NBA Lottery: Open to all teams?

[Sauru]

who cares if a team tanks? the celtics traded away everyone and tanked to win tim duncan and look how well that worked for them. tanking is not always rewarded and more times than not, even if you land the top pick, no one wants to play for that team. hard to sign big name players when you have a habit of loseing. nothing preventing the rockets from tanking if they wanted to.

[Effekt]

I think it should stay as it is, teams who don't have good season's should get the top picks to revitalize the teams. As stated before by Matt, Miami-Toronto-Denver-Cleveland all had bad seasons. They then each picked up one of the top 5 picks. Those rookies gave the teams playoff hopes. Now what would happen if a team like Dallas (who I think will win the playoffs) get the first pick. They would pick up let's say Oden and it would make them even better than before, though the teams with the bad records like 20-50 etc. would still get those the next season. I find that the lottery gives teams more hope of winning the playoffs and also makes the NBA more entertaining, imagine all those Cavs fans being pissed because of only 17 wins in an 82 game season. Now think of how happy they were when LeBron James came on.