Breaking: NBA Passes New Anti-Tanking Rules In 29-1 Vote

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is tackling tanking, and on Thursday he's overwhelmingly won a vote by the Board of Governors to institute new Anti-Tanking rules. The vote was 29-1 in favor, with only the Memphis Grizzlies voting against.

The new rules will penalize the worst three teams each season by putting them in a "relegation zone", reducing their odds of securing the No. 1 pick.

Breaking: The NBA's Board of Governors has passed new anti-tanking rules that include expanding the draft lottery from 14 to 16 teams, a relegation zone where the bottom 3 teams get penalized with lessened chances for the No. 1 pick, and flattened odds, sources tell ESPN. pic.twitter.com/e1oq10p2yV
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) May 28, 2026

Other changes include:

Draft lottery expanding from 14 to 16 teams
Flatter lottery odds across the board

The new system is called the "3-2-1 lottery," which, as ESPN insider Bobby Marks reports, is a "fairly revolutionary overhaul of the system designed to immediately curb the league's annual race to the bottom and incentivize more teams to compete late in the season."

Does everyone agree that this new system will kill the tank? Well, no, not exactly.

This is for sure going to be one of the unintended consequences. A really good team is going to deal with injuries during the season, finish 8th, make a deep Playoff run AND get a top pick. It’s not going to go over well. https://t.co/JWlAFcv7a6
— Trevor Lane (@TrevorLane) May 28, 2026

One unintended consequence could include a very good team that's been hit with injuries during the season dropping to, say, 8th in the Conference, making a deep playoff run, and then still getting the top pick.

Or what about good teams that already have a stockpile of poor teams' draft picks that wind up getting bumped up to No. 1?

There are quite a few problems that could arise. How about simply reversing the drafting order of the non-playoff teams? A foolproof solution: Of the 14 teams that miss the playoffs, the team with the best record of those 14 gets the 1st overall pick, the team with the second-best record gets the 2nd overall pick, and so on. Just forget about the lottery, and poof, tanking is completely gone.

But instead, we get this complicated "3-2-1 Lottery" plan.

Incidentally, the lone dissenters in the 29-1 vote in favor of it, the Grizzlies, finished this past regular season on an all-out tanking spree, with a 5-28 record, which dropped them to the sixth-worst mark in the league.