Adam Silver is currently struggling with how to curtail tanking. His current plan to eliminate the draft will end up harming small-market teams like the Sacramento Kings. The answer is to assign a permanent draft order that rotates by one year after year, eliminating the value of tanking.
In the last couple of weeks, both the Indiana Pacers and the Utah Jazz have been heavily fined for keeping healthy players off the court. This is the essential process of tanking, also known as trying to lose on purpose to get a better lottery pick spot in the upcoming NBA Draft.
While some front offices see this as a team-building strategy, the real victims of it are the fans. They spend a lot of money to go to games and should see each team play their best. Paying to watch top stars sit on the sidelines isn't exactly great value for their dollars. Commissioner Silver knows this.
The main idea to end tanking he's floated around is shutting down the draft altogether and switching to a free agent system for college players. Naturally, this means small-market teams like the Kings in the league's basement will have a much more difficult time getting great rookies. There's a better way.
Sacramento would benefit more from a structured draft pick rotation
As it stands right now, each team gets two picks in the draft for a total of 60 players selected. That is impacted by teams trading draft picks as well as the lottery, which decides who gets the top 14 picks. That kind of system encourages the practice of tanking for teams like the Kings.
Instead, assign each team a spot based on alphabetical order. Atlanta gets one, Brooklyn gets two, and so on. When it gets to 31, the order starts over again with Atlanta. That's year one. In year two, every team rotates by one. Atlanta would drop to two, and Washington moves from 30 to one.
This effectively eliminates tanking as it no longer has any impact on draft position. It means that teams know exactly what their picks will be from year to year. And it doesn't eliminate trades. If Atlanta wants to trade their number one spot for Anthony Edwards, that's still an option.
Adam Silver isn't wrong that tanking is a major problem for the league, but eliminating the draft to stop it is overkill. Teams like Sacramento need the draft to have a fair chance at college stars. The pick rotation system does all of these things, plus improving the value of picks as trades.