Does the Wizards' slide indicate it's time to change the draft lottery system?

The 2025 NBA Draft Lottery will go down as one of the most shocking, franchise-defining events in the history of the NBA. Does that mean it’s time to scrap it?

The Dallas Mavericks won the lottery with just a 1.8% chance, jumping ten whole spots from eleventh-best odds to the very top. Meanwhile, the three teams with the highest odds for the no. 1 overall pick —the Charlotte Hornets, Utah Jazz, and Washington Wizards — fell to picks four, five, and six, respectively.

The Wizards especially got screwed. They tanked ethically, keeping their best guys in the lineup down the stretch of the season and going out trying to win games. They even sacrificed the best lottery positioning to the Jazz late in the season, opening up the possibility that they would fall to the sixth pick (which ended up happening, tragically).

Eliminating the draft lottery and awarding the top picks in reverse order of record would likely have the effect of greatly concentrating tanking. Teams like the Philadelphia 76ers were rewarded this year for throwing a bunch of guys out on the court who nobody had ever heard of to intentionally lose 20 of their last 22 games.

In a draft lottery-less world, the Sixers would have had to either commit to their tank earlier or stay competitive for longer. Rather than pivoting to a brazen tank in mid-January and being rewarded by jumping up to pick no. 3, Philly would have been rightfully handed a mid-to-late lottery pick and been told “better luck next year.”

The same goes for the Mavericks, who famously made the worst decision in the history of the NBA by shipping off Luka Doncic in the middle of the night, cratered the rest of the season, and were still somehow rewarded with Cooper Flagg.

Now, it should be noted that the “get out of jail free card” nature of this year’s draft lottery is not an annual occurrence. Generally speaking, the worst teams end up with the top picks in a reasonable order (that is, unless you are the Detroit Pistons, who selected no. 5 overall in three straight drafts).

One other concern with eliminating the draft lottery is that pick protections included as trade stipulations would become much, much more valuable considering teams would have a lot more control over where their draft picks fall toward the end of the season.

I don’t think the draft lottery is going anywhere any time soon, and any change to the system at this stage would be aggressively reactionary. But given how the Wizards and Jazz both got the worst possible picks they could have while the Mavericks and Sixers both got bailed out of historical incompetence, it is worth debating the merits of the system as it stands.