Hands Up If You’re Also Confused by the NBA’s Convoluted Anti-Tanking Plan

The NBA wants to stop tanking. The plan, broken by Shams Charania and reported in granular detail, is the most convoluted draft lottery structure the league has ever proposed. Rich opened The Rich Eisen Show by trying to explain it.

He gave up early.

Rich offered his own credentials first. Two degrees. A bachelor of arts and a master of science in journalism. Thirty-plus years of doing this for a living. He read the Shams report. He read a dozen other articles. His honest reaction, he told the room, was the Charlie Day red-string conspiracy meme. The show even produced a doctored photo of the alleged NBA war room. Lots of red string. A lot of coffee.

Then Rich actually did the work.

The new structure, called 3-2-1, expands the lottery from 14 teams to 16 teams. The three worst records in the league each get two ping pong balls and a 5.4 percent chance at the top pick. The rest of the non-play-in teams, ranked five through eleven, each get three ping pong balls and an 8.1 percent chance.

The three worst teams are now formally called the relegation zone. Rich illustrated the concept with a photo of General Zod and his villains floating through deep space in Superman 2. That, he said, is what the relegation zone looks like. Trapped. Hurled. Forgotten.

The nine and ten seeds in the play-in get 5.4 percent. The teams that lose the seven-eight game get 2.7 percent. Which means a team that could conceivably win a playoff series and reach the conference finals can still pull the number one pick.

The NBA also added two new rules. No team can land the first overall pick in consecutive years. No team can pick in the top five three years in a row.

Rich pulled out the math comparison. Right now the Wizards, Nets and Pacers each carry a 14 percent chance at the top pick. Under the new system that drops to 5.4 percent. The Jazz and Kings drop from 11.5 to 8.1. Memphis at the six spot effectively breaks even.

The sweet spot in the new system is finishing tenth. The Bucks would jump from 5.1 percent to 8.1 percent.

Chris Brockman saw the unintended consequence immediately. Tanking does not go away. It moves. Teams will no longer race to the bottom. They will race to be just bad enough to miss the playoffs and just good enough to avoid the relegation zone.

Rich game-planned it out loud. Golden State, under this system, would have been incentivized to leave Steph Curry on the bench. Skip the Kristaps Porzingis trade. Stay just bad enough to land in the seven-to-ten range.

The deeper issue, Rich argued, is load management. Load management is a fig leaf for tanking. Until that gets addressed, the rest is window dressing.

His final point was the cleanest. Adam Silver is choosing to confuse fans about why teams are no longer tanking, rather than letting them watch the obvious version of teams tanking. That may actually be the better trade.

You are welcome.