Adam Silver on tanking: 'We are going to fix it. Full stop.'
Adam Silver on tanking: 'We are going to fix it. Full stop.'
Dan DevineThu, March 26, 2026 at 6:39 PM UTC
0
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday that the league plans to implement major changes to its draft lottery system with an eye toward curbing the practice of tanking.
“We are going to fix it,” Silver said. “Full stop."
During a press conference following the league’s Board of Governors meetings in New York, Silver offered updates on a number of issues facing the league, including the decision to explore expansion to Seattle and Las Vegas, the possibility of establishing a new league in Europe, and the efficacy of the league’s Player Participation Policy and the 65-game threshold for year-end awards eligibility, among other matters.
Draft your Yahoo Fantasy Baseball team for the 2026 MLB Season
“I would say virtually everything we covered at the board meeting was very positive,” Silver said. “One topic, not so positive. And that’s ongoing tanking issues in the league.”
The league’s owners had “a lengthy conversation about the issue,” according to Silver, who acknowledged that franchises doing less than their level best to win — intentionally plunging to the bottom of the standings in hopes of improving their chances of landing higher draft picks — is nothing new. Concerns about teams purposely putting non-competitive teams on the floor in pursuit of potentially transformative talents have persisted for decades, helping lead to the introduction of the NBA Draft Lottery in 1985.
“That lottery has been modified four times since then,” Silver noted. “Obviously, it does not seem to be operating optimally, where we are now.”
Adam Silver watches a game between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Utah Jazz at Moda Center on March 13, 2026, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Soobum Im/Getty Images) (Soobum Im via Getty Images)
Over the years, the NBA has seen plenty of instances of teams choosing not to play certain players, often late in the season, with their sights set on improving their draft positioning and/or ensuring that they keep a protected pick that they’d previously traded away and that would be conveyed to another team if it landed after a certain spot in the draft order. Such machinations have become more pronounced and begun coming earlier in the season of late, though.
Last March — ahead of a 2025 NBA Draft headlined by Cooper Flagg — the Utah Jazz were fined $100,000 for sitting star scorer Lauri Markkanen. Last month, the league fined the Jazz $500,000, and the Indiana Pacers $100,000, claiming that the teams’ approach to roster management in certain games represented “overt behavior [...] that prioritizes draft positioning over winning [and] undermines the foundation of NBA competition.” (Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle later called the fine, and the process by which the league arrived at it, “ridiculous.”)
Ahead of February’s trade deadline, some teams dealt away star players with an eye toward entering full rebuilds. Others traded for star players, only to then keep them in street clothes with various reported injuries.
“There is an aspect of team building that is called a genuine rebuild — a rebuild with integrity,” Silver said. “The problem we're having these days is, it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild.”
Advertisement
A month after Silver said that the league was considering “every possible remedy” to limit tanking and informed the NBA’s 30 general managers that changes would be forthcoming, the race to the bottom shows no signs of abating ahead of the 2026 NBA Draft, which will likely feature a number of highly touted prospects, including Darryn Peterson, AJ Dybantsa, Cameron Boozer and Caleb Wilson, among others.
“This may be an unusual year, because of a perception of such a deep draft,” Silver said. “I’d say that’s combined with the advent of advanced analytics in all sports, that teams are now making calculations in terms of opportunities and risks and rewards. And I understand where that incentive takes our teams.”
A decade removed from “Process” architect Sam Hinkie’s ouster in Philadelphia, it became clear by the All-Star break that nearly one-third of the NBA’s teams were operating as if it would be better for them to lose than to win. That’s because under the current structure — with cost-controlled talent at a premium in the apron era, with free agency decreasing as a viable option for many franchises (especially smaller-market ones) to add elite players, and with the draft still likely the most direct path many teams have at being able to have a shot at a generational difference-maker — it arguably is.
Which is why, according to Silver, the league will look to take aim at that incentive structure — an approach that the commissioner said “seemed unanimous in the room” of team owners, who agreed on the need to make a change to the system before the 2026 NBA Draft and free agency period.
What specific changes the league office might look to implement, however, remains unclear. Previous reports have suggested that the NBA’s powers that be have discussed a range of ideas, including limiting protections on first-round draft picks, freezing lottery odds at some point during the season rather than at its end, preventing teams from picking in the top four in consecutive years, giving every lottery team the same odds of landing the No. 1 overall pick, and more. Silver said the governors are continuing to work through proposals, with a “special board meeting” likely coming in May and featuring a vote on “whatever modification we come up with.”
“I do think ultimately this is a decision that needs to be made at the ownership level,” Silver said. “It has business implications, has basketball implications, has integrity implications for the league. So, it's one that we take very seriously, and we are going to fix it. Full stop. And I want to say that directly to our fans.”
While Silver’s intention is clear, the path is not. The league instituted lottery reform in 2017, flattening out the odds of landing the top overall pick; nearly a decade later, the league’s stakeholders are back to the drawing board.
“There’s such a subtlety to this when incentives don’t match — when we’re now into it with coaches’ decisions on lineups, and when players come in and out of the game, injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other, pain levels of players — that my sense is when I say ‘fix now,’ yes, we need to do something more extreme than we did with those incremental changes the last four times along,” Silver said. “[...] Certainly, going into next season, the incentives will be completely different than they are now.”
The hope, from Silver and his office, is that adjusting those incentives to put a greater premium on winning will lead to a shift in focus back toward the more positive elements of the on-court product.
“I’m sorry to have to talk about tanking, because it takes away from the incredible competition we’re seeing from roughly 20 teams in the league right now going into a wide-open playoffs,” Silver said. “[...] What’s so incredible about live sports at this level — and I think it’s not just the NBA, but we’re seeing a rising tide among all premium sports — is that people have this hunger for this live, unscripted drama.
“Of course, the opposite of that is when there’s a sense that both teams aren’t out there trying to kill themselves to win a game. And so, as I said, we have to fix that problem.”
Source: “AOL Sports”
