The New NBA Purgatory

The NBA rebuilding landscape has completely changed.

With a recent rule change in the CBA, the NBA Draft lottery odds have been completely flipped.

Teams in the bottom 3 now have equal, and worse, odds than teams that finish above them. Even teams that lose in the Play-In, like the Charlotte Hornets this year, have equal odds.

Tanking is officially over.

No longer are teams going to purposefully bottom out in the league standings, hoping to receive a top draft pick.

No longer will teams have to struggle through years of consistent 14th and 15th seeds.

No longer will fans have to struggle to remain interested in their team after years of losing.

But tanking isn't the only thing that this rule change affected.

Front offices don't chase losses for the sake of losing. They chase expected value. Under the previous lottery system, finishing with one of the league's three worst records maximized your chances of drafting a franchise player. Under the new system, that incentive largely disappears. If finishing 28th gives you nearly the same lottery odds as finishing 20th, why would any front office willingly sacrifice another season?

I previously described NBA Purgatory as a position teams land in, typically around the 11th-12th seeds, that leaves them trapped with low lottery odds and few ways to improve.

But with the reformed lottery odds, this has completely shifted.

Teams like the Chicago Bulls and the Brooklyn Nets, who have consistently landed in the middle tier of non-Playoff teams, finally have a way out.

The days of hoping for a lucky top pick or trying to sign a star in free agency are past them.

They can finally rebuild the right way.

So where does this place the new NBA Purgatory?

As we know, teams landing above the bottom 3, but short of the play-in, have the best lottery odds, so it can't be them.

We also know that teams that make the play-in but lose have the second-best odds, equal to the bottom 3. But at least they are already competitive, and many of these teams, like, once again, the Charlotte Hornets, are 1-2 solid pieces away from actually making the Playoffs, so it can't be them either.

So that leaves us with what I believe will be the new NBA Purgatory, the Bottom 3.

Think about it: your team sucks; in fact, they suck so bad that they land in the bottom of the league's standings. Typically, when this happens, they have the best chances to get a top pick, to get a player that is their foundation.

But with the new lottery odds, this is no longer the case.

Teams landing in the bottom 3 now only have a 5.4% chance of the top pick, with 13 teams sharing equal or better odds. This is a drastic downgrade compared to the previous odds, which gave bottom 3 seeds a 14% chance at the top pick with only 2 other teams having equal odds.

So now you have a bad team, with low odds of drafting a star player, and with less and less player movement during free agency, you likely won't sign a star either.

It's a place no team wants to get trapped in, but someone has to.

And I think I know exactly what team this will be

Likely scenario:

The New Orleans Pelicans have basically failed with the Zion Williamson experiment.

After 6 years of consistently disappointing seasons, it appears the Pelicans may be looking to finally reset.

It has been widely discussed that within the next two seasons, either Trey Murphy, Zion Williamson, or even both, could be traded. And this change would be much needed.

With Zion, Murphy, and other guys like Saddiq Bey, Jeremiah Fears, and Derik Queen all having good seasons, you would expect the Pelicans to have at least landed above .500, right?

Well, no.

The Pelicans finished this past year with a record of 26-56, good for the 11th seed in the West, only 4 losses removed from the 15th seed.

This failure of a season should be the writing on the wall for New Orleans. Their current core will not accomplish anything together, and it is time to restart.

But the problem with restarting, especially now, is you typically need to flip your players for valuable assets. But with the Pelicans having struggled so much, even with a healthy team, losing Trey or Zion, or both, would definitely make their record worse, and they would likely end up at the bottom of the Western Conference.

And as we just discussed, landing at the bottom of your conference ruins your lottery odds, giving you a small chance at landing a top pick.

And you may be thinking, the Pelicans have young, high-potential players in Jeremiah Fears and Derik Queen, which is true, but Fears and Queen have shown real flaws in their game that give me doubt about how high their potential really is.

So as it stands, unless Fears and Queen can make large leaps in their game, the Pelicans are likely to end up at the bottom of the West, with bad lottery odds and little chance to improve.

For the longest time in the NBA, mediocrity has been a trap.

But this isn't the case anymore; Mediocrity is now a strategy.

Instead, the real trap is bottoming out.

The Pelicans may become the NBA's first victim of the new lottery era, not because they weren't bad enough, but because they were too bad.