COLA Explorer

What if the NBA Draft rewarded patience instead of losing?
Explore 25 years of what-ifs with real data.

The Problem: NBA Teams Are Rewarded for Losing

In the NBA, the worst teams get the best draft picks. Once a team is out of playoff contention, losing more games improves their chances of landing a franchise-changing player. This is called tanking. In 2024-25, roughly 30% of teams were accused of tanking for the chance to draft Cooper Flagg or Ace Bailey.

Every proposed fix runs into the same wall: mathematicians proved in 2020 that no draft system based on a single season's record can simultaneously help weak teams and prevent tanking. It's not just hard. It's provably impossible.

The Solution: Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA)

Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA) is a new draft mechanism designed by Prof. Timothy Highley and colleagues at La Salle University (research paper). COLA escapes the impossibility by changing what the draft looks at:

Under COLA, losing more games never improves your draft position. Teams that have been genuinely bad for years get the most help. Teams having one bad season after years of success don't jump the line.

What This Tool Does

This tool takes real NBA data from 2000 to 2025 and asks: what would the draft have looked like under COLA? You can explore two COLA variants:

Simple COLA

How it works: Count how many consecutive years a team has gone without (a) winning a playoff series or (b) getting a top-3 draft pick. The team with the longest drought gets the #1 pick. Ties broken by most wins.

Key property: Fully deterministic. No lottery, no randomness. You always know exactly where you stand.

Highley's full explanation →

Classic COLA

How it works: Every year you miss the playoffs, you earn 1,000 lottery tickets. Playoff success (especially deep runs) and high draft picks reduce your ticket count. More tickets = better odds in the lottery.

Key property: Tickets accumulate over years. A team that's been bad for a decade has far more tickets than a team in their first bad season.

Highley's full explanation →

How to Use This Tool

  1. Season View: Slide to any season (2000 to 2025). Toggle between Simple and Classic COLA. The table shows each lottery team's COLA ranking; the chart visualizes it.
  2. Team Timeline: Pick your team from the dropdown. Watch how their COLA score evolves year by year. Green dots = playoff years. Red = lottery years. Gold = championship.
  3. Side-by-Side Comparison: See how Simple COLA and Classic COLA rank the same teams differently, alongside what actually happened.

Try this: Select the Sacramento Kings in the Team Timeline. They haven't won a playoff series since 2004, so under Classic COLA they'd have the highest lottery index in the league. Then switch to the 76ers: despite a terrible 2024-25 season, their 7 consecutive years of playoff appearances mean their COLA index is near zero. COLA identifies who's been chronically bad, not who's bad right now.

Learn more: Part 1: Why tanking is hard · Part 2: Key insights · Part 3: Four candidates · Research paper

A note on what this tool shows: This tool applies COLA rules to actual NBA history. It answers: "given what really happened, how would COLA have ranked these teams?" It does not simulate what would have happened if COLA had been in effect the whole time. Under real COLA, draft picks assigned by COLA would reset a team's drought or reduce their tickets, which would change rankings in future seasons. For example, under Simple COLA, the Kings would receive pick #1 in the first year of a long drought, resetting their drought. They would not hold the #1 spot year after year as the table might suggest. Keep this in mind when a team appears at #1 for many consecutive seasons.

Season View

Pick a season and a COLA variant. The table shows how each non-playoff team would rank under COLA. The Actual column shows which draft pick they really got (compare it to the COLA ranking to see what would have changed).

2024-25
Simple COLA
Classic COLA
COLA Rank Team Tickets Odds of #1 Pick Real Pick W-L

Team Timeline

Pick a team and watch their COLA score evolve over 25 years. Rising lines mean the team is accumulating draft priority (missing playoffs, no high picks). Sharp drops mean a reset (playoff series win, high pick, or championship). Hover over any point for details.

• Playoffs   • Lottery   • Champion

Side-by-Side Comparison

For the selected season: how do Simple COLA and Classic COLA rank the same lottery teams? The Actual Pick column shows what really happened under the current NBA system. Look for teams where COLA and reality diverge (those are cases where the current system arguably got it wrong).

Team Simple Rank Drought (yrs) Classic Rank Odds of #1 Real Pick W-L

Methodology & Notes

Data

All data comes from Basketball Reference: 26 seasons (1999-00 through 2024-25), 775 team-season records. Every win total, playoff result, and draft pick has been individually verified.

How We Compute COLA

We walk real NBA history forward from 1999 (the start year recommended by Prof. Highley). Each year, we apply the actual playoff results and draft picks to update every team's COLA state. This is the same method Highley uses in his own analysis.

Classic COLA: Diminishment Rules

Playoff success reduces your lottery index: Championship → reset to 0. Finals loss → −75%. Conf. finals → −50%. 2nd round → −25%. 1st round exit → unchanged.

High draft picks also reduce it: Pick 1 → reset to 0. Pick 2 → −75%. Pick 3 → −50%. Pick 4 → −25%.

What This Tool Doesn't Do

This is a what-if analysis, not a simulation. It shows what COLA rankings and probabilities would have been, but doesn't simulate who would have won the lottery. Classic COLA picks 1-4 are probabilistic (the chart shows odds, not outcomes).

Traded pick protections and play-in tournament effects are simplified. See the paper for full details.