An idea was floated a few years ago I liked when compared to the lottery. An NBA Draft Wheel. Every team would know exactly where it was picking for the next 30 years. You were guaranteed a top 6 pick every 5 years and at least top 12 every 4 years. Done. No more tanking. No more pick protections.
Could it suck? Sure. Certainty is a lot better than continuous bad luck some teams have with the lottery. Tanking would be eliminated. I think it could have merit. Not sure where the idea went since first being "leaked". No doubt to gauge interest.
"The Wheel" is a terrible idea, and if I recall correctly the NBA owners did discuss it and shoot it down. One of the problems with The Wheel is that adopting it locks the league in to a 30-year experiment. Let's say the Kings, knowing our luck, turn out to be the 16th team to get the number 1 pick when the order is determined. Then, 15 years into The Wheel, the league decides it's a bad idea after all. And lo and behold, the Kings went through half the wheel and then never get their #1 pick anyway! Awful.
The other problem with the wheel is that while it addresses "tanking", it does NOT address league competitive balance. The reason the NBA has a draft in the first place (its technical name is something like "Competitive Balance First-Year Player Draft") is exactly to distribute the best young players to the worst teams. Places like L.A. will never have difficulty attracting top free agents. Places like Sacramento always will have difficulty. The whole point of the draft is to try to balance that out, so we don't have teams like Sacramento and Minnesota and Milwaukee, etc., going 18-64 every single year for the duration of the franchise.
People get very caught up in their distaste of tanking, and they forget or don't realize that keeping all the superstars from gathering on the Lakers/Knicks etc. is more important - MUCH more important, in fact - than preventing bad teams from jockeying for position in the late portion of the season (or, hey, in the case of Hinkie's "Process", all season long). One problem is that many of the suggestions to curb tanking do a worse job of ensuring that truly bad teams get good draft picks than the current system.
My take on the issue is twofold. 1) Competitive balance is way way way way way more important than stopping tanking. I will live with tanking, to the degree that it happens, to retain a draft system (lottery or no) that better addresses competitive balance issues. 2) I doubt in all sincerity that an objective system (based on record, or wins after elimination, or anything like that) can be devised which a competent "tanking" GM will not find a way to exploit. Show me the rules, and I'll show you a "tanky" "cheaty" way to get my team the best odds. The only way to avoid this is to force teams to WIN to get good draft picks, which completely blows the whole purpose of the draft out of the water, because now it's BETTER teams that get good picks.
If we really DO want to tackle tanking, I think there may be a solution, and it's only a bit outside of the box. The solution could be to remove objective reference to team win/loss record completely. Instead, create some sort of subjective vote among all 30 team front offices. Teams vote for which teams get the best picks (obviously you can't vote for your own team - though even if you could it would all come out in the wash because every team would vote themselves first). That way, regardless of what a team's record is, the front offices across the league would take a close look at each organization and decide which team is "safest" to give the #1 pick to. Sacramento and Minnesota might end up tied at the end of the year in record, but presumably a lot of GMs would look at Towns+Wiggins and decide that they'd much rather slot Sacramento into the draft ahead of Minnesota. This would, at the very least, not incentivize tanking, because the other front offices in the league should know the approximate strength of your team no matter how hard you tank (or if, say, David Robinson is hurt for the year).
The one problem I can see with the above "voting" approach is that of traded picks. What happens with, say, the Nets' pick this year? Obviously the Nets are so bad they do deserve the #1 pick, but everybody knows it's going to Boston. And that would totally affect a subjective vote. If the Nets were keeping it, sure, they'd get #1 or close to it. But no front office is going to want to gift Boston with a #1 pick with the team they've put together right now. I suppose the argument could be made that once such a system were established, trades for future draft picks could be made with the system in mind. A terrible team like the Nets could trade for a first-rounder from the Cavaliers - the Cavaliers aren't giving up much (they would normally pick in the late 20s) but the Nets might end up getting a very good pick out of it. And obviously a team that acquired, say, 5 first-round picks would end up getting pushed back a bit, even if they were bad. Nobody would want to give them five great picks, so instead maybe they get a good pick or two and a bunch of middling picks. Obviously it would be unfair to apply such a rule to picks that were already traded, but if such a system were being implemented, you could say "All right, starting in 2021 these are the new rules. Do as you will." Teams that thought they were going to be bad would be in the market to get draft picks any way, from anybody, and teams that thought they were going to be good would have no more incentive to hold on to their picks than they do now, and less incentive to ask other teams for picks in trade.
Anyway, that's the way I think it should be done - eliminate tanking while preserving competitive balance. And a system like that voting system seems to me to do a better job of both goals than any other.