If that sounds radical, allow us to take things further.
For the NBA to get rid of tanking “full stop,” as Silver said during a Wednesday news conference, it must remove the temptation for teams to lose. That’s right: It’s time to abolish the draft.
Abolishing NBA Draft should be seriously considered as way to combat tanking
The NBA is as much a race to the bottom as it is to the top, with several more interested in improving draft odds than fielding competitive rosters.
Based on the way the league operates, it makes sense. In a rigid draft structure, why not want a better pick, for a chance to select a better player? The NBA enables bad teams, but abolishing the draft would force them to elevate their standards, on and off the court.
In a 2025 article from Yahoo Sports contributing writer Kari Anderson, NWSL senior director of strategy Carlin Hudson discussed the impact of the league’s decision to cancel its draft as part of its most recent collective bargaining agreement and said, “It has led to our clubs creating more of a player-friendly environment as well to make themselves as attractive as possible to players.”
The Athletic’s David Aldridge wrote one way a draft-less system could work in June 2025, with first-year players put into tiers. Per Aldridge, “The NBA already tiers incoming players,” with front-office executives from the league’s 30 teams providing lists of prospects used to determine who receives green room invitations.
Aldridge added:
“In addition, the league already uses a ‘Top-10 Formula,’ using composite pre-draft rankings of players to determine the top 10 players in a given year’s draft. That ranking of players determines which teams receive medical information on the prospect.”
That list — with the top 15 prospects included in Tier 1 — would be expanded to include second and third tiers (30 players each) for negotiating and signing purposes, with rookie-scale contracts determined by ranking.
Under Aldridge’s suggestion, teams would only be allowed one Tier 1 signing over a three-year span, preventing top teams from continually grabbing the best talent.
One problem with this solution is that several teams have already made trades involving future draft capital. What happens then?
In a world where the draft is abolished, the NBA could allow teams to trade their ability to sign Tier 1-3 players. The league office would be able to convert those already-traded assets into “Tier” signings, which may sound complicated but is no more so than any of the convoluted ways of fixing the draft.
While the draft is the premier event of the NBA’s offseason, nixing it would be a small price to pay if it makes the regular season more competitive. Plus, a live television production with top rookies announcing where they’re signing — with ESPN’s Shams Charania spoiling the moment online seconds earlier — would be just as compelling, if not more so.
What’s clear from the NBA’s anti-tanking proposals is that it doesn’t have any good ideas how to solve arguably its biggest problem. Instead of tinkering with the draft model, the league should abandon it altogether, even if it isn’t being realistically considered. In February, The Athletic reported that canceling the draft wasn’t brought up when league officials recently discussed “approximately 10” potential solutions.
But maybe it should be on the table. The nuclear option would represent a massive change for the NBA. It may also be the only way to ensure tanking is, one day, a thing of the past.
