The NBA officially passed its contentious lottery reform on Thursday afternoon in an attempt to address a purported tanking crisis. My initial concerns about the plan still stand, and the NBA added in a couple more bizarre elements for the final product.
It was originally reported that teams can’t pick in the top-5 three years in a row, or No. 1 overall in consecutive years, as part of the new lottery changes. This is seemingly meant to address the San Antonio Spurs moving up into the top-4 in three straight lotteries to draft Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper. That rule created a dilemma over picks that had already been traded. The league decided that it will not grandfather in traded picks, meaning teams who initially made those deals are now punished for them.
The one team this affects in the 2027 NBA Draft is the Memphis Grizzlies. The Grizzlies own the Utah Jazz’s unprotected first-round pick in 2027, but now it’s suddenly top-5 protected because the Jazz picked in the top-5 in 2025 and 2026, and thus can’t land a third consecutive top-5 pick in 2027 even if they’re not the ones making it. Somehow, that isn’t even the most bizarre amendment to the reform.
The NBA announced it is flipping the top-16 picks from the first-round in the second-round as part of the lottery reform. This means the team that picks No. 16 in the first-round automatically gets the first pick in the second-round. The team that holds the No. 1 overall pick in the draft won’t pick until No. 16 in the second. The team that drafts No. 2 overall in the first-round now has the 15th pick in the second-round, and so on.
This is an unprecedented move in American professional sports. Previously, the second-round of the NBA draft has been determined by overall record, meaning the Brooklyn Nets pick third in the second-round this year even though their first-round pick fell to No. 6 in the lottery, because they had the league’s third-worst record. Why would the NBA do this? John Hollinger of The Athletic talked to NBA executive vice president Evan Wasch to get an explanation:
Two pieces of logic drove this, according to Wasch. First was to “counterbalance to the luck of the draw in the first round” by at least giving the poor sap whose ping-pong ball was drawn last a better second-round pick.
Secondarily, however, the league wanted to guard against the scenario — one officials acknowledged was unlikely — whereby teams deep in the relegation zone started to tank to land the 31st pick.
My first question is: who asked for this? My second thought is that this is so strange and so creative that I can’t even really be mad about it. I’m mostly just amused.
I always thought a top-10 pick in the second round was pretty valuable. Some recent hits from that range include Jalen Brunson, Ajay Mitchell, Ayo Dosunmu, Herb Jones, Andrew Nembhard, and Neemias Queta. These days, the depth of the NBA Draft has been significantly thinned out by the NIL money flowing through college basketball, so the second round looks a lot weaker. The No. 31 overall pick (or the No. 33 overall pick once the Las Vegas and Seattle expansion teams join) is still a decently valuable asset, but it’s not really worth being upset over at this point.
Plenty of smart NBA analysts are on the record saying they like the new lottery reform. I think tanking was never the NBA’s biggest problem, and was always a bit overblown when it came to the national discourse. Either way, the league passed the reform rules with a 29-1 vote … with the Grizzlies unsurprisingly being the lone dissenters.
The best news for NBA lottery reform haters like me is that it’s only a three-year commitment. Come the 2030 NBA Draft, we will possibly have another new lottery system. Three years is a really short trial run, but that’s what the NBA thought it needed to do to address the public relations black eye that came from tanking. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this all goes, including the suddenly flipped second-round.
