To hear NBA commissioner Adam Silver tell it, the NBA has a severe tanking problem. A quick look at the standings suggests he’s probably right. The Sacramento Kings have lost 15 straight games, and the Dallas Mavericks have dropped 10 in a row. In the Eastern Conference, three teams are below a .300 winning percentage.
In Sacramento’s case, some of the losses have been brutal. None of the Kings’ last three games was closer than 26 points. They were so bad that Utah and Orlando could have taken nothing but shot clock violations in the fourth quarter and still won.
The NBA plans to address the issue, and to its credit, it should. Tanking is bad for the league and miserable for fans. The problem is the league seems to be going about it the wrong way.
Some of the ideas being discussed include flattening lottery odds, limiting protections on first-round picks, freezing lottery odds at the trade deadline, and preventing teams that made the conference finals the previous year from picking in the top four. That last one feels very specifically aimed at a team like Indiana, which was a game from the Finals last year and now sits at the bottom of the East.
The issue is none of these ideas actually encourage teams to try. They only remove the incentive to lose.
Fortunately, there is already a league with a better solution: the Professional Women’s Hockey League.
If you follow the PWHL, you know it has introduced several innovative rules that have helped grow the sport. If you don’t, here is how its anti-tanking model works and why the NBA should seriously consider it.
What Is the PWHL’s Lottery System?
The PWHL’s approach, known as the Gold Plan, rewards teams for trying throughout the entire season. Once a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, its results from that point forward determine its lottery odds.
The better a team performs after elimination, the better its odds at the top pick.
For example, if two teams are eliminated on the same day with 15 games remaining and Team A goes 7–8 while Team B goes 10–5, Team B earns better lottery odds. Team A can still win the lottery, but Team B has the edge because it won more games.
The system ensures every team has a reason to compete. It also protects weaker teams by giving them more time to accumulate wins after elimination.
Why This System Works
The Gold Plan works because it gives teams a target. More importantly, it eliminates any scenario where losing helps a team.
The focus is on rewarding wins, not punishing losses. Teams can still manage injuries or workloads, but doing so carries a real competitive cost.
It also keeps fans engaged. As Mark Cuban has said, fans want hope. They want to believe things are getting better and that their team has a reason to compete.
By rewarding effort and results, the PWHL has essentially eliminated tanking.
Why the NBA Needs Incentives to Win
The NBA’s current ideas mostly remove the benefits of losing. But they don’t give teams a reason to win, and that’s the problem.
Players may always want to win, but organizations think about the present and the future at the same time. If a season is lost, it becomes much easier to rest players, manage injuries conservatively, and focus on next year.
We’ve seen how quickly a season can unravel. The Pacers losing Tyrese Haliburton to an Achilles injury is a perfect example. Once a team is out of contention, the risk of losing a star becomes even more difficult to justify.
Teams are not going to risk their best players unless there is a tangible benefit.
And that’s why simply removing incentives to lose without adding incentives to win will never fully solve the problem.
The NBA doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. The PWHL already has a working model. The league just needs to be willing to use it.
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