Haralabos Voulgaris@haralabob
In 2019 they modified the lottery rules and that was an abject failure as well, it clearly made tanking worse.
The bottom line is the draft and lottery are flawed at the root. If you were serious, you’d scrap the draft entirely, make every rookie a free agent, remove max salaries, and enforce a true hard cap.
But they'll likely never do that, nor will they go with the wheel so instead they are fixated on how they can make sure teams don't tank their way out of the play-in to get a better chance at a top 3 pick which tells you all you need to know about the product and the people who run and own these teams.
Think about how crazy it is that people would actually thinking about losing games on purpose to avoid playing in the playoffs. The league has had two major innovations of late - one of them was "The In Season Tournament" and the other is a Playin that is so revolutionary that people are convinced teams will tank their way out of it if it means they'll have a better than 2% chance to draft a star rookie.
The league is cooked.
Lets say they solve tanking at the very bottom, whats next?
Apathy.
What incentive will a middle of the road team have to compete every night over 82 games? They won't be in the playoff hunt they'll be guaranteed some lotto % so what incentives will they have to actually compete?
I'm not sure anyone in the league office or even ownership has thought about that, but they should.