A better NBA Lottery System: Lottery Ball incentives

NBDL team payrolls are ~$400k, total. You can't just call them up and not expect a bloodletting every night they play. The disparity is too great. They also couldn't hope to draw enough revenue to afford the NBA cap floor.

The league would never go for this, since relegation would substantially diminish franchise value of the teams that go down. In the end, the owners would never sign off on it, and they are the ones in power.

If you really wanted to dream of a relegation system, you'd need to take at least 8 teams down, pepper in 4 of the most promising D-League teams, and call it Tier 2. Tier 2 gets its own salary cap (say, a third of the NBA's) and relegated teams have to release players to get under the cap - putting them into an amnesty waiver pool (teams coming up from tier 2 getting first option).

You don't want to keep flip flopping the same teams every year, so every two or three years, the worst (combined record) team from each conference goes down and the top two teams in Tier 2 get to come up.

But again, it'll never happen. No owner wants to put his neck out for that.

 

The first concept essentially eliminates the lottery altogether. Every team in the NBA gets a single ping-pong ball regardless of record. Everybody has an equal shot at getting the first pick (and the last pick for that matter).

The second concept is less radical and more in line with the current setup, however, without a clear advantage (more ping pong balls), teams will be less likely to tank games because all of the lottery teams are treated equally (single ping-pong ball).

With that being said, I believe the first concept is more effective when it comes to eliminating tanking altogether.

 

I would go with basically a straight lottery.

Everybody except the 8 teams that make the semifinals. 22 team completely random lottery, all equal chances.

Only way to truly eliminate any tanking.