for teams to tank.”