In a shocking turn of events, the NBA has voted to keep their lottery system as is, rather than change the draft process to discourage teams from losing on purpose. The professional basketball strategy of “tanking” (the NBA’s very own performance art) will continue to live on.
This turned unbelievably fast. Some ownership sources literally 36 hours ago anticipated a 29-1 or 28-2 vote for reform.
— Zach Lowe (@ZachLowe_NBA) October 22, 2014
The reform would have changed the current system of scaling the odds of getting the first overall pick from the worst team getting a 25% chance of grabbing the number one pick to a new system where the four worst teams would each get a 12% chance of getting the first pick, with the odds for the remaining lottery teams scaling down from there.
The measure only managed to get 17 of a necessary 23 votes for reform.
According to Adrian Wojnarowski, the owners got cold feet:
One owner tells Yahoo: "Several teams started to wonder about unintended consequences and voted no to be able to do further study."
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) October 22, 2014
In an article for Yahoo! Sports, Wojnarowski explained why some teams would like to keep a system in place that leads to purposefully awful basketball. The fear of a new system which discourages tanking is that it would leave small market teams with even less means of being competitive with large market teams (the theory being the only reason that a great player would sign with a small market is if they were forced to through the draft). Of the teams that voted against reform, most (but not all) are small market teams:
Here were the 13 "No" votes, sources told Yahoo: PHX, PHL, OKC, NO, DET, MIA, MIL, San Antonio, Utah, Wash, ATL, CHA and Chicago.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) October 22, 2014
So, keep on enjoying the spectacle that is the NBA’s annual race to the bottom! Masochists and lovers of bad basketball rejoice! Things aren’t going to change for at least one more year.
