Part of the issue with tanking, at least recently, is that David Stern did not care about it at all. He was in charge up until 2014 and that's when the Sixers were tanking the hardest. Sam Hinkie took over for the 2012-13 season and they got rid of Andre Iguodala, Jrue Holiday, and Thaddeus Young within that first year of him running things. They went all in for the 2013 draft when they traded for Nerlens Noel, who would miss considerable time because of his back injury, and they were fine with him missing all of that time because they had no intention on being competitive. Stern was on his way out also, ready to step down for Silver at the All-Star break in 2014, so no one in the league office cared what the Sixers were doing. By the time Silver was in charge, the Sixers had already tanked their way into 2 drafts, 2013 and 2014, and there was no way they were going to be able to field a competitive roster for the 2014-15 season. Since that was also his first full year in charge he paid attention but what could he do? Colangelo joined the Sixers front office for the 2015-16 season, which helped end the tanking, but by that point they'd already had enough quality draft picks they were going to compete and we're seeing that now. Some of them didn't pan out, Michael Carter-Williams, Jahlil Okafor, and Nerlens Noel, but the ones who did have been big for them, Embiid, Ben Simmons, Dario Saric, and Markelle Fultz. They won't be punished but everyone in the future will be while they'll be competing for titles. That seems fair.
They shouldn't have changed the lottery odds, they should have adopted rules blocking a team from having top 3 picks in consecutive years. Work it backwards, if they get the #1 pick then they can't draft in the top 3 for 3 years, if they get the #2 pick then they can't have a top 3 pick for 2 years, and if they get the #3 pick they can't draft in the top 3 the next year. They also opened up the lottery so the top 4 picks will be selected by lottery rather than just the top 3, so a team with the worst record could fall to #5 going forward. I don't see those changing curbing tanking so much as punishing bad teams. They've done the smart thing in watching the teams in the bottom of the standings to make sure they aren't resting players to tank but injuries happen and they do get exaggerated also. Chicago was warned but somehow the Suns weren't, which is a bit surprising. The Suns had a lot of people missing time at the end of the year and I'm pretty sure most of those guys could have returned if needed. If we were competing for something other than a top pick they would have been playing. The lottery odds won't do much though, IMO. They need to keep up with watching teams resting players and they should have punished Philly for tanking. If they had, then we wouldn't see other teams so openly following the blueprint that Sam Hinkie laid out for everyone when he took over up there.
