A topic that only interests me

Since I read a lot of Bill Simmons' column I have read countless mediocre jokes about NBA teams trying to tank games in order to improve their chances in the draft lottery. The obvious prize is a chance to pick Greg Oden or Kevin Durant, assuming they leave college this year. As a newly developed NBA fan and pseudo-statistician there are two things about this that bugs me:

• It bugs me the fan in me that professional athletes can give up and still earn huge contracts. I don't mean to be naive. I know that the players can't control their coaches trying to throw games; I understand that players earn their money to draw in crowds, not necessarily win games. But the idea that teams could throw games for the chance to maybe pick a player is a complete misalignment of incentives.
• It bugs the statistician in me that the draft lottery results in a fixed percentage chance to pick 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. Here is a description of the draft lottery. What annoys me is that the worst team may only be slightly worse than the next worse team, yet they have a 25% better chance of winning the lottery. It would seem that it would be a much better system to have the chances of winning the lottery proportional to how bad the teams are. This year Memphis is pretty clearly the worst team, but you can throw a rug over Boston, Milwaukee, Charlotte, and Atlanta.
  
• My proposal: make the odds of winning the lottery proportional to the number of losses each team has. You can weight this in various ways to make it more likely for the worst team to win (i.e. proportional to the square of the number of losses, etc). Simultaneously I would fix the standings at some date before the end of the season to make intentionally tanking harder to do. Maybe fix the lottery order on the same day that the first team clinches a playoff spot. That way if you tank, you have to tank the whole season.