By the time the 2026 NBA Draft rolled around, everyone was already tired of the tanking conversation. The league spent months treating it like some complicated debate, like there were layers to peel back. There weren’t.

Teams were bad. Some of them were just regular bad. Others were the kind of bad where you’d check the injury report, see three “questionable” starters sitting again, and just shake your head because we all knew what was going on. Nobody really enjoyed it. Not the league, not the fans, not the coaches trying to sell it, and definitely not anyone watching random Tuesday games in March.

And then draft night hit, and suddenly all those teams that gave us those ugly games got rewarded.

Washington got AJ Dybantsa. Utah got Darryn Peterson. Memphis got Cameron Boozer. Chicago got Caleb Wilson. Four teams that spent most of the year living in that mess walked out with players who can actually change things. However they got there, they all ended up in the same place — right at the front of a loaded class.

This draft felt like tanking getting one last moment before the league starts tightening things up. Because starting in 2027, the NBA’s new 3-2-1 lottery system is going to make this a lot harder to pull off. Not impossible — it’s the NBA, someone will always try something — but definitely harder.

The Old System Paid One Last Time

Washington went 17-65 last season — the worst record in the league — and had a 14 percent chance to land the top pick. They did. It’s their first No. 1 since John Wall in 2010, which just adds to it. This was a franchise that’s been spinning their wheels for years, finally getting handed a real direction.

And yeah, that’s the dream. That’s why teams do this, even if everyone pretends to be surprised by it every spring.

Because let’s be honest, nobody wants to go 17-65. Nobody wants to ask fans to buy into a season that’s over before the holiday lights come down. Nobody enjoys the late-season rotations, the “development minutes,” or the nights where half the lineup is suddenly unavailable for reasons that feel… flexible.

But if the other side of that is AJ Dybantsa, you can see why teams talk themselves into it.

At BYU, he had one of those seasons where by February, most people had already moved on from debating No. 1 and just accepted it. 26 points, seven boards, four assists, over 50 percent from the field, led the country in scoring. He's a big wing who can create and score at all three levels — basically the exact archetype every rebuilding team is chasing.

That’s the entire pitch for tanking sitting right there in one player.

And it wasn’t just them.

Utah getting Peterson at No. 2 almost feels like the universe having a little fun with all of this. The Jazz were right in the middle of the tanking conversation all year, and not quietly either. The NBA fined them $500,000 after they pulled Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. from games they could’ve finished. Adam Silver flat-out said that kind of stuff hurts the integrity of the game.

And then they still landed the No. 2 pick.

Peterson gives them exactly what they’ve been missing — a big guard who can go get his own shot. He averaged 20.2 at Kansas, set the freshman scoring record there, and profiles as the kind of primary scorer/secondary creator teams spend years trying to find. There’s a pretty clear path to him becoming an All-Star-level guard if it all clicks.

Utah got called out, got fined, and still ended up exactly where they wanted — with one of the best players in the class. The fine matters in a vacuum, but in team-building terms, it’s nothing if the end result is a potential star on a rookie deal.

That’s the part the league is trying to clean up. Not bad teams altogether — that’s always going to happen. But being bad on purpose shouldn't feel like the smartest move.

The League Saw Enough

The NBA didn’t change the lottery because they needed a new graphic or wanted to freshen things up. The whole thing got way too obvious. Silver flat-out called the 2025–26 tanking “unprecedented,” and he’s right.

"I think what we’re seeing is a modern analytics where it’s so clear that the incentives are misaligned. Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view. And which was what led to those fines [of the Jazz and Pacers] and not just those fines, but to my statement that we’re going to be looking more closely at the totality of all the circumstances this season in terms of teams’ behavior, and very intentionally wanted teams to be on notice."

Tanking used to come with at least a little shame. Not a ton, but enough where everyone talked around it. Now it’s just part of the conversation. Fans know the odds. They know the prospects. They know when losing helps more than winning. And they can spot a “sore ankle” update doing some heavy lifting from a mile away. Nobody’s getting fooled.

That’s what made this season so rough. It wasn’t just the losing — bad teams have always lost a lot of games. It was that everyone understood the angle.

That’s a tough sell. You can only ask people to be patient so many times before they start wondering why they’re paying to watch a team chase ping pong balls. Silver basically admitted that before the Finals — fans hate how it looks, even if they understand why their team is doing it. And that’s why this reform came in hot.

This new 3-2-1 system actually has a shot. Under the old setup, the three worst teams all had the best shot at No. 1 — 14 percent each. Not a guarantee, but still the cleanest path. If you were going to be bad, you might as well go all the way.

Now it’s different. The bottom three teams get two lottery balls, while teams in that 4–10 range get three. So the truly awful teams actually have worse odds than the ones that were just regular bad. They’re still protected from falling past No. 12, but after an 18-win season, landing at 12 isn’t exactly a win. Nobody’s celebrating that.

Of course, this is still the NBA, so teams are going to poke at the edges of it immediately. Instead of racing to the very bottom, you might see teams try to live just above it. But the message is pretty simple.

The NBA doesn’t want the worst teams automatically sitting in the best spot anymore. Which means the 2026 draft was the last real payout from the old system.

All stats courtesy of NBA.com.

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