The NBA Draft Lottery is at 3 p.m. ET on ABC. There will never be another like it.
This season’s tanking was so egregious, and fan and media complaints about it were so loud, that the NBA is doing something about it. That the league will make some sort of reform to the lottery for 2027 appears certain. What that reform will be is less obvious, but the league seems to be moving toward a “3-2-1” system that awards varying numbers of lottery balls to teams that lose Play-In games (one ball), finish ninth or 10th in their conference (two), finish with the fourth- to 10th-worst record (three!) or finish bottom-three (just two, as an anti-tank incentive).
Smart people can (and already do) disagree about this specific fix. The Athletic’s Zach Harper thinks the NBA’s proposal is overly convoluted. John Hollinger thinks it’s generally great and is “sooooo excited to look at the schedule on a random night in March and not write off half the games as a charade with a predetermined outcome.”
Your mileage may vary here. But wherever the NBA settles, the current lottery setup is not long for this world. Today should be the last day of the bottom three teams (or their trade partners) sharing a 14 percent chance at the top pick, with 11 more teams getting progressively smaller chances at it. The teams with the best shot at taking advantage of the last lottery of the old world are the Wizards, Pacers and Nets, followed by the Jazz and Kings in the 11.5 percent bracket. Of course, a handful of teams have won the lottery with low-single-digit odds.
This lottery feels extremely sleazy because of the well-documented tankathon that caused all this consternation in the first place. But not all prospective No. 1 pickers are created equal, so I asked Hollinger to weigh all of the candidates on the scales of justice. Who would be the least honorable recipient? And who really deserves a break?
First, the worst:
💬 In a crowded competition for the least honorable team to win this lottery, we'll have to go with the Grizzlies, who went a quasi-respectable 20-33 with a -2.3 net rating before the All-Star break ... and 5-24 with a -12.8 rating afterward. What's amazing is how the Grizzlies continued to ratchet up their awfulness as their lottery odds improved; in their final 13 games, they lost by double digits twelve times, including a 46-point defeat to a Utah team that was itself tanking and basically starting random strangers off the street.
Totally unethical. Meanwhile …
💬 The most honorable team to win obviously would be Indiana, whose year-end tanking was just as brazen as anyone else’s (anybody seen Ivica Zubac?) but rebuilt itself into an NBA Finals team without tanking at all before injuries to Tyrese Haliburton and other maladies sent them to the 2026 lottery.
Who will the winner take at No. 1? BYU wing AJ Dybantsa is the mock draft favorite right now, but it’s Duke forward Cameron Boozer who leads Hollinger’s top-15 ranking. We’ll see.
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