The NBA Draft Lottery Isn’t Working (Not That it Ever Has)
How the Lottery makes tanking worse, and screws the teams trying to rebuild
The NBA Draft lottery has existed in some form or another since 1985, and in its 40 years as a supposed anti-tank cannon, it has failed miserably. Tanks barged through the league since its inception, continued their advance as the odds flattened, and will continue to storm through the countryside until the draft isn’t a merit-based system. If you’re bad, it’s always better to give yourself a marginally better chance at a top-five pick than winning a few extra games that few will remember and even less will applaud.
The lottery, in and of itself, is a perplexing solution to the problem of tanking. The draft’s sole purpose is to award the least talented teams access to the best amateur/young talent entering the league. It’s a mechanism to redistribute talent based on need. No matter what, there will be a worst team in the league, whether it’s by design or accident is another matter, but throwing in a lottery goes counter to the whole point of a draft in the first place.
Now, I live in the real world and understand that teams will intentionally be bad to improve their chances at landing a top pick. This is a real problem in people’s eyes. They view it as a morally reprehensible act that some teams aren’t doing everything they can to win. However, the lottery doesn’t actually solve that problem. Ironically, the lottery increases the number of franchises that will inevitably tank.
The 2025 NBA Draft lottery is a perfect example of how this particular system only leads to more tanking. The three worst teams in the league by record, the Utah Jazz, Washington Wizards, and Charlotte Hornets, due to the lottery, ended up with fourth, fifth, and sixth picks. Meanwhile, the teams that got the first three picks, the Mavericks, Spurs, and Sixers, were all projected to compete for a playoff spot; the Mavericks made the play-in, and the Spurs were competitive for over half the season, before injuries kneecapped them, and the Sixers were championship hopefuls before Joel Embiid’s continuing injury issues.
In this case study, the teams that tanked the longest and hardest this season were functionally punished by the randomness of the draft lottery. Surely, that’s a disincentive not to tank? Wrong. For any team that enters a rebuild, a necessary cycle that all franchises endure, the lottery incentivizes tanking hard for a prolonged period. If a franchise needs to rebuild through the draft because they’re not a free agent or trade destination, a scenario around 75% of the league finds itself in, then they’ll likely need one or two top-five picks to secure the necessary top-end talent to be a real contender. When you look at the expected career value based on pick, it’s apparent how quickly talent in the draft falls off.
*WAR is Career VORP multiplied by 2.7
The average first overall pick between 1980 and 2020 has produced 28.55 career Value Over a Replacement Player (VORP), which equates to 77.09 career Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For reference, Nicolas Batum has a career VORP of 28.73. By the fifth pick, the average career VORP drops to 17.02, which is less than the 18.5 Andre Drummond has produced in his career.
Using the R^2 of career VORP of each pick, we can see what the smoothed expected career value of each pick is, which does a better job of showing just how quickly prospect quality falls off in the draft.
This next chart is the same, but shows the difference between each pick and the first overall pick.
Remember, the average first overall pick, while significantly better than any other pick, still roughly has the career of Nicolas Batum, Brook Lopez, or Draymond Green, and once you’re out of the top five, you’re basically looking at solid starters. The fact that career value based upon draft pick follows an exponential function is critical in understanding how damaging the current lottery odds are. The difference between the first and sixth pick isn’t five spots, it’s the difference between Peja Stojakovic (26.17 career VORP) and George Hill (19.36 career VORP).
The reality that picks outside of the top-five, and really outside the top three, are generally solid but not transformative players, makes the current lottery system run counter to the intended function of the draft. Finishing with the worst record in the league gives you a 47.9% chance at the fifth pick. Finishing with the second-worst record gives you a 47.8% chance at the fifth or sixth pick. And finishing with the third-worst record gives you a 47.8% chance at landing the fifth, sixth, or seventh pick. But the teams with the bottom three records only have a 40.1% chance of landing a top-three pick. Since the best players in the NBA generally were top-three picks, the current lottery system makes it increasingly difficult for the worst teams to land there, and thus, change their fortunes for the better. Even more maddening is that the teams towards the bottom of the lottery order can only jump into the top four. The team with the lowest odds can only land the 14th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, or 1st pick in the lottery.
*Bold is the most likely pick a lottery seed will earn
Due to the lottery, the only way to rebuild, outside of lucking into a generational prospect, is to be awful for an extended period and hope you get the guy. That means when teams enter a rebuild, they are incentivized to tank long and hard because the randomness of the lottery cannot be counted on to facilitate a quick turnaround. It’s less a deterrent to tanking and more a hellscape for franchises that rely on the draft to land top-tier talent. If you’re the worst team in the league for three straight years, you’re the most likely to end up with the fifth pick in three straight drafts. If you did that from 2022 to 2024, you would have selected Ron Holland, Ausar Thompson, and Jaden Ivey, and would be the Detroit Pistons. Luckily, the Pistons landed the first overall pick in 2021 and had Cade Cunningham to build around.
Now, the flip side, the three teams that landed the top three picks in the 2025 draft, offer us another example of how the lottery increases tanking. The Philadelphia 76ers and the San Antonio Spurs fancied themselves as playoff teams this past season. The Sixers won the offseason with their free agent signing of Paul George, and the Spurs swung a trade for De’Aaron Fox when it was abundantly clear that Victor Wembanyama was ready to compete for a title right now. Unfortunately, injuries nuked their seasons, and they decided to pack in their veterans and tank as hard as possible to give themselves the best odds of jumping into the top five. The Mavericks never overtly tanked, but due to their own organizational incompetence and injuries, they were functionally trotting out rosters that looked all but guaranteed to lose down the stretch.
Simply put, the lottery didn’t stop anyone from tanking. It just extended the misery for bad teams and rewarded three teams that currently employ multiple players who have made an All-NBA team in the recent past or would have this season if not for injury. While this exact set of outcomes was statistically unlikely, the league could have made it an impossibility. Instead, the Jazz, Wizards, and Hornets will tank again next season, a few playoff hopefuls decimated by injuries will join them, and three teams who were likely to be in the playoff mix regardless of their draft position will be even stronger.
The lottery has obliterated the spirit of the draft, forced bad teams to tank for extended periods, and given playoff teams with single-season drops a lifeline. It literally increases the chances that the gap between the haves and have-nots widens. So, what good does this current system do? In practice, nothing.
Instead of critiquing a system and leaving it at that, I have a few moderate solutions that the NBA should consider.
Not every team in the lottery should have a chance at the first overall pick. The pick is too valuable and too transformative to give it to a 40-win team instead of a 20-win team.
Weigh a team’s previous season record into the lottery order. I don’t think it should be 50-50, but 75-25 should be enough to prevent teams with talent that endured injuries from leapfrogging the talentless dredges.
They should tier each section of the lottery. The bottom five teams have a lottery for picks one through five, six through ten have odds for picks six through ten, and so on. Or you could do it so that each slot can only jump or fall a certain set number of picks if you don’t want to prevent the sixth worst team from maybe landing the fifth or fourth pick.
The lottery doesn’t help solve tanking. In many respects, it makes it worse, and the current lottery system can doom franchises to irrelevance for years. If the league really wants to stop tanking, there are far better options. Perhaps prize money for league placement. If you’re the worst team, you get the least national television money. If you’re the best, you get the most. Seems fair. You tank for players, you get less money. You try to win, you get more. All I know is that the lottery isn’t working. So fix it.
For any inquiries about work, discussion, and the like, you can email me at nevin.l.brown@gmail.com.