NBA lottery reform likely postponed until salary cap stabilizes

Thanks to the uncertainty that will come with next summer’s dramatic increase to the salary cap, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said he plans to postpone changes that could be made to the NBA lottery system, for now.

The NBA’s plan to “smooth” over the salary cap over a few seasons was formally rejected by the player’s association earlier this month. With the TV revenue set to increase from $930 million to $2.67 billion in 2016, the cap is now expected to jump as much as $30 million in a single year.

“What I am hearing from some of the general managers in the league is that because it’s unclear how the cap will operate with a massive amount of cap room in ‘16 and ‘17 and potentially in the year after that, it may be premature to change the lottery until we have a better understanding of what the changed behavior will be. So it’s something we are going to continue to look at,” Silver told the Houston Chronicle.

Silver continued: “I think it’s obviously a question of when we make a change. The expectation of the league office that we were going to have smoothing, we turned out to be wrong and I accept that. Therefore we have to study what that means because the lottery is just one aspect of a larger draft and free agency so we have to look at all those moving parts together.”

The NBA lottery has been an issue at the forefront of Silver’s tenure. In January, teams rejected a proposal that would have spread out the odds more evenly among lottery teams and dis-incentivize tanking further. However, it was generally agreed that some change to the system was on the horizon, with some ideas more elaborate than others.

Now Silver and the NBA has than two years to come up with a viable reform for the draft process.