The NBA Draft lottery is designed to promote competitive balance by awarding better draft positions to weaker teams, but it creates incentives to deliberately lose, a practice known as tanking. We propose a draft mechanism that is simultaneously practical, incentive-compatible, and advantages weaker teams. The \textbf{Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA) Draft Mechanism} represents a paradigm shift in evaluating team quality, replacing a single season's standings with playoff outcomes over multiple years. COLA uses a draft lottery where every non-playoff team receives the same number of lottery tickets, removing incentives to lose additional games after elimination. Lottery tickets that do not win a top draft pick carry over to future lotteries, while playoff success or winning a top pick diminishes a team's accumulated tickets. Over time, COLA rewards teams with poor long-term performance and less prior draft assistance. By retaining the lottery format, COLA preserves transparency and fan engagement. Real-world implementation challenges are addressed to demonstrate feasibility, including transitioning from the current system, handling traded draft picks, and accommodating draft classes of varying strength. The most significant challenge occurs in years with exceptionally strong draft classes, where teams may prefer missing the playoffs in order to gain lottery access, violating a foundational assumption: that teams prefer playoff success to lottery participation. We provide a solution to this problem, employing a truth-elicitation mechanism to identify such years and expand lottery eligibility to include as many playoff teams as necessary to preserve anti-tanking incentives.

翻译：NBA选秀抽签机制旨在通过给予较弱球队更好的选秀顺位来促进竞争平衡，但这却催生了故意输球的动机，即所谓的“摆烂”行为。我们提出了一种兼具实用性、激励相容性且有利于弱队的选秀机制。**结转彩票分配（COLA）选秀机制**代表了评估球队质量范式的转变，它用多年季后赛成绩取代了单一赛季的排名。在COLA机制下，所有未进入季后赛的球队获得相同数量的彩票，从而消除了球队在确定无缘季后赛后继续输掉更多比赛的动机。未赢得高顺位选秀权的彩票将结转至未来的抽签，而季后赛的成功或赢得高顺位选秀权则会减少球队累积的彩票数量。随着时间的推移，COLA会奖励那些长期表现不佳且先前获得选秀援助较少的球队。通过保留抽签形式，COLA保持了透明度和球迷参与度。本文探讨了实际实施中的挑战以证明其可行性，包括从现行系统的过渡、处理交易过的选秀权以及适应不同实力水平的选秀年份。最重大的挑战出现在选秀人才异常突出的年份，此时球队可能更倾向于放弃季后赛以获取参与抽签的机会，这违背了一个基本假设：即球队更看重季后赛成功而非参与抽签。我们针对此问题提出了一种解决方案，采用真相诱导机制来识别此类特殊年份，并酌情将抽签资格扩展至足够多的季后赛球队，以维持反摆烂的激励。