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Basketball: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver speaks to the media during a press conference at the St. Regis Hotel New York, NY 9/10/2025CREDIT: Erick W. Rasco (Photo by Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) (Set Number: X164772 TK1)
Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
Nearly one-third of the NBA has spent the past few months actively trying to lose games. As a result, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has spent the past few months pledging to reform the draft lottery to reduce teams' incentives to tank.
The league's proposed anti-tanking reforms—all of which involved expanding the number of teams eligible for the draft lottery—were not "embraced with much warmth around the league," according to ESPN's Anthony Slater. He added that "many of the favored concepts—like flipping the benefits for lottery odds from losses to wins midseason—are extremely difficult to explain simply to the casual consumer."
As we’ve covered before, any changes to the draft lottery also need to keep the purpose of the draft in mind. It exists to give terrible teams a pathway out of the league's basement.
Tanking teams are complicating that by crashing the party or, in the Indiana Pacers' case, taking an injury-fueled gap year. Silver addressed that tension during a press conference in late March after a meeting of the NBA board of governors where tanking was front of mind.
"There is an aspect of team-building that is called a genuine rebuild, a rebuild with integrity," Silver told reporters. "The problem we're having these days is it's become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild."
"… There's such a subtlety to this when incentives don't match. 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."
While the NBA is still deciding how to address tanking, a simple solution may be sitting right in front of its face. Just ask Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green.
'Just Fine The Hell Out Of People'
On Tuesday, the Warriors beat the Sacramento Kings, 110-105, in part due to some late-game chicanery.
With the Kings clinging to a one-point lead, they intentionally fouled Seth Curry—a career 86.4% free-throw shooter—with three minutes left. When asked about that after the game, Green offered his thoughts on how the NBA could combat tanking moving forward.
"I think I get fined when I do wrong," Green said. "Just fine the hell out of people. We love taking money from players, keep fining the teams. I've seen two fines. And we all know everybody tanking. But you’ve seen two fines."
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Basketball: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver speaks to the media during a press conference at the St. Regis Hotel New York, NY 9/10/2025CREDIT: Erick W. Rasco (Photo by Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) (Set Number: X164772 TK1)
Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
The NBA did issue a $500,000 fine to the Utah Jazz and a $100,000 fine to the Indiana Pacers shortly before the All-Star break, but it has not fined a single team since then. Utah's fine was for "conduct detrimental to the league" when it benched Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. in the second half of a game, while Indiana's fine was for violating the player participation policy when it sat Pascal Siakam and two other starters against Utah.
In response, more tanking teams have taken the approach of shutting players down entirely. The Memphis Grizzlies, who've lost 20 of their past 22 games, can barely field eight healthy players most days. They've taken to signing random G League players like Lucas Williamson, Toby Okani and Adama Bal to 10-day contracts and have been giving them far more minutes than their actual rotation players.
The Grizzlies have not been fined for tanking this season.
These tactics aren't exclusive to this year, either. The Jazz, Washington Wizards and Toronto Raptors all routinely pulled players from competitive games last year. None of them got fined for doing so. (The Jazz got fined $100,000 for resting Markkanen at one point, but that's it.)
Rather than rework the entire lottery system—and perhaps punishing the "genuine rebuilds"—the league could first look to tweak its player participation policy and begin enforcing it more strictly.
Why Isn't The NBA Fining More Teams?
As it's currently written, the player participation policy applies strictly to star players, which the league defines as anyone who was named to the All-NBA or All-Star team within the previous three seasons. The policy also includes clear penalties for violations of the policy, which the Jazz and Pacers discovered firsthand over the past 14 months.
The NBA can impose a $100,000 fine for the first time that a team violates the player participation policy and a $250,000 fine for the second violation. After that, the league can fine a team $1 million more than its previous penalty for each subsequent violation. So, the third violation would cost $1.25 million, the fourth violation would cost $2.25 million, so on and so forth.
Teams might not bat an eye at a $100,000 fine, particularly if they don't fear further punishment from the league office. That's a price worth paying if the reward is a potential franchise cornerstone in the draft.
But what if the league began strictly enforcing fines? Would tanking teams still stick with that strategy if they had to pay millions of dollars after every game?
That appears to be on the table. According to Joe Vardon of The Athletic, there's talk of allowing Silver to take away teams' draft picks, move the picks to the end of the lottery or first round "and also increase fines into the millions of dollars" if they're found guilty of tanking under the new rules.
"Without stricter penalties, you could still have crazy behavior," a league source told Vardon. "You have to have something in place that is so drastic, a team would actually think twice about tanking. And if a team tries it and gets caught, then the other teams need to see the penalties and realize it isn’t worth it to try."
Perhaps Silver doesn't want the responsibility of having to decide whether to fine teams for blatant tanking. But if the league expanded the player participation policy to cover all players rather than just stars, that would give him the ability to more closely police the late-season mockery of basketball that tanking teams engage in.
Owners might push back against imbuing Silver with that type of power. Perhaps the league would need to install an arbitrator who could weigh in on punishments if a team objected to a particular fine. But enforcing harsher penalties rather than reforming the lottery could help preserve the original purpose of the draft while still dissuading tanking.
"If it was players, (the league) would have snatched that money in a heartbeat," Green said Tuesday. "Why isn't it the same? Everybody love money. The punishment for players is always, 'let’s take the money. Well, now it becomes time to punish teams, and all of a sudden, nobody don't know what to do. Why not? We know exactly what to do when somebody gets a technical foul. Or suspended for a game. We know exactly what to do.
"All of the sudden, we've got team issues, we don't know what to do. What happened to the whole take-the-money stuff? Everybody else is trying to reach quota, too. But when it comes to player discipline, we wanna snatch the money as fast as we can. Comes to team discipline, we see 12 teams tanking. We've seen two fines. If my math serves me correctly, that's 10 that ain't been fined."
Green slightly exaggerated the number of teams tanking this year, but his overall point remains sound. Before implementing drastic lottery reform, the NBA should instead expand its player participation policy to cover all players and begin more strictly imposing fines on teams found guilty of tanking.
Teams might not bat an eye at a $100,000 or even a $250,000 fine. But a $5 million fine? That's likely a different story.
Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Spotrac and salary-cap information via RealGM. All odds via FanDuel Sportsbook.
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This article was originally published on Forbes.com
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