There is a larger-than-usual amount of NBA teams that are tanking their way through the final games of the regular season in hopes of improving their lottery odds for what appears to be a promising draft class.

The Dallas Mavericks can be classified as one of those teams - at least for this season.

Even with the Mavs facing multiple crucial injuries that have lowered their ability to compete with the top dogs in the league, this top-heavy draft class offers some reasons to be content with losses piling up in 2025-26. At 23-50, Mavs fans are surely familiar with the reality by now.

That mentality, however, is getting addressed as more and more teams find advantages in setting themselves up for the future by disregarding the present.

According to ESPN's Shams Charania, the league met this week about three possible anti-tanking "concepts" that could be investigated and potentially enacted after a formal vote in May.

Here are the ideas, and how they might affect the Dallas Mavericks if they were to be in action today.

Charania reports: "18 teams in draft lottery (seeds 7-15 in each conference) – flattened odds, with bottom 10 teams having an 8% chance, the remaining 20% odds distributed in decreasing order for 11 through 18, and and a lottery drawing for all 18 picks."

That adds four more teams to the lottery, which begins conflicting with the extra sample of teams who sneak into the playoffs via the Play-In Tournament. Flattened odds for receiving the No. 1 pick creates a more randomized winner (something the league began installing, to some extent, when the bottom three all got an equal 14 percent chance of the top pick), but could result in an unfair talent distribution that does not benefit the poorest of poor teams like the lottery was first intended to do.

The Mavs currently have the sixth-best odds of the top pick at 9.0 percent. If last year was any indication - when Dallas won the rights to drafting Duke star Cooper Flagg after just 1.8 percent odds entering the lottery - than anything remains possible.

That rings true in this scenario, but the unpredictability will be more expected.

Says Charania: "22 teams in lottery using 2-year record (seeds 7-15, plus the four playoff first round exits in both conferences). Lottery teams would reach a minimum win total floor in each season, such as 25 wins. If a team falls short of the floor, it gets slotted to meet the floor. Top 4 drawn as part of lottery, as is currently."

While slightly more difficult to understand, teams will be assessed over a longer period whether they are more "in-need" of a high pick, and thus the best influx of rookie talent in the upcoming draft. But for teams, say, like the Brooklyn Nets, who are clearly two-plus years away from competing, what might be stopping them from still tanking, just for longer?

In Dallas' case, the return of Kyrie Irving and Dereck Lively II, along with the continued rise of Flagg and the emergence of this summer's lottery rookie, there isn't an expectation to be as bad as this year's team is.

"18 teams in a '5 by 5' lottery – bottom 5 teams have equal odds for the top pick, with lottery formed for picks 1-5. Bottom 5 teams have a floor at 10; those that fall out of top 5 get sorted in a separate drawing."

This process ensures teams like the 2024-25 Mavs don't make a miraculous rise in a full lottery, which would cause a subsequent drop of others. But, again, it does not stop teams from aiming for the bottom five during the regular season. So, the entire end-of-season tanking issue goes relatively untouched, other than the possibility of less teams taking part, depending on the makeup of their roster.

All things considered, the Mavericks shouldn't (and hopefully won't) need to worry about this in the seasons to come. You can argue that this is one of the last few years where tanking is easy because the league still has no definitive defense against it.

That's expected to change eventually, and these ideas are getting that ball rolling.

But given how the Association tends to speed-run solutions to perceived problems in this way, there likely won't be an effective result that teams can get behind, anyway. Whenever that may be.