NBA Anti-Tanking Proposals & Expansion — 2026

Why the League Is Moving Now

The 2026 NBA Draft class is widely regarded as one of the deepest in over a decade. Analysts and scouts have described it as a “double draft” year because both the top-end talent and the lottery depth are unusually strong compared to a typical cycle. That concentration of value has made the race to finish last into something close to an organizational strategy rather than a byproduct of bad luck. Multiple franchises spent the 2025–26 season accused not of trying to lose by accident, but of engineering losses by design.

The current lottery structure assigns graduated odds to the 14 worst teams, ranging from roughly 14% at the bottom to about 1% at the 14th slot. The top four picks are drawn by lottery; everything below that fills in by reverse record. That means a team at 14 wins holds a significantly better expected draft position than a team at 28 wins, and the only mechanism to earn that gap is to finish with a worse record. Commissioner Adam Silver, speaking after the Board of Governors meetings in New York in late March 2026, made clear that changes would happen before the 2026–27 season. A formal vote is expected at a special Board of Governors meeting in May.

All three proposals share a common philosophy: expand the number of lottery-eligible teams and flatten the gradient between the very worst records and merely bad ones. The disagreements are in how far to expand, how much to flatten, and whether to introduce new structural mechanisms like win floors or multi-year record windows.

Proposal 1 — The 18-Team Lottery

The first proposal expands the lottery from 14 to 18 teams by folding in the eight play-in teams alongside the ten that miss the postseason entirely. The ten worst teams would all hold equal 8% odds at the top pick. The eight play-in teams would receive descending odds based on where they finished in the play-in round.

Think of it as changing the rules of a raffle. Right now you need to finish with the worst record to buy the most tickets, and each slightly-less-terrible team buys fewer and fewer. Under Proposal 1, everyone who missed the playoffs entirely buys the same number. Teams in the play-in get a small number of tickets too, because they at least showed up. The floor is higher for the worst teams, and the ceiling for semi-competitive teams is raised from zero.

The practical effect is significant. Under the current system, the worst team has a 14% shot at the first pick while the team with the 10th-worst record has only 3.3%. Compressing that entire range to 8% across all ten removes most of the structural incentive to shave wins at the margin. For a team like the Washington Wizards — legitimately rebuilding, young roster, no clear short-term playoff ceiling — finishing 20th worst in the league rather than 28th worst would no longer feel like a meaningful sacrifice of draft positioning.

The limitation of Proposal 1 is that it does not close the gap entirely. A team genuinely committed to finishing in the bottom five still holds better expected positioning than a team trying to scrape into the play-in. And the play-in inclusion, while philosophically interesting, awards very small odds to those teams. A team bounced in the play-in would receive somewhere between 2% and 5% depending on their seeding — meaningful as a symbolic gesture but not enough to change organizational behavior at a team seriously considering a reset season. Proposal 1 is the most modest of the three changes and the easiest to implement, but it solves the problem least completely.

Proposal 2 — The 22-Team Lottery with Win Floor

The second proposal is the most structurally aggressive. It expands the lottery to 22 teams — the same 18 from Proposal 1, plus the four teams eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. It also introduces two features that exist in none of the other proposals: a two-season combined record window and a minimum win floor.

Under the two-season window, lottery positioning would be determined by a team’s combined record over two consecutive seasons rather than just the current year. A franchise that was poor last year but improved meaningfully this year would rank lower in the lottery than a franchise that has been consistently bad. This is a direct response to the multi-year teardown strategies that have come to define a generation of NBA rebuilds, where teams intentionally shed assets, play young players heavy minutes, and target the bottom of the standings for two or three seasons in a row.

The win floor is where the proposal introduces something genuinely new. If the league sets the floor at, say, 20 wins per season, a team that finishes 14–68 is treated as though they finished 20–62 for lottery purposes. The actual standing is unchanged — that team still owns the worst record and picks last in terms of non-lottery positioning — but the gap between their lottery position and a team at 22 wins shrinks considerably. The analogy is a curved grading system where the absolute bottom is lifted: a student who scored 12 and a student who scored 30 might both be treated as 25 under the curve, eliminating the reward for the single worst possible score. The Philadelphia 76ers teams of the Sam Hinkie era, which produced seasons of 10, 10, and 19 wins over three consecutive years, would have found their lottery odds substantially compressed under this rule.

Including first-round playoff losers in the lottery pool is a notable element. A team that wins its first playoff series and loses in the second round gets nothing. A team that loses in the first round gets a small lottery presence — perhaps 1–2%. That may be enough to discourage some teams near the playoff bubble from intentionally falling out. A franchise like the current Phoenix Suns or Indiana Pacers that is hovering between a first-round exit and a play-in berth might prefer to win a first-round series and keep their small lottery ticket rather than slide into play-in territory where their odds under any of these proposals would be similar.

The downside is complexity and collateral punishment. The two-season window can hurt franchises doing things correctly. If the Detroit Pistons finished 14–68 in 2024–25 and are now at 30–52 and improving, they are a different team than their record two years ago suggests. Holding their combined record against them for lottery purposes treats a legitimate rebuild the same as a deliberate tank — which is exactly the kind of outcome that would drive 25% of owners to vote no in May. The win floor also raises questions about the floor level itself. Too low (say, 15 wins) and it barely changes behavior. Too high (25 wins) and it starts to punish genuinely thin rosters. Getting that calibration right, and getting owners to agree on it, is not simple.

Proposal 3 — The Five-by-Five Method

The third proposal, known as the five-by-five method, uses the same 18-team pool as Proposal 1 but fundamentally changes the drawing mechanics. Instead of one lottery that determines the top pick and cascades downward, there would be five separate drawings — one for each of the top five picks. Every team in the bottom five by record would have equal odds in every drawing. After all five top picks are assigned, a second drawing determines picks six through eighteen for the remaining teams.

The floor protection built into this proposal is its most consequential feature. If a team in the bottom five does not land one of the top five picks in the first round of drawings, it cannot fall below the tenth pick in the second drawing. The five worst teams are therefore guaranteed a top-10 result regardless of how the lottery goes. A team like the Utah Jazz, Charlotte Hornets, or whoever occupies the bottom of the standings in a future season knows that even in a worst-case lottery night, they are walking away with a top-10 pick. That is a real and meaningful guarantee that preserves the core economic value of finishing poorly while eliminating the specific incentive to finish at position one versus position five.

The analogy is a lottery where five people with the lowest scores all draw from the same hat for the five best prizes. Under the current system, the person with the absolute lowest score gets the most tickets in that hat — maybe four, while the fifth-lowest gets one. Under five-by-five, they all get the same number. There is no marginal benefit to scoring a 14 instead of a 22 if you are going to be in the bottom five either way. For a team sitting at the margin of that cutoff — a franchise that could finish anywhere from fourth-worst to eighth-worst — the pressure to lose games vanishes once you are safely inside the bottom five. The race to the bottom becomes a race to be comfortably bad, not catastrophically bad.

The concern with this proposal is that it shifts rather than eliminates the strategic threshold. Instead of teams competing to be worst-in-league, some front offices might calculate whether their team is within reach of the bottom five and nudge the roster accordingly. A team at 28 wins in late February that could conceivably slip to 22 wins by season’s end faces a genuine calculation about whether the bottom-five guarantee is worth chasing. That said, this is a less extreme incentive than the current system creates, and the absence of a win floor means the proposal can still theoretically be gamed by a well-organized rebuild. Adding a win floor to Proposal 3 — a hybrid approach that the league could arrive at before May — would close most of the remaining gap.

Which Proposal Might Actually Work — Analysis

None of the three proposals would fully eliminate tanking. The NBA acknowledged this directly, and no honest analysis would claim otherwise. The question is not which proposal ends tanking but which one most reduces the marginal incentive while doing the least collateral damage to teams that are legitimately rebuilding through poor performance rather than engineering it.

Proposal 3 is the most effective at solving the specific behavior the league is most visibly trying to stop: the multi-year grind toward the absolute worst record in the league. By giving all five bottom teams identical odds, it makes the race from worst to fifth-worst irrelevant. A team at 12 wins and a team at 22 wins are the same for lottery purposes if both land in that bottom group. The guaranteed top-10 floor also removes the fear that a legitimately terrible team might get lottery-unlucky and fall out of the range that was supposed to justify the suffering. Portland tanking for two years and somehow landing at pick 12 is a real risk under the current system; the five-by-five floor removes it.

Proposal 2 is the most structurally honest about the root cause: teams are not just tanking for one season, they are building organizational cultures around sustained losing. The two-season window and win floor address that directly. But the complexity introduces a real risk of punishing franchises — like a young Oklahoma City Thunder or a Denver Nuggets before Nikola Jokić emerged — that happened to be bad for non-strategic reasons. A rule that treats honest incompetence the same as deliberate tanking will face legitimate resistance from ownership groups in smaller markets who rely on the lottery as their primary mechanism for acquiring star-level talent.

Proposal 1 is the path of least resistance. It introduces meaningful change — the 8% equal floor for all ten non-playoff teams is a real compression of the current graduated scale — but it does not address multi-year strategies, does not include a win floor, and does not protect against the most committed tanking franchises. It would likely pass in May because it upsets the fewest stakeholders, but it would be the proposal that analysts revisit in four years when the behavior persists.

The most likely outcome before May is that the league presents a modified version of one of these three concepts that borrows elements from the others. A version of Proposal 3 with a win floor added — equal odds for the bottom five, guaranteed top-10 protection, and a minimum win threshold that compresses the apparent record of genuinely terrible teams — would address the core problem, protect legitimate rebuilders, and be complex enough only at the margins. Whatever passes will not be the final answer. Tanking is a structural incentive problem, and as long as the top picks in the lottery are worth multiples of what the play-in picks are worth, some teams will find the margin where strategic losing pencils out. The goal of any rule change is to make that margin smaller, not to believe it has been erased.

Where Things Stand — Seattle and Las Vegas

On March 26, 2026, the NBA Board of Governors voted to formally begin the process of exploring expansion to two cities: Seattle, Washington and Las Vegas, Nevada. This was not a vote to add franchises. It was a vote to authorize an evaluation process, with investment bank PJT Partners hired as the league’s strategic adviser to examine ownership candidates, arena infrastructure, and the broader economic implications of going from 30 to 32 teams. A final decision on whether to proceed, and with which ownership groups, is expected later in 2026, with the earliest possible debut for new franchises being the 2028–29 season.

Seattle’s case is rooted in history and unresolved civic grief. The SuperSonics were one of the league’s original franchises, played from 1967 through 2008, and won the NBA championship in 1979. The team relocated to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder following a contentious ownership dispute, and Seattle has been without a team in the nearly two decades since. Climate Pledge Arena — a full renovation of the original KeyArena — opened in 2021 and currently hosts the NHL’s Seattle Kraken. The venue is modern, operational, and capable of hosting NBA games immediately. The fan base never fully moved on, and the political infrastructure to support a return franchise has been in place for years.

Las Vegas is a different kind of case and perhaps the more interesting one economically. The city already hosts the NBA Summer League and has become a preferred location for team training camps and practice facilities. The Vegas Golden Knights proved in 2017 that a major professional sports league can build a passionate local fan base in a market previously written off as a tourist city with no local sports loyalty. The Las Vegas Raiders followed with the NFL. Every indication is that an NBA franchise would arrive into an already-functioning major-league sports culture rather than building one from scratch. The league’s expectation is that both Seattle and Las Vegas would rank among the top eight revenue generators in the NBA once operational, which is a remarkable projection for two teams that do not yet exist.

Each franchise is expected to sell for between $7 and $10 billion. For context, the Phoenix Suns sold for $4 billion in 2023, which was at the time the highest franchise sale in NBA history. The Boston Celtics recently sold at a valuation above that. The expansion fees would be distributed among the current 30 ownership groups — representing a windfall of roughly $230 to $330 million per team before any operational costs. That financial incentive is a significant reason why the expansion vote was as smooth as it was. Owners are being asked to dilute their share of national revenue streams while receiving a nine-figure lump sum in exchange.

How NBA Expansion Drafts Have Worked

The NBA has added teams twice in the modern era, and both times used a version of the same expansion draft structure. Understanding what happened then is the clearest guide to what Seattle and Las Vegas can expect in 2028.

In 1995, the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies joined the league simultaneously. Each of the 27 existing teams protected eight players from its roster before the draft. Any player not on the protected list was available. The Raptors and Grizzlies held a coin flip to determine who picked first, then alternated selections, taking one unprotected player from each existing franchise. By the end of the process, Toronto had selected 14 players and Vancouver 13, and both had assembled initial rosters from the unprotected remnants of every other team in the league. The player quality was exactly what you would expect: solid rotation pieces, aging veterans on the back end of their contracts, and the occasional overlooked talent that a front office had misjudged as expendable.

In 2004, when the Charlotte Bobcats (now the Hornets) entered the league as a single expansion franchise, the same protection structure applied. Each existing team could shield eight players, Charlotte made 19 selections, and the franchise built its first roster accordingly. The Bobcats were not competitive in their early years — they finished last in the Eastern Conference in their first season — but expansion drafts are not designed to build playoff teams. They are designed to give a new franchise enough NBA-caliber bodies to put a real product on the floor.

The expected framework for 2028 mirrors this history. Each of the 30 current teams would protect up to eight players. Seattle and Las Vegas would alternate selections one player at a time from each team’s unprotected list, each selecting approximately 14 players. A coin flip decides who picks first, and the process runs in straight alternating order. Each expansion team would also receive one of the early picks in their inaugural NBA Draft, giving them a young foundational piece to build around alongside the expansion selections.

The protection decisions are where the stress lives. Eight spots sounds like more than enough until a general manager sits down and counts. A team with two max-contract stars, three reliable starters, and three key rotation pieces is already at eight before reaching the depth chart. The players left unprotected are not necessarily bad — they may be useful starters whose contracts or ages made the front office assume expansion teams would pass on them, or young players not yet showing enough to be considered obvious protects. The 1995 draft included several players who went on to have meaningful careers despite being left unprotected, including veterans who had been assumed safe because of salary or role.

Consequences for Teams — Winners and Exposed Franchises

The expansion draft creates an unusual dynamic: the teams most harmed are often not the worst ones. A franchise at the bottom of the standings in 2027–28 has a young roster concentrated at the top. Their one or two lottery picks from prior years are almost certainly protected. Their remaining roster is filled with players cheap enough or marginal enough that losing one to an expansion team causes no meaningful disruption. A tanking team in the season before the expansion draft is, counterintuitively, in a relatively safe position.

The franchises most exposed are the ones with deep, balanced rosters and no obvious sacrificial lamb. The Denver Nuggets, Miami Heat, and Golden State Warriors — teams that have consistently competed and accumulated talent through trades and smart development — carry more NBA-quality players than they can protect. A team with 11 or 12 real NBA contributors has to leave three or four of them unprotected. Expansion teams actively seek exactly that profile: established NBA players with value, under contract, not yet declining. They do not need the tenth man on a bad team; they want the ninth man on a good one.

The Portland Trail Blazers and Oklahoma City Thunder represent the most interesting cases. Both franchises have built unusually deep developmental rosters with multiple young players who are valuable but not yet stars. The kind of player who is Year 2 of a rookie deal, showing real development, not yet on the protected-eight conversation — that is exactly who expansion teams covet. Those players are young, affordable, and can anchor a second unit while the franchise builds its identity. Portland and Oklahoma City could each lose a piece they considered foundational and discover they did not have as many protectable assets as they thought.

The league as a whole benefits in ways that extend beyond the financial. A 32-team structure creates cleaner conference symmetry — 16 teams per conference, eight per division — that the current 30-team layout has never had. Scheduling logic simplifies. The return of basketball to Seattle repairs a genuine wound in the league’s relationship with that market, and Las Vegas adds a franchise in the fastest-growing entertainment city in North America. Two new television markets, two new merchandise markets, two new local broadcast deals. The expansion also increases roster demand across the league: going from 450 roster spots to 480 means 30 additional players are employed as full-time NBA players, which raises the floor of the league’s talent pool and creates new pathways for borderline roster players currently getting cut before opening night.

The complication worth watching is how expansion intersects with the anti-tanking reforms being voted on in May. Whatever lottery structure the league adopts in 2026 will need to function in a 32-team league by 2028. If the bottom 10 teams form the lottery core, and two new expansion franchises are likely to struggle in their first seasons, the lottery math shifts. Expansion teams have historically been among the worst in the league for two to three years before their draft picks and development pipeline kicks in. Seattle and Las Vegas would almost certainly be in the lottery in 2029 and 2030. The league will need to decide whether expansion franchises are treated as lottery regulars from day one or whether any transitional protections apply — a question that has not yet been answered publicly.

Which Teams Will Become the Expansion Franchises?

As of March 2026, no ownership groups have been officially selected. The Board of Governors vote authorizes the exploration process, not the award. PJT Partners will evaluate prospective ownership bids over the coming months, and the league will make its selection based on a combination of financial strength, arena situation, and market fit.

For Seattle, the primary track involves local ownership with deep Pacific Northwest ties. Multiple groups have been publicly associated with the effort over the years, though no single bid has been formally presented to the league. The arena situation is the cleanest it has ever been — Climate Pledge Arena is a solved problem, which removes the single largest obstacle that has derailed Seattle’s prior attempts to return to the NBA. A new Seattle franchise would almost certainly revive the SuperSonics name and green-and-gold identity, given the depth of that brand history in the market.

For Las Vegas, the bidding field is more crowded and the process less predictable. Several high-profile ownership groups — including names linked to casino and entertainment interests, technology wealth, and sports investment firms — have been reported as interested. The arena question requires more resolution: T-Mobile Arena is the likely venue option given its NBA Summer League track record, but the building is primarily controlled by AEG and MGM Resorts, which adds a layer of negotiation complexity. Las Vegas would enter as an expansion franchise without a historical NBA identity to revive, which means the branding exercise is entirely fresh — potentially an asset in a city where newness and spectacle sell.

The league’s decision on ownership groups will have downstream consequences for roster construction. A high-spending ownership group with access to top-market revenue might be more aggressive in free agency in year one, accelerating how competitive these teams become. An ownership group focused on building through the draft might be content to absorb early losses in exchange for lottery position. Either way, both Seattle and Las Vegas enter the league knowing that the anti-tanking rules being voted on in May 2026 will be the rules they navigate from their first season onward.