Report: NBA considering proposal to eliminate draft lottery

One of the largest talking points early in the NBA season has been tanking, the process of teams systematically being bad in order to improve their draft position and thus, hopefully, improve their future outlook.

It's led to several teams with ugly rosters and, most importantly, fans openly rooting against their teams in the hope of more hope (in the form of "ping pong balls," or better lottery odds).

This is obviously something the league should be and is concerned about, because it's terrible for the on-court product and completely abhorrent from a moral perspective.

And according to a report from Grantland's Zach Lowe, the league is considering changes to the lottery system. According to the report, there is a certain proposal getting enough buzz that it may at least be looked at more formally. From the report:

We can also search for solutions, and there are lots of folks in the league office and among the 30 teams who find tanking abhorrent — who bristle at the idea that the league has incentivized teams to be anything but their best every single season. One detailed proposal, submitted by a team official, has gained initial traction among some high-level NBA officials — to the point that the NBA may float the proposal to owners sometime in 2014, according to league sources. Other top officials in the league office have expressed early opposition to the proposal, sources say.

The proposal would "eliminate the draft lottery entirely and replace it with a system in which each of the 30 teams would pick in a specific first-round draft slot once — and exactly once — every 30 years." That is, a team would select first, second, third...28th, 29th and 30th every 30 years, in a predetermined order.

The order would also shuffle so that teams don't pick high multiple times in a short span (something more like first, then 30th, then 19th, then 18th and so on). And most importantly, "Teams would know with 100 percent certainty in which draft slots they would pick every year," which would, in theory, completely eliminate the incentive to tank.

(It would also make the trading of draft picks incredibly interesting, but that's a very minor point unrelated to the core issue.)

Each team would receive a top-six pick every five years and a top-12 pick every four years, thus eliminating situations of teams picking high year after year.

And again, it also completely eliminates any incentive to be bad, since your draft position is pre-determined. This is the huge benefit and the main selling point; it would kill tanking, period.

However, the lottery exists for competitive balance purposes, to help bad teams close the gap and catch up to good teams, and as such the new system brings with it some concerns. Primarily, bad teams on a "down" part of the pick rotation couldn't sell hope to fans and good teams may get even better in some years. If you blow a high pick, too, it's really easy to see a team being stuck in a decade-long valley.

One other important note is that the proposal wouldn't kick in until "all current draft-based trades have been executed," putting the timeline for such a change around 2020.

If you find yourself getting excited for this proposal or angry about it, slow down just a bit. As Lowe notes, "This proposal is in the very early stages of a life cycle that may lead nowhere."

However early in the process or raw the proposal, however, it's an incredibly positive sign that the league realizes they have an incentive problem and are looking at ways to fix it.