The NBA flirted with an idea that could make the off-season even more interesting. Ironically, the league brainstormed the idea to keep the regular season interesting. Over the last few years, the association has found creative ways to make the long season interesting throughout, like the Play-In and In-Season Tournament. But they couldn’t solve one nagging problem, and that’s the tanking express. However, they might have found the trick.

This week, the league assembled in Manhattan for the Board of Governors meeting with an agenda to fix tanking. While three preferred alterations in the existing draft lottery were already in place, the league officials also discussed a fantasy football-inspired system, as per Jake L Fischer.

As per the report published in The Stein Line, a discussion on introducing Draft Credit took place during the brainstorming session. “A real-life equivalent to the way waiver budgets work in Fantasy Football, which essentially would have meant bidding on incoming rookies like you would with the Monopoly money that gets thrown at free agents in the Fantasy realm.”

For a simpler understanding, it’s a system that will cut the link between the standings and drafting. Instead of giving an undue advantage to poorly performing teams, every single team has a go at the No.1 prospect. Say, every team has 100 draft credit points, and with that, the team with the highest bid would sign a particular player. For instance, if the Dallas Mavericks bid 80 points over the Phoenix Suns‘ 75 points for Cooper Flagg, the rising star will ultimately end up signing with Dallas.

This will also impact how the trades happen in the league. Instead of exchanging draft picks for players, the teams will engage with draft credits. This system was followed in fantasy football, where teams engage in bidding with finite currency on the available players.

However, the proposal didn’t take shape, Fischer wrote, “It proved, in the end, to be too radical a change to gain serious support,” and the league went with an already preferred system.

How will the NBA combat tanking teams now?

Heading into the meeting, the league had three preferred alterations. The first option would feature 18 teams in the lottery: those that finished the season between 7th and 15th in their respective conferences. The bottom 10 teams have an 8% advantage of winning the lottery, while the rest have 2.5%. Basically, the Play-In teams would also participate in the Draft lottery.

The second option included 22 teams, with teams between 7 and 15, along with the postseason First Round losers. The third option again included 18 teams with a 5×5 lottery. In this system, the bottom 5 teams of each conference have equal odds for a 1-5 pick, and also enables the 10 teams to have a sure shot at the first 10 picks.

However, at the end of the day, the league zeroed in on option one, including the Play-In teams in the Draft lottery. With this, the league hopes to curb the tanking. At the same time, this system doesn’t aim for a 100% relief as promised by the Draft credit system.