The current system rewards losing—so teams lose on purpose. These proposals sever that link entirely.
Decouple draft odds from wins and losses. Base lottery positioning on a team's total asset inventory instead of their record.
Read more ↓Make every win carry postseason value. Replace the Play-In with a gauntlet where regular-season wins become point advantages in elimination games.
Read more ↓In 2025–26, roughly a third of the NBA is actively trying to lose—the commissioner says it openly. The product suffers: fans endure unwatchable games, bettors face non-public lineup changes from teams sitting healthy players, and young prospects spend formative years in losing cultures with no veteran mentors. This isn't caused by bad actors. It's caused by rational people responding to irrational incentives.
The NBA has tried flattened lottery odds and the Play-In Tournament. Both share a fundamental flaw: they still tie draft position to on-court wins and losses. A bottom-five record still dramatically outperforms a bottom-fifteen record in expected draft value. The Play-In only affects seeds 7–10—teams targeting the bottom are unaffected. And flattening the odds further creates its own problem: if every bad team has roughly the same lottery chances, genuinely hopeless franchises lose the one mechanism that could accelerate their recovery. The league trades a tanking crisis for a hope crisis. As long as losing games improves draft odds, rational front offices will find ways to lose. The incentive must be severed at the root.
Instead of using win-loss records, determine draft lottery odds by conducting an annual inventory of each team's total assets. The teams with the least organizational value get the best odds. The teams with the most get the worst.
At the end of each season, every team's assets are appraised: players on the roster (valued by projected Wins Above Replacement over the remaining life of their contracts), draft capital, available cap space, trade exceptions, Bird rights, mid-level and bi-annual exceptions, and more.1 The teams that are genuinely worst off—thin rosters, no draft picks, no cap flexibility—rise to the top of the lottery. The teams that are asset-rich fall to the bottom, regardless of how many games they won or lost.
Under the current system, tanking is free. A team can bench healthy players, run bad lineups, and trade away useful veterans, all without any real organizational cost beyond the losses themselves—which are the point. Under an asset-based system, the calculus changes completely:
Player valuation would be based on open-source statistical models—descendants of systems like DARKO and EPM—that project future WAR and are backtested against actual outcomes. The key principle is transparency: the methodology, the data, and the code are all public. The NBA analytics community can propose improvements, identify weaknesses, and collectively raise accuracy over time, similar to an ongoing open competition.
An ensemble of methodologically diverse models provides robustness. Rather than relying on a single formula that teams can reverse-engineer, the system would combine approaches with different statistical foundations—regression-based, machine-learning-based, comparable-player models—so that exploiting any one model's weakness only moves a fraction of the total score.
The NBA would retain the right to evolve the formula as better methods emerge. Teams attempting to exploit a specific weakness face a moving target. Competitors who identify loopholes can propose fixes. The system improves adversarially, like a security protocol.
Any system can be gamed. The question is whether the gaming is more or less damaging than the status quo. Under the current system, tanking is free—you lose games on purpose and are rewarded with better draft picks. Under an asset-based system, gaming requires actually destroying your organizational value. Overpaying a player to make them look like a negative asset on paper still costs you real cap space. Trading away draft picks to appear asset-poor means you've actually traded away draft picks. The manipulation is self-punishing in ways that tanking games is not.
This doesn't eliminate gamesmanship—it redirects it. And the redirected behavior (acquiring or shedding real assets) is visible, auditable, and has genuine organizational consequences. It's a dramatic improvement over the invisible, costless act of choosing to lose basketball games.
The Asset Draft removes the incentive to lose. The Ladder creates a powerful incentive to win—by making every regular season victory carry tangible postseason value.
Replace the Play-In Tournament with an expanded single-elimination tournament for seeds 7 through 14 in each conference. The 15th seed is excluded entirely—another reason not to finish last.
Teams are organized into two ladders. In each ladder, the lowest seed must beat the next-highest seed, then the next, climbing upward. The survivor of each ladder earns a playoff berth.
Here's what makes the Ladder unique: lower seeds start every game trailing on the scoreboard. The deficit is based on the regular season win gap between the two teams—one point per game behind. If the 14 seed finished 12 games behind the 12 seed, that game tips off with the score 12–0.
This means every regular season win has compounding value. Finishing 10th instead of 12th might save you 8 points of deficit across two rounds. Finishing 7th means you play only once, at home, fully rested, against a team that just played two games in three days on the road. The gradient is steep and continuous—there is no seeding cliff where one additional loss is meaningless.
The Ladder fits within a window only slightly longer than the current Play-In. The two ladders alternate game days so no team plays on consecutive nights:
| Day | Ladder A | Ladder B |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday | 14 at 12 | — |
| Wednesday | — | 13 at 11 |
| Thursday | Winner at 10 | — |
| Friday | — | Winner at 9 |
| Saturday | Survivor at 7 | — |
| Sunday | — | Survivor at 8 |
Six days, twelve games across both conferences. No team plays back-to-back. The worst-case path (a 14 seed climbing all three rounds) is Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday—every other day, a standard playoff cadence. The first-round playoff series can begin the following Tuesday.
The Ladder creates genuinely different basketball. A team starting down 15 points can't ease into the game—they have to attack from the opening tip, push pace, take risks they'd never take in a normal playoff setting. And a Cinderella run from the 14 seed through three games of escalating deficits? That's appointment television—the kind of narrative the NBA's current play-in tournament tries to generate but can't, because the stakes aren't high enough and the format isn't distinct enough.
More importantly, it solves the dead zone in the current standings. Right now, there's no meaningful difference between finishing 11th and 15th. Under the Ladder, the difference is enormous: the 11th seed enters at round one of Ladder B with a manageable deficit, while the 15th seed doesn't even get to compete. Every win, every game, matters.
The Ladder applies the "carry your regular season into the postseason" principle to the teams on the bubble. The Point Bank extends it to the rest of the bracket. This idea is more speculative and would face greater resistance, but it completes the logic: if every regular season win should matter, it should matter for the top seeds too.
In rounds 1 through 3 of the playoffs, the higher seed receives a "point bank" equal to the regular season win differential between the two teams. They can allocate any portion of their bank to any game in the series, announced 12 hours before tipoff to allow betting lines to adjust.
If the 1 seed finished 14 games ahead of the 8 seed, they have 14 points to distribute across a potential seven games. They might spend 5 points on Game 1 to secure an early lead, hold the rest, then deploy 9 points in a decisive Game 5. Or they might spread them evenly. The allocation decision itself becomes a strategic chess match that coaches, analysts, and fans would obsess over.
This is a radical idea, included as a provocation. Once the Super Bowl ends, the NBA has the sports calendar largely to itself for about eight weeks. How can it ensure that every game in that window is meaningful and exciting? How can fans tie each regular season game to real postseason impact? The current league structure was designed when the entertainment landscape was far less competitive—non-traditional ideas are worth considering.
That said, this changes the nature of playoff basketball in a way the other two proposals don't. The Asset Draft and the Ladder can stand on their own.
Any incentive system can be gamed. The question is cost. Tanking is free—you lose games on purpose and are rewarded. Gaming an asset model requires destroying real organizational value: overpaying players burns actual cap space, trading away picks costs actual draft capital. The manipulation is self-punishing. Additionally, the model evolves over time. Teams that find exploits face a moving target, and competitors who spot weaknesses can propose fixes. The system improves adversarially.
Open-source statistical models, backtested against actual outcomes. No single human committee decides. An ensemble of methodologically diverse models—regression-based, machine-learning, comparable-player approaches—provides robustness. The methodology, data, and code are public. This isn't a black box; it's a transparent, improvable system, similar to how WAR operates in baseball. Imperfect, but far better than the alternative it replaces.
The current system is simple and broken. DVOA, QBR, and WAR were all considered "too complex" when introduced. They're now part of the sports lexicon because they solved real problems. Complexity is acceptable when it aligns incentives correctly. The alternative—a simple system that produces a third of the league trying to lose—isn't simplicity worth preserving.
Yes. A catastrophic injury craters a team's asset value, improving their draft odds. This is a feature, not a bug. The draft is designed to give hope to the hopeless. A team that loses its franchise player to a torn ACL is in dire straits, and the system recognizes that without requiring them to also lose games on purpose for months.
At one point per game behind, a typical first-round Ladder deficit is 8–15 points. NBA teams regularly go on runs larger than that in a single quarter. The deficit is meaningful but survivable—and it creates a completely different kind of basketball. The trailing team has to play fast, aggressive, high-risk basketball from the opening tip. The leading team plays keep-away and manages clock. It's a format that doesn't exist anywhere else in sports, and the entertainment potential is enormous.
It creates a hard floor. Being the worst team in your conference doesn't just mean bad odds in a lottery—it means you're excluded from postseason play entirely. Combined with the Asset Draft (which already helps the worst teams through draft positioning), the 15th seed gets the best lottery odds but pays the steepest price in postseason exclusion. It's another reason every win matters.