What if the NBA Draft rewarded patience instead of losing?
Explore 25 years of what-ifs with real data.
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.
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.
This tool takes real NBA data from 2000 to 2026 (with the 2025-26 season as a live post-R1 projection for the 2026 NBA Draft Lottery) and asks: what would the draft have looked like under COLA? You can explore five COLA variants and the NBA's adopted 3-2-1 reform proposal:
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. All 22 teams that failed to win a series are ranked (14 non-playoff + 8 first-round losers).
Key property: Fully deterministic. No lottery, no randomness. You always know exactly where you stand.
Highley's full explanation →How it works: Same drought ranking as Simple COLA (22 teams by years without a playoff series win or top-3 pick). But instead of deterministic assignment, the top 14 teams enter a lottery using pre-2019 NBA odds (25% for the longest drought, down to 0.5% for the 14th). Bottom 8 teams are excluded from the lottery.
Key property: Adds randomness to protect against gaming while keeping drought-based priority. The longest-suffering team has the best odds but isn't guaranteed pick #1.
Highley's full explanation →How it works: Each team's McCarty number = drought × regular-season wins. Teams ranked by McCarty number. Picks assigned bottom-up (worst pick first): for each pick, the 5 lowest-ranked remaining teams form a pool with 6/5/4/3/2 tickets. Draw one, eliminate, repeat until last team standing gets #1.
Key property: No team falls more than 4 spots below expected. Winning matters (higher McCarty), while long droughts multiply. Probabilities computed via Monte Carlo simulation (10,000 trials).
Highley's full explanation →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 it works: Each team has a stockpile of lottery tickets capped at a maximum (default 150). Play-in teams and below earn wins-based increments at season's end. Playoff success reduces stockpiles in 20% steps: 1st-round loser −20%, 2nd-round −40%, conf. finals −60%, finals −80%, champion −100%. Play-in advancer who loses R1 only loses −10%. Top 5 picks raffled by stockpile; picks 6+ by stockpile order. Eligibility requires drought ≥ 2.
Key property: No cliff, no runaway stockpile. The max cost of winning any single playoff series is bounded at 45 tickets (30% of MAX=150), with each additional series costing 30 tickets (20% of MAX). This defuses playoff-tanking at the mechanism level, not just empirically.
Highley's Substack →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
Pick a season and a COLA variant. Classic COLA ranks the 14 non-playoff teams. Simple, Simple Lottery, and Countdown COLA rank all 22 teams that failed to win a playoff series (14 non-playoff + 8 first-round losers). Capped COLA ranks teams with drought ≥ 2 (typically 9–17 teams after eligibility filters).
| COLA Rank | Team | Tickets | Odds of #1 Pick | Real Pick | W-L |
|---|
— in Real Pick = no first-round pick (traded away or forfeited).
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.
For the selected season: how do all five variants rank the same teams? Simple, Simple Lottery, and Countdown COLA include 22 teams (all that failed to win a playoff series); Classic includes the 14 non-playoff teams; Capped includes drought-≥-2 eligible teams. SL = Simple Lottery odds. CD = Countdown (McCarty number). Cl. = Classic odds. Cap = Capped COLA stockpile. Cap Odds = Capped top-5 raffle odds.
| Team | Simple | Drought | SL Odds | CD Rank | McCarty | CD Odds | Classic | Cl. Odds | Capped | Cap $ | Cap Odds | Real Pick | W-L |
|---|
All data comes from Basketball Reference: 26 seasons (1999-00 through 2024-25), 775 team-season records. Win totals, playoff results, and lottery picks (1-14) have been individually verified against the source. Picks 15-30 are sourced programmatically from Basketball Reference draft pages and reflect the original pick holder; draft-night trades in this range are not corrected. Minnesota forfeited their first-round pick in 2001 and 2002 (Joe Smith salary cap violation).
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.
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%.
Playoff ladder: Champion −100%, Finals −80%, Conf. Finals −60%, 2nd-round −40%, direct R1 loser −20%, play-in R1 winner who loses R1 −10%, play-in loser 0%.
Draft pick ladder: #1 −100%, #2 −80%, #3 −60%, #4 −40%, #5 −20%.
Wins increment (end of regular season): for any team that is play-in-or-below (seeds 7+), stockpile += season wins, then clamp to MAX.
Per-series tanking bound: max 45 tickets (30% of MAX=150), typical 30 tickets (20% of MAX). No cliff, no runaway stockpile.
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 and Capped COLA picks 1-5 are probabilistic (the chart shows odds, not outcomes).
Traded pick protections and play-in tournament effects are simplified. Capped COLA's enhanced Stepien rule (teams at 150-ticket cap must retain own first-round picks every other year) is documented but not enforced in the backtest. See the paper for full details.