The current NBA lottery is built almost entirely on record. That makes losing the only signal that really matters. The league flattened odds in 2019 to reduce the race to absolute last place, but it did not remove the core incentive. It just widened the zone where being bad still pays.

Draft Score changes the ranking logic before it changes the odds. Instead of asking only who lost the most games, it asks three separate questions: who has been bad for years, who is still competing against peer teams, and who actually finished with the worst record. The model is designed so those forces pull against each other instead of all rewarding the same behavior.

That tension is the whole point. A team cannot maximize priors, MOV, and record all at once. Priors are frozen before the season. MOV rewards effort. Record still rewards losing. Once those incentives stop lining up cleanly, tanking stops being the obvious answer.

Under the current NBA system, the one-year tank is straightforward. A team trades productive veterans, rests healthy players, plays developmental lineups, piles up losses, and climbs the odds board. Draft Score attacks that strategy from two sides. Priors are frozen before opening night, so a late collapse does not rewrite recent competence. Lottery-field MOV then punishes the kind of ugly, low-effort losses that tanking usually produces.

That means a team can still worsen its record, but the gains from record are partially canceled by poor priors and a collapsing MOV profile. The strategy does not disappear entirely, but it becomes dramatically weaker than it is under the current system.

The most effective way to maximize Draft Score looks a lot like the kind of team that genuinely deserves help. A franchise can strip down over multiple years, absorb losing seasons, build very bad priors, then enter a target season still bad enough to miss the playoffs but competitive enough to post a strong lottery-field MOV. That profile is hard to fake quickly, expensive in organizational patience, and much closer to a real rebuild than a one-year dive.

That is not a flaw in the model. It is the point. If the best way to game the system is to become the exact kind of team the draft is supposed to help — long-term bad, still trying, still rebuilding honestly — then the gaming problem is already much healthier.

The original lottery gives teams in the 30-to-42-win range very little reason to keep going. They are too bad to matter in the playoffs and not bad enough to matter in the lottery. Draft Score gives them a different path. If they have endured multiple weak seasons and keep competing against peer teams, they can earn legitimate lottery position without needing to become strategically hopeless.

The strongest proof of the model came from who it refused to reward. Recent winners in collapse mode did not automatically inherit premium lottery status just because they bottomed out once. That memory of prior competence survived the season.

Record tells you who lost. Lottery-field MOV tells you how they lost. That distinction is everything. Teams that competed, even while remaining structurally bad, rose. Teams that got obliterated by peer opponents sank.