NBA Draft Lottery Reform: How the new system benefits teams like the Thunder and Spurs

The NBA's board of governors officially approved draft lottery reform on Thursday,  according to ESPN . The new rules were passed by a 29-1 vote, with the Grizzlies as the lone dissenters. The proposal chosen was dubbed the "3-2-1" model and includes the following changes, beginning with next year's draft, as widely reported in April :

- The new lottery will feature 37 total lottery balls allocated to 16 teams. The three worst teams in the league will get two. The next seven teams to miss the postseason each receive three. The No. 9 and No. 10 seeds in each conference receive two. The losers of the No. 7 vs. No. 8 Play-In games receive one. - Drawings will be held for all 16 lottery picks. The three worst teams in the NBA can pick no lower than No. 12. Anyone else can pick anywhere between No. 1 and No. 16. - Teams can no longer pick No. 1 in consecutive drafts, nor can they pick in the top five of three consecutive drafts. This applies dating back to the 2025 NBA Draft and covers picks that have been traded. For example, the Jazz picked at No. 5 in 2025 and No. 2 in 2026. Their pick -- even though it is technically controlled by the Grizzlies -- cannot land in the top five in 2027. - Picks between No. 12 and No. 15 cannot be protected in trades. - The commissioner will have increased powers to punish perceived tanking, including altering lottery odds or changing where a team picks. - The changes include a "sunset" provision, meaning they will expire after the 2028-29 season and need to either be re-approved or changed again. That gives the league three years to weigh whether the system is working and, critically, align potential changes with the expiration of the existing collective bargaining agreement, which runs through the 2029-30 season.

The goal of these changes, as commissioner Adam Silver has stated on numerous occasions, is to avert tanking. As many as nine teams arguably tanked this season, a number that has steadily risen since the NBA last reformed the lottery in 2017. Whether these changes succeed, we won't know for some time. But in the interim, this reform will drastically impact several teams and league demographics in somewhat predictable ways.

So with lottery reform now official, let's pick winners and losers of the changes coming next year:

Winners: The Spurs and Thunder

The two West juggernauts have been stashing picks for years

When you flatten the lottery, those odds have to get redistributed somewhere. What this effectively means is that the most valuable draft picks, prior to the lottery of their year, are less valuable than they've ever been... but any draft pick with a chance of landing in the back of the lottery is now mor e valuable than ever.

Because a draft pick's final slot is less tied to record than it's ever been, owning specific draft picks from teams you once expected to be bad just isn't as powerful as it used to be. There will be far fewer instances of, say, the Celtics trading for picks from the Nets years out that become Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum . The name of the game now is accumulation. You can't give yourself great odds at a top pick by owning one specific pick, but if you stack as many picks as possible, the randomness of the new lottery is likely to work to your favor.

Hey, you know who's been stacking a lot of draft picks and draft swaps in trades over the past several years? The two best teams in the NBA. The Thunder own the rights to three future first-round picks from other teams between 2027 and 2029 that could potentially fall somewhere in the lottery, plus protected swap rights with the Clippers . The Spurs have the Hawks' 2027 pick, plus the right to swap picks with four different teams between 2028 and 2031. Both teams are probably going to add to those piles in the years to come. It's part of how they were designed, a cost-cutting mechanism. As their role players get expensive, they want to be able to draft replacements with these surplus selections and then trade those existing role players for more picks to perpetuate the cycle.

2026 NBA Draft order, lottery results: Wizards to pick No. 1 after winning lottery Sam Quinn

None of the picks they own, save perhaps Sacramento's unprotected 2031 swap given their history, looked all that likely to belong to one of the worst teams in the NBA. But as long as those picks belong to one of the worst 16 teams? They're in the lottery now, and they don't need to jump into the top four to be beneficial. For a team that only needs role players, jumping from, say, No. 15 to No. 9 is enormously valuable. The lack of a floor hurts the worst teams, but helps the better ones.

Now, the Spurs and Thunder aren't the only accumulators. The Nets,  Grizzlies and  Rockets have all accumulated quite a bit of pick stock as well. But those teams don't have franchise players yet. For them, pick upside is paramount. The Thunder and Spurs would be happy to pick No. 12 every year because they already have their cores. Teams without that star certainty would rather one top-five pick than a dozen in the 20s. The Hornets are a borderline case here. They've accumulated quite a few picks as well, and while their core isn't in the same class as the Spurs' or Thunder's, it's impressive enough to believe they don't necessarily need upside over depth.

But the Spurs and the Thunder are undeniable winners here, and it's not just because of the picks they've accumulated. It's the picks other teams won't get to accumulate. Teams are no longer allowed to pick in the top five in three consecutive drafts because San Antonio doing so has the potential to be so destructive to the league's long-term competitive balance. Even if it was allowed, the new odds make it so unlikely that it wasn't something the league needed to stress too much over anyway.

The Spurs and the Thunder got to tank with impunity. San Antonio did more of it, but they both benefitted from a system that rewarded the worst teams with high draft picks. Now they no longer need to, but the teams that try to build up to compete with them won't have that same advantage. The two best teams in the league got to pull the tanking ladder up from behind them, depriving their competitors of tools they really could have used to oppose them.

Losers: Small-market teams

It might be tougher than ever for some teams to acquire top talent

When the NBA first tried to reform the lottery back in 2014, its proposal surprisingly failed to garner the three-quarters majority it needed to pass. Why? According to Zach Lowe ( then writing for Grantland ), Thunder general manager Sam Presti quietly lobbied teams around the league, arguing that the change would hurt small-market teams and help their big-city counterparts.

It was a sensible argument. The transactional playing field is not level. Some teams have substantially freer access to certain types of players than others. The Lakers and Knicks can reasonably expect top free agents to sign with them and stars under contract with other teams to push for trades to them. The Jazz and Trail Blazers don't have that luxury. It is widely agreed that superstars are an absolute necessity for genuine championship contention. For some teams, the draft is the only realistic path available to acquiring those stars.

Therefore, by making it harder for teams to assure themselves access to top talent through the draft, the NBA is tacitly placing more influence on trades and free agency as a means of acquiring the best players. This is potentially problematic because the NBA, intentionally or not, has drastically weakened the utility of those talent markets for small-market teams over the past decade or so.

The NBA couldn't have picked a worse time to address tanking Sam Quinn

The last few collective bargaining agreements, for instance, have made it much easier for players to sign contract extensions with their teams. This has drained the typical free-agent talent pool, and with fewer high-level free agents, the cost of trading for non-stars has skyrocketed to the point that players like Desmond Bane and Mikal Bridges are fetching massive hauls of picks.

Small-market teams don't even really have the chance to preserve cap space and meet with top free agents anymore because those free agents don't exist. When an elite player wants to move, he usually informs his team with a year or two left on his deal and uses the threat of his free agency to scare off undesirable destinations.

The NBA has had seven champions in the past seven years. A number of league rules, specifically pertaining to the salary cap, are designed with parity in mind. But we can be realistic about how professional basketball works. Since LeBron James ' infamous decision in 2010, stars have exerted more power over where they play than the NBA is designed to accommodate while maintaining competitive balance. A reverse-order draft is a badly needed counterbalance to player empowerment. When James leaves Cleveland for Miami or Chris Paul ditches New Orleans for Los Angeles, at least their teams can feel reasonably certain that they'll be able to rebuild through the draft.

How are small-market fans supposed to feel when the Knicks take their best player now? Where are they supposed to find hope in a system that now actively punishes them for having one of the three-worst records in the league? Cleveland was a bottom-three team in each of the first three seasons after it lost James. That wasn't because the Cavs were explicitly tanking. It was because they went all-in on building around a player who left them.

Inevitably, there are going to be teams in this system who are not bad intentionally, but get trapped at the bottom anyway because the nearly bottomless floor keeps handing them late-lottery picks for 20-win seasons. The biggest beneficiaries of this system are two teams that are already dominant and big markets, whose structural advantages are eternal. The losers are the teams that aren't already great and don't have those advantages.

As has so often been the case in the NBA, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Winner: Miami Heat

Pat Riley's anti-tanking stance will be rewarded in this new system

There are a handful of teams that historically don't tank or have come out hard against tanking. Some of the historical non-tankers -- the Wizards and Pacers , most notably -- have caved in recent years. Phoenix's Mat Ishbia has probably been the most vocal owner against tanking, but it's worth noting that he basically traded all of his draft picks before his first full season running the Suns , so it's not as though he ever had the chance to benefit from tanking.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a single team that both talks the talk and walks the walk when it comes to tanking. The Heat are probably the closest . Pat Riley took over the team in 1995, and since then, they've won fewer than 25 games only once, in 2008. It took them until March of that 15-win season to start shutting down core players. Erik Spoelstra openly accused the Wizards of trying to lose after they allowed Bam Adebayo to score 83 points against them. Riley made it clear at his end-of-season press conference that he has no interest in operating that way. "I'm not going to tank," he said . "I'm not going to lose. We're not going to go into the lottery and do that insanity because I will quit if I ever get ordered to go down that road."

The Heat have spent the past four seasons in the Play-In Tournament. That's exactly where most teams don't want to be. The middle, at least recently, has been treated as a hamster wheel. Not good enough to compete for championships now, not bad enough to get the players necessary to compete for championships later. It's a trap. Or at least, it was.

Fittingly, from Miami's perspective, the No. 9 and No. 10 seeds will have the same odds of landing the No. 1 picks as the three worst teams in the NBA. Building from th

_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/nba-draft-lottery-reform-winners-losers-new-system/)._