Rules: Draft and Draft Lottery 2027

We’re shaking up the way our annual six-round draft works. The Toilet Bowl? Gone. RD1 draft slots? Gone. The SWMP Rule? Also gone. The new focus is on randomizing Round 1 picks and tying them directly to the real NBA lottery odds. (Details on how those odds will be distributed are below.)

As for Rounds 2 through 6, we’re flipping the script. Instead of snaking through the Power Rankings from #1–16, we’ll now go #16 down to #1 in straight order every round. No more snake. This tweak should give the weaker teams a much-needed boost while keeping things competitive throughout.

That's it and very simple. We are instituting this for the 2027 season. Also, in case you wanted to take a look, here are the 2024 and 2025 two-year cumulative records

RD1: Lottery

(1) We’ll use the combined records from the two most recent regular seasons. The team with the worst cumulative record gets the highest chance at the #1 pick.

(2) Each SlamNation team will be assigned odds based on the NBA Draft Lottery structure.

(3) The NBA’s #13 and #14 lottery slots (a combined 1.5% chance) will be split among SlamNation’s top four Power Ranked teams. If those balls happen to hit, we’ll run a quick secondary lottery between those four to determine the winner. That works out to a 0.375% chance for each top-four team.

The total chance of NBA #13 and #14 winning the lottery is 1.5%, and we’ll split that equally. Essentially each of the top four SlamNation teams has a 0.375% chance at winning the lottery.

(3) Whatever the NBA lottery spits out, we mirror. Simple as that.

RD2-6: Power Rankings

Reverse power rankings from the most recent regular season, and no snake each round. Just #16-1, #16-1, and so on.