This NBA season, for the first time, teams can't win by losing. After a tanktastic 2025-26 campaign, the league has instituted a new draft lottery setup with several new features, including:
Flat lottery odds for the teams with the fourth- through 10th-worst records A "relegation zone" in which the three worst teams get worse odds of landing a top pick A lottery that draws each of the first 16 picks, rather than just the first four from the old system This new setup will invariably produce plenty of ripple effects as teams respond to new incentives with new behaviors. Exactly how much things will change, and how these anti-tanking measures might alter transactional decisions such as the trade and buyout markets, remains to be seen.
But for now, here are five predictions for how the new rules will affect on-court outcomes in the 2026-27 season.
Fewer blowouts
In the 2025-26 regular season, 281 games were decided by at least 20 points, which broke the record of 259 set just one year earlier... which broke the record of 235 set just one year before that... which broke the record of 232 set just two years before that.
On a percentage basis, last season set a record, too. On a percentage basis, last season set a record, too, as 22% of games were blowouts. If you rank every season in NBA history by the proportion of games decided by 20-plus points, five of the top six have come since 2021.
While the leaguewide blowout rate remained relatively consistent through the first 70-plus years of NBA history, it has skyrocketed in the 2020s.
Several factors explain this sudden rise, including the increased variance of 3-pointers and a general rise in offense; it's easier to win by 20 points when the average team scores 115 points per game instead of 95. But when scoring was also high in the 1960s and 1980s, blowout rates in those decades weren't close to where they are now.
Instead, it appears that teams' modern approach to late-season games has skewed competitiveness. The NBA's blowout rate increased considerably as the 2025-26 season went on, especially in games involving tanking teams. From the start of February through the end of the season, a full third of games involving the NBA's worst teams ended with at least a 20-point margin.
Now that the league's cellar-dwellers no longer have an incentive to keep losing -- and in fact might have an incentive to win games to avoid the relegation zone -- the blowout rate should theoretically stop spiking in February, March and April.