Cuban says he pitched lottery-reform alternatives, but no one liked them

Of the 30 representatives on the NBA's board of governors, only two didn't vote in favor of the league's draft-lottery reform proposal last month: The Oklahoma City Thunder, who voted against it, and the Dallas Mavericks, who abstained from the vote.

Mavericks owner and NBA board member Mark Cuban says he opted not to vote because he doesn't think the reformed lottery rules - which flatten the odds of the worst teams landing the top picks - will do much to mitigate tanking.

"It's OK, but you still have the best chance of getting the best pick if you have the worst record," Cuban told ESPN's Tim MacMahon. "The hope is if you're one of the bottom three, you're going to try. Now, if you're one of the bottom three, the odds are all the same. It doesn't get any better if you get any worse, and that's OK, but you're still going to try to tank to get a chance at the best pick."

Related: Cuban admits Mavs tried to tank after being eliminated

Not sold on the NBA's proposal, Cuban pitched his own radical fix to tanking, which involved abolishing the draft entirely and replacing it with a free-agent bonus pool for signing rookies. But he couldn't get anyone else to buy in.

"The team with the worst record gets the most money and the team with the best record gets the least money," Cuban explained of his proposal. "It's like a free agency. It makes it a lot harder to tank because you don't know if you get the best players if you're horrible all the time.

"Nobody liked that at all, not a single person."

Cuban had another proposal to disincentivize tanking: Barring the team with the worst record from getting a top-two pick.

"Now all of the sudden, if it's close at the end, you're going to see teams play as hard as they can because if they end up with the worst record, they don't get the best pick," Cuban explained.

But that proposal didn't even make it to the board of governors meeting because commissioner Adam Silver dismissed it out of hand.

"Adam didn't like that. That never got to the board of directors, but that one was my favorite," Cuban said. "I brought up (the first proposal), but after that one got shot down, I didn't bring up the other one. When I got no response on the one, I just dropped the other because it was obvious that what they had proposed was going to pass."