The things the nba seem to be considering are all fine ideas that won’t hurt anything and may make the draft process a bit better, but still won’t in any way actually fix the issue they are trying to address. So long as there is incentive to be worse and no incentive to be mediocre, the optimal strategy for any team that can’t be great will be to lose as much as possible, and none of those proposals change that in any way.
If they want to fix tanking completely, the solution is the wheel, full stop. It creates a few other balance problems; makes it harder for smaller market teams to compete, but it eliminates lose on purpose as a strategy completely.
I still think if they don’t want to completely eliminate tanking but want to significantly reduce its impact, they’d do better just chucking out all the fancy rules, tossing the lottery completely, and going back to a simple reverse order.
All the lottery does is extend the amount of time it takes for a tank to pull off its goals. Since it takes longer, teams tank for longer, and more teams end up tanking at once. If you got rid of the fancy stuff you’d still have tanking, but teams would only be able to do it for a few years in a row, and then would bounce back up. You’d get more up/down churn instead of so many teams hitting bottom and staying there forever.
