Over the weekend, the NBA seems to have finally cracked the competitiveness issue with the All-Star Game. However, one controversy continues to simmer: Tanking, or teams intentionally losing games to improve draft lottery odds, has long frustrated many voices in the league. As commissioner, Adam Silver seeks a solution, but another league has sent a message in the meantime.

“No tanking. No Lottery. No nights off. Season 9 incoming,” 3v3 league BIG3’s X account posted, featuring a highlight-filled trailer for their upcoming season.

The post doubles as a callout of the NBA while also promoting their upcoming season. The league, founded by rapper Ice Cube, has a shorter, more competitive season than some see as a structure that incentivizes losing in the NBA. The BIG3 directly challenges Silver and the NBA’s marquee stars, like LeBron James, to reckon with the incentives they’ve tolerated, because now they’ve emphasized that every game matters and offers no reward for losing.

Recent examples show how bad things have gotten. The Utah Jazz and the Indiana Pacers were recently fined $500,000 and $100,000, respectively, for resting healthy players in the fourth quarter of close games to perform worse and improve their lottery odds.

Despite league intervention over the last few years, such as flattening the odds and the play-in tournament, incentives for tanking remain embedded in the very structure of the summer offseason draft.

BIG3 avoids many of these problems through its significantly different structure from the NBA. There’s no draft lottery, and players enter the league as free agents, so there’s no way to build a team while losing. Their season is much shorter, and every team has a direct path to the playoffs, which makes each game matter in the standings.

Adam Silver’s NBA Weighs Eliminating the Draft as Tanking Solution

According to recent reports, Adam Silver’s NBA is considering even the most drastic measures to end tanking, rather than fining teams or changing lottery odds further.

“However, if Silver and his advisers decided the only way to stop tanking, and thereby protect paying customers from forking over money to watch their teams lose on purpose, was to stop the draft altogether and turn rookies into free agents, that same league official said it would get serious consideration,” The Athletic’s Joe Vardon wrote.

This would essentially be an entire reset of the league, since the draft is central to the NBA’s functioning. With no relegation, the draft tries to add a sense of competitive balance, and removing it would completely change how teams build their rosters.

While the draft is designed to help struggling teams catch up, it increasingly incentivizes them to fall behind, as in the cases of the Jazz and the Pacers, and commissioner Silver is considering the nuclear option. Rookies turning into free agents who can be paid any amount would eliminate tanking, but also increase the influence of larger markets like LA or New York, and put it into the hands of wealthier owners who can afford to pay larger contracts.