Adam Silver's NBA Lottery Reform Could Really Screw Small Market Teams

NBA commissioner Adam Silver's crusade to eliminate tanking from his league reached its climax on Thursday.

Hours before two NBA juggernauts—built largely through tanking—faced off in Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, ESPN's Shams Charania broke the news that Silver's proposed lottery reforms had passed their vote with the league's board of governors.

The changes are dramatic. And the potential consequences could be dire for small-market teams that already face massive team-building challenges.

The biggest adjustment, of course, is further flattening of the lottery odds (a bold suggestion, since one could easily argue that when Silver flattened the odds in 2019, it led to far more teams tanking). Part of that includes reducing the chances of landing the top pick for the bottom-three teams.

You don't have to look at that graphic for more than a few seconds to realize the problems.

First of all, we are almost certainly going to see teams try to lose that 7-8 play-in game. Why on earth would a team bound to get squashed in the first round anyway pass up a 2.7 percent chance at the top overall pick?

There will also be teams trying to get out of the top 10 to bump their chances from 5.4 percent to 8.1.

Sure, Silver's new odds may have created some incentive for the very worst teams in the league to try a little harder down the stretch, but all he really did was shift the window for the tanking teams (again).

In years with potentially generational draft classes (like 2026), instead of trying to finish in the bottom three, teams hoping for the top pick will just try to game the standings to end up somewhere between the fourth and 10th worst record.

And inevitably, there will be some year in which an already loaded roster finds itself in the middle of the pack due to injuries, tanks for a couple weeks to get into that now juicy range of the lottery and ends up with the first overall pick.

In short, this move could be an even bigger disaster than the last adjustment. And that's especially true for small-market teams that hadn't hoarded picks under the old system (some of the future firsts for the Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs are far more valuable than they were last week).

It's no secret that the NBA's hyper-complicated collective bargaining agreement and team-building rules have essentially ended free agency. Teams typically operate over the cap, and on the off chance an organization like the Utah Jazz or Memphis Grizzlies were able to generate some space, players have long demonstrated a desire to play in glitzier markets.

It's a tool that's just really in the belt for small-market teams.

Trades are now tougher for them too.

We won't even get into how absurd it is that the 2027 first-round pick that the Grizzlies acquired from the Jazz in February is barred from being in the top five (because Utah is there this year, and another new rule is that a team can't be in the top five two years in a row). If a rebuilding team ever wants to add future firsts to a deal, the team receiving them knows they come with, at best, an 8.1 percent chance of being the top pick.

In other words, their assets have been devalued by the league. And that's going to make it harder to sell another front office on a trade.

So, without free agency and with the trade landscape being more difficult to navigate, small-market teams are once again left with the draft as the most obvious path to real success. And the NBA just made that path rockier, too.

Silver seemingly envisions a basketball utopia in which every team has a chance to win the title each year. In many ways, the parity he desires is already here. But what he seems to be ignoring is how much more difficult this will make team-building for the organizations that were already dealing with some pretty significant disadvantages.

Of course, there's a chance this adjustment does exactly what Silver wants. We may see far fewer teams mailing it in down the stretch. But the good intentions of the last significant lottery reform were never realized.

And the intentions of this one could make it near impossible for the NBA's have-nots to build a perennial contender.