INDIANAPOLIS — Three weeks after the Pacers had their hearts broken in the NBA Draft lottery, news broke that the league will be overhauling the lottery system.
For much of the second half of the regular season, the NBA faced calls from fans and stakeholders to address the extent of “tanking” as the league’s bottom third seemed to show little interest in winning games in the season’s final months with the 2026 draft class expected to be particularly strong and teams jockeying for lottery position. Commissioner Adam Silver addressed the issue with fines — including a $100,000 fine levied at the Pacers for their personnel decisions in a Feb. 3 game against the Jazz — and said that there would be significant rule changes made for future lotteries.
After reportedly considering several options, the NBA’s Board of Governors approved a drastic rule change on Thursday according to a report from ESPN’s Shams Charania. According to the report, the lottery is being expanded from 14 teams to 16, odds are being flattened and there is a “relegation zone” that penalizes teams with the league’s worst records rather than rewarding them with the best lottery odds.
The NBA confirmed the rule change in a press release after Charania broke the story.
The NBA will do away entirely with the current lottery system in which 14 ping-pong balls are placed in a machine similar to the ones used for state lotteries and four balls are chosen to determine each of the top four picks. There are 1,001 four-ball combinations using the numbers 1-14, and those combinations are distributed to each team sequentially based on their regular-season record with each of the worst three teams getting 140 combinations.
Now, according to Charania, the lottery will be done on a 3-2-1 system. Rather than putting numbers on the balls, each team will have its logo on them. Teams that finish between 4th and 10th in the reverse standings will each have three balls in the lottery. The teams with the three worst records will have just two each. The teams that were the No. 9 and No. 10 seeds in the play-in round will receive two balls each. The teams that lost the No. 7 vs. No. 8 games in the play-in round will each have one ball in the lottery. Instead of just choosing the first four picks as the lottery did this year with the rest being determined by reverse order of finish, the lottery will determine each of the top 16 selections.
No team will be able to win the No. 1 pick in consecutive years and no team will be able to win three consecutive top five picks. The rule passed 29 to 1 according to Charania with the Memphis Grizzlies as the only opposing vote.
The Pacers certainly hope they will return to the postseason and not have to concern themselves with the lottery, but the 2025-26 season was proof of how fragile success can be. They reached the NBA Finals in 2025, but lost in seven games with All-Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton suffering a right Achilles tendon tear in Game 7 that kept him out the entire 2025-26 season. The Pacers hoped to be a postseason team anyway, but Haliburton’s turned out to be just the first in a series of injuries that hijacked their season with point guard T.J. McConnell suffering a preseason hamstring injury and guards Andrew Nembhard and Bennedict Mathurin, and forward Obi Toppin suffering injuries in the season’s first three games. The Pacers won just one of their first 14 games, two of their first 18 and six of their first 37 en route to a 19-63 record that was the worst in franchise history.
In February, the Pacers made a significant trade, acquiring center Ivica Zubac from the Clippers but sending Mathurin, center Isaiah Jackson and three draft picks to get him. That conditionally included the Pacers’ 2026 first-round draft pick. They would have kept the selection if they won the lottery and earned a top four pick or if they ended up with a pick between 10 and 30, but the Clippers got it if it landed between 5 and 9. The Pacers won just six of their 31 games after the trade to post the second-worst record in the league and entered the May 10 lottery with the best possible odds at getting the No. 1 overall pick (14%) or a top-four pick (52.1%). However, none of their lottery combinations came up, they ended up with the No. 5 pick and had to send it to the Clippers.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: NBA changes lottery format after Pacers lost 5th pick in trade
Reporting by Dustin Dopirak, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
