The NBA’s board of governors officially approved draft lottery reform on Thursday. 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 more 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 the middle, as Miami is attempting to do, is now easier than ever, and considering the Heat landed Adebayo and Tyler Herro at the end of the lottery, they’d be a pretty reasonable bet to hit on a high pick if they ever got one. The bottom is probably going to be far stickier in this world than it used to be, but the counterargument is that the middle won’t be nearly as sticky as it used to be.

Losers: The Trail Blazers and Grizzlies

The Damian Lillard and Jaren Jackson Jr. trades don’t look as good as they used to

We covered the idea of pick accumulators above. For now, the name of the game is volume. But under the old system, that wasn’t the case. Certain teams traded for picks deep in the future based on the idea that they had specific value because of the circumstances those teams faced. Houston might have come to mind here if Phoenix hadn’t bounced back in the middle of the standings this year, but now that the Suns appear somewhat competitive, there’s really one standout in this regard.

When the Blazers traded Damian Lillard, the primary value baked into the deal was control over Milwaukee’s first-round picks between 2028 and 2030. The idea there was that Milwaukee suddenly had one of the oldest rosters in the NBA, and while the Bucks could be formidable early on, there was a lot of upside in controlling their picks years down the line, when Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo would presumably age out of stardom. Essentially, they were taking a chance on their version of the Tatum-and-Brown trade for Boston.

And then there’s the matter of the new rules outlawing streaks of lottery success. Take the Grizzlies. When they traded Jaren Jackson Jr. in February, one of the picks they received was the most favorable 2027 selection between Utah, Minnesota and Cleveland. Well, the Jazz picked No. 5 in 2025 and No. 2 in 2026. That makes their pick ineligible for the top five in next year’s draft. The Grizzlies are essentially getting punished for Utah’s tanking.

The Athletic’s John Hollinger has argued that the prevalence of tanking actually makes traded picks more valuable in this world. Think of Atlanta with the New Orleans pick this year. The Pelicans, just by virtue of not actively trying to lose, went from the NBA’s worst record on Dec. 10 to a tie for seventh when the season ended. Essentially, when a tank race is as competitive as 2026 was, traded picks are locked out of the highest lottery odds because a team that’s trying to lose will always be worse than one that isn’t. 

Of course, that depends on a steady supply of tankers. There usually aren’t eight or nine teams trying to lose. Perhaps the NBA wanted to get ahead of the possibility that races like 2026 would become more frequent, but it’s worth noting that before the 2017 changes that first flattened the odds, tank races like this were rare. The Nets had the second-worst record in the NBA when they handed Boston Jaylen Brown and the worst record when they gave the Celtics Jayson Tatum.

Whether or not the actual pick yield is superior for Portland, we won’t know for some time. It frankly depends on the return in an Antetokounmpo trade that hasn’t happened yet. But the Blazers made a trade under one set of rules and the picks they’re getting will be conveyed under a different set of rules. They acted on the information they had at the time, and it’s worth wondering if they would have made the same decisions had they known what was coming. The Grizzlies almost certainly would have. They traded for an unprotected pick that essentially had a top-five protection retroactively applied to it.

Winner: Washington Wizards

The Wizards won the lottery this year… just in time

Congratulations to the double dippers! A handful of teams spent the past several years tanking and therefore benefitting from the old rules, but are now set to try to win right as the rules make doing so more rewarding in a draft context. 

A number of those teams, however, don’t control their 2027 first-round picks. The Nets, Jazz and Mavericks fall into that category. If they’re in the middle of the standings in 2028, they could do some double-dipping, but if that’s the case, other components of their rebuilds have likely gone south. Meanwhile, other teams like the Hornets and Spurs were previously members of the tank brigade but have already risen in the standings since then, so they didn’t get to really benefit from the strength of the 2026 lottery.

The Washington Wizards finally have hope — it’s been a long time coming

Zachary Pereles

The one true double-dipper here is Washington, who fittingly won the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft. Perhaps no team has tanked as nakedly as they have since the beginning of the 2023-24 season. They’ve won just 50 total games in that span and reaped the lottery benefits of all that losing. But trading for Anthony Davis and Trae Young at the deadline set Washington up to try to compete next season. Either they’ll make the playoffs, in which case, mission accomplished, or, more likely, they’re a Play-In team that benefits from the new rules. They may not be able to pick No. 1 again, but any top draft choice, relative to the sort of season they expect to have next year, would qualify as an unmitigated victory.

Loser: Sacramento Kings

The Kings missed a great chance at a top pick this year

The Kings are whatever the opposite of a double-dipper is. They missed a golden opportunity to tank when the odds would have been in their favor.

A year ago, Sacramento insisted on bringing in Zach LaVine when it traded De’Aaron Fox in a misguided attempt to remain competitive. They wound up making the Play-In Tournament and sending the Hawks the protected pick that would later become Derik Queen. Had the Kings recognized the need to tank when they gave up Fox in 2025, they could have kept that pick and potentially gained control of that ultra-valuable unprotected pick from the Pelicans or Bucks. This year, they had the NBA’s worst record as late as early March. They wound up finishing with the fifth-worst record in a season in which they legitimately tried to win.

Realistically, the Kings are at best several transaction cycles away from being even remotely playoff-viable. Their best long-term asset by far is the No. 7 overall pick in a draft in which they really should be drafting higher. The No. 1 pick went to Washington, the NBA’s worst team. The Kings had the NBA’s worst record at the All-Star break but got out-tanked by the Wizards and a number of other teams. They lost a coin flip for the No. 4 slot in the lottery… to the Jazz, who wound up with the No. 2 pick. A chance at a genuine franchise player was lost due to a combination of bad luck and worse tanking. 

The Bulls very nearly landed in this bucket, but jumped up to No. 4 in this year’s lottery, at least giving their somewhat similar rebuild a head start. The same was arguably true of Memphis just because the Grizzlies happened to deal Desmond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. right as the rules changed. They, too, jumped in this year’s lottery, snagging the No. 3 pick, and besides, their draft track record is so strong that they could have been trusted to navigate a tank-free rebuild.

But for the Kings? Things are bleak. They aren’t getting one of the four potential franchise-changers in this year’s draft. The only player on their team who currently projects as a long-term starter is Keegan Murray. They are frequently among the NBA’s worst teams and now the rules are harsher for the league’s worst teams. I suppose in fairness, the Kings have had 20 years to get their act together without doing so, but that’s on management. One of the most passionate fanbases in the NBA now probably roots for the team with the hardest path into contention.