beyond the back page How the NBA’s tanking problem reached a breaking point By Howie Kussoy Published Feb. 26, 2026, 7:50 a.m. ET NBA commissoner Adam Silver has told GMs the league is looking into ways to disincentivize teams from tanking. Kirby Lee-Imagn Images Roughly six weeks remain in the NBA regular season. If we’re lucky, it will be the final six weeks of the league’s decades-long tanking plague.
In Thursday night’s slate, six of the 10 games feature at least one team with no interest in picking up a win, but commissioner Adam Silver has offered hope that next season could look different, reportedly telling every front office that the league will soon institute stronger anti-tanking measures.
The potential options reportedly include: freezing lottery odds at the trade deadline or a different date, not allowing teams to make top-four picks in consecutive drafts, limiting lottery protections, basing lottery odds on two-year records, placing play-in teams in the lottery and flattening the odds for all lottery teams.
These aren’t solutions, but they’re a start. There are no easy fixes. If so, they’d already be here.
