The NBA team-building paradigm is about to change

Adam Silver vows that serious reform will take effect next season. No one seems to know what's coming.

Good morning. It's New Music Friday. I don't have any new music for you to listen to, this is more of an FYI. Let's basketball.

At his press conference after this week's Board of Governors meeting, where the big story was the advancement of expansion exploration efforts centered on Seattle and Las Vegas, Adam Silver essentially vowed to have tanking reforms in place ahead of the June draft.

In a move that underscores the urgency of the situation, Silver said the NBA will hold a special board of governors meeting in May to address the problem so teams are aware of what the rules will be ahead of the offseason.

"Certainly going into next season, the incentives will be completely different than they are now," Silver said.

That's a bold statement that makes it sound as if this will represent a major shift in how draft slots are determined. Say more!

"There's such a subtlety to this when incentives don't match, when we're now into it with coaches' decisions on lineups and when players come in and out of the game, injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other, pain levels of players," he continued, "that my sense is when I say fix now, yes, we need to do something more extreme than we did with those incremental changes the last four times along.

Wow, Silver is laying down the gauntlet on his own bosses to agree to something more extreme than the odds-flattening that occurred in the late 2010s ... when no one seems to be all that sure what the extreme solution will be. Where Silver seems focused largely on the incentives, it tells me that the league is considering something like tombstone wins or restrictions on consecutive high picks. I don't think limiting pick protections, additional odds-flattening or other minor reforms will meet this definition.