Nate Tramdaks, Staff Writer

The NBA relies on competition, yet its draft system has long rewarded teams for doing poorly. Popularized by Sam Hinkie and the Philadelphia 76ers in the mid-2010s, tanking is a strategy where teams intentionally lose to increase their chances of receiving a higher draft pick. 

The NBA draft lottery is designed to distribute top prospects to the league’s worst teams. Each year, the 14 teams that miss the playoffs are entered into a lottery where those with poorer records are given better odds at landing the No. 1 overall pick. Through this system, losing is rewarded, prompting teams to lose on purpose to ensure they have a good draft pick. 

The problem with most proposals to reform the lottery is they neglect the real change that needs to be made: losing cannot benefit your draft position. Dr. Highley, along with the help of Tannah Duncan, ‘27 and Ilia Volkov, ‘27, set out to change that. Their proposed system, Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA) removes tanking incentives while still favoring weaker teams. This method is specifically aimed at shifting the value focus among teams. This involves balancing championship equity and pick equity. 

What sets COLA apart from other lottery-reform proposals is that it does not rely on a single-season result– rather, it incorporates multi-year performance into draft positioning. COLA has many different variations, or flavors. In its simplest form, the COLA system assigns each team a running total of “lottery tickets” that carries over from year to year. Every season, all non-playoff teams receive the same increase in tickets, regardless of their exact record.

Instead of rewarding the worst team in a single season, COLA gradually rewards teams that miss the playoffs repeatedly. The longer a team goes without postseason success, the more its lottery odds accumulate. Once a team earns a top draft pick, however, its ticket total is reduced, preventing it from repeatedly benefiting from the system.

To evaluate whether COLA would work in practice, Duncan and Volkovran ran long-term simulations modeling team performance, player development and draft outcomes. Using probabilistic methods, they simulated hundreds of seasons to observe how teams performed over time under the system. The results indicated that no team remained consistently dominant or consistently poor. Instead, draft opportunities and team success balanced out over time, suggesting that COLA could maintain competitive parity while eliminating incentives to lose. 

COLA also introduces radical changes to the draft system as a whole, proposing that the lottery line can be moved to incorporate playoff teams in strong draft years and the ability to opt out entirely from the lottery system for a fee of tickets. 

This proposal, however complex it seems, truly addresses tanking in the NBA in a way that other proposals do not. By neglecting losses with regard to draft position, teams are forced to shift their value focus. Theoretically, that focus should shift back to winning and if that’s the case, talent will be properly distributed through the draft.