There has to be some other way so that non-playoff teams still have an incentive to win.  Maybe they can make it so the best non-playoffs teams get a slight increase in the salary cap in the following year.  It would be just a little incentive to keep teams playing for something.  Just an idea

And when the the odds didn't change that much, win or lose, there wasn't (statistically speaking, and yes, people have actually crunched the numbers) as much tanking as there was before.  But the really bad teams didn't think it was fair when a team that just barely missed the playoffs won the lottery, like when New York got Ewing and we got Mullin.  

So they weighted the lottery slightly and rewarded tanking, but not that much. This didn't please people though as the worst teams still didn't necessarily get the best pick.  And better teams could pick high in successive years with more regularity.  The strongest call against the low-weighted lottery (e.g. best team in lottery gets one chance, worst gets 14) came after Orlando won in back-to-back years.  The NBA didn't want this to happen again for some reason.  

So the NBA adopted a more skewed weighting system where the worst team had a 25% shot at the best pick, about double what it was in the previous minor weighted lottery.   This rewarded tanking more than before, but not as much as when there was not a lottery.  But it does reward it and there's clear evidence that it happens.  I doubt that a coach would deliberately throw games, but they'd definitely play guys who weren't that good with the "we have to see what we have" excuse, knowing very well that they've seen them not play well in practice and odds that these guys will suddenly play better in real games is low, low, low.  

So now tanking's seen as the problem and there's talk of modifying the lottery to not reward it.  

There's only one solution that I can see that minimizes the incentive to tank and gives really bad teams the competitive advantage to get higher picks which hopefully give them a shot at improving.  That's to weight the lottery, but not based on record of non-playoff teams in a particular season, but by number of consecutive years out of the playoffs (with the ties broken by record perhaps).  I can't see a team tanking successive seasons to win the lottery for unidentified players years down the line.  And yeah, when the Warriors hadn't been there in more than a decade, it would have been fairer than successive #9 picks destined to keep us picking #9.  It would have been fairer than seeing San Antonio luck into the #1 to get Duncan because Robinson had been hurt for a season, essentially winning the lottery in their only entry in a decade.