The NBA has told general managers it wants to roll out new anti-tanking reforms as soon as the 2027 season, a sweeping change aimed at tightening the lottery system and discouraging teams from chasing better draft odds by losing on purpose. The measures are expected to have enough support from owners to pass.
Ricky O'Donnell of SB Nation summarized the proposed lottery changes, and the cleanest read on the idea is that it would make losing less useful without completely rewriting the draft. The simplest answer to whether the San Antonio Spurs would be hurt is this: it doesn’t. Not in any meaningful way, anyway.
That is because the Spurs already did the hard part. They won 62 games this year and are expected to remain a playoff team next season, while San Antonio is in control of all of its own picks after that. The first real test for any new format would come in 2027, when the Spurs owe the Sacramento Kings an unprotected first-round pick from the De'Aaron Fox trade and the Atlanta Hawks owe San Antonio an unprotected 2027 first-rounder.
The league’s concern is rooted in a problem that had grown hard to ignore: teams sitting healthy players or giving them only brief minutes in ways that made it look as if winning had become optional. That has already drawn punishment before. In February, the Utah Jazz were fined $500,000 for essentially point shaving, a sign the league was no longer willing to shrug off the edge cases.
For San Antonio, the longer view may matter more than the immediate one. The Spurs also have pick swaps with the Dallas Mavericks, Boston Celtics and Minnesota Timberwolves in 2030, and those could wind up untouched if the NBA changes the format and then uses the option to opt out after the 2029 draft. In other words, the team that once had every incentive to game the system may find the system changing after it has already cashed in its future.
That is the tension at the center of the reform push. The league says tanking had gotten to a point where something had to be done, and this appears to be the answer it believes can clear the owners. The harder part will be proving that the new rules actually change behavior without simply moving the game into a different corner of the calendar.