Adam Silver is done playing nice. After a season defined by blatant tanking, the NBA commissioner is now pushing for stronger, potentially unprecedented powers to punish teams gaming the system, but will it be enough to protect the league’s competitive integrity?

The 2025–26 season has already seen the league crack down, with teams like the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers facing sanctions for “overt” tanking and violations of player participation rules. In response, Silver, the board of governors, and NBPA representatives have convened to explore stricter anti-tanking measures aimed at restoring credibility and competitiveness across the league. NBA insider Shams Charania revealed the latest proposed changes to tackle the plague of tanking earlier today. It’s safe to say that the consensus amongst most fans is that this won’t result in significant change.

But according to NBA reporter Joe Vardon, Silver is pushing for exclusive authority to impose sanctions on teams found guilty of unequivocal tanking. “If a team, under the new rules, was still found by Adam Silver’s office to be tanking, he would be able to take away that team’s draft pick, move it to the end of the lottery or first round, and also increase fines into the millions of dollars,” Vardon wrote on Friday.

In Vardon’s latest report for The Athletic, Silver was quoted as saying, “It has business implications. It has basketball implications. It has integrity implications for the league. So it’s one that we take very seriously, and we are going to fix it. Full stop. And I want to say that directly to our fans.”

Vardon was able to get one anonymous league source to freely discuss conversations being held behind closed doors regarding anti-taking measures.

“Without stricter penalties, you could still have crazy behavior,” the source said. “You have to have something in place that is so drastic, a team would actually think twice about tanking. And if a team tries it and gets caught, then the other teams need to see the penalties and realize it isn’t worth it to try.”

Will Adam Silver’s war against ‘tanking’ succeed?

Today’s update from Charania and league sources confirms that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is moving far beyond simple fines, laying the groundwork for a structural overhaul of the draft and lottery system. This would give him and his office sweeping power to hand out stiff penalties to any team violating league rules.

Executives must realise that ‘tanking’ is driven by incentives, not rules. Despite how strict the regulations are, teams will still have a massive financial and competitive incentive to land a generational draft prospect or avoid a bad contract.

This likely means that, regardless of sweeping changes, some form of ‘strategic losing’ will still be a part of team strategy for bottom-tier teams.

Instead of openly tanking late in regulation season, teams may shift to more subtle strategies. Excessive load management, curated trades, or ‘development‑focused’ bench rotations might be loopholes teams exploit to improve draft lottery odds.

The Jazz and Pacers fines show the league is more than willing to punish egregious cases of tanking. But if the enforcement is uneven across the league, then front office executives will push their limits to test the league’s resilience before being hit with sanctions.

This struggle with tanking is hardly unique to the NBA; it’s a recurring tension across professional sports, where draft systems and rebuild incentives often clash with the demand for nightly competitiveness.

In the NFL, for instance, draft order is determined strictly by reverse order of regular-season finish, with the worst record earning the top pick, a structure that openly rewards poor performance in a way the NBA has tried to blunt through its lottery system.

A lot of modern tanking exposure comes from media narrative. With expansion talks part of the conversation, lower‑revenue teams could argue they’re being punished for pursuing a path that the league has conveniently overlooked over the last two decades.

Ultimately, it’s Silver’s very own reputation that’s on the line here. Yes, viewership numbers are down, gameday attendance is inconsistent, and the league’s credibility is up for debate. If, after all these changes, obvious tanking continues, critics will highlight that these reforms are more about optics than actual deterrence.