It’s March, which means Tanking is the NBA’s subject du jour. “Can the NBA fix tanking?” has been, is, and will be the subject of many a podcast segment and column – including this one!
What I find curious about the league’s tanking issue is that this seems to be purely an NBA problem. The NFL, MLB and NHL all have essentially the same system that rewards the very worst teams with the very best picks. Yet none of those leagues are dealing with anything that comes close to the NBA’s annual existential crisis.
Maybe that’s simply because top picks matter more in the NBA than they do in those other sports.
As ESPN’s Tim Bontemps and Kevin Pelton pointed out this week, 40 of the last 45 NBA champions were led by a player taken with one of the first seven picks in the draft.
In a league that moves as star players do, being bad is the surest way to get really good.
Notice, though, that I didn’t say “really bad.” No, you can just be kinda bad – like last year’s 36-46 Atlanta Hawks – and still be rewarded in the lottery with the No. 1 pick. Despite having the 10th worst record, the Hawks still had a 3% chance of landing the No. 1 pick. It happened, and now teams like the Toronto Raptors are hoping for similar luck.
The Raptors, 24-47, have put themselves in the middle of this tanking conversation by resting their best players down the stretch of close games in an obvious attempt to pad their loss record.
A March 14 tank-off between the Raptors and Utah Jazz stands out. In a close game, the Jazz yanked star Lauri Markkanen out of the second half while the Raptors played a bunch of rookies and journeymen. As ESPN put it, “Instead of a matchup between All-Star forwards Markkanen and Scottie Barnes, fans watched a fourth quarter filled with rookies and reserves from both teams.”
When we talk about tanking, this is what people are talking about. Nobody cares that the Washington Wizards and Charlotte Hornets are bad. Those organizations are at a clear step in the NBA life cycle. They were expected to be bad and duly are. The NFL has bad teams, too. Every league does.
The problem that the league has is when a team like the Raptors deprives its fans of seeing its best players in the most exciting moments of the season. Or when the Philadelphia 76ers shut down Tyrese Maxey because the pick they owe the Oklahoma City Thunder is top-six protected.
It’s not fair to fans who tune into these games or even buy tickets to be given a worse product. And it’s embarrassing for the NBA, no matter what these teams tell themselves.
Jazz coach Will Hardy told reporters recently, “For our team, it's been a point of pride that I don't care who's on the court, I want our fans to know that our team is going to play with a ton of passion and joy."
What?!
Imagine buying tickets to see Sabrina Carpenter, only for her to get pulled at the last minute, then being told that the backup dancers tried really hard.
When we talk about the NBA’s tanking issue, what we’re really talking about is their inability to keep their global and local stars on the court. For a league that has openly marketed itself as a Star League, this is a problem.
(It also doesn’t help that we’re in the portion of the calendar when good teams are taking their foot off the gas. Tune into any nationally televised TNT or ESPN game around this time and you’re almost guaranteed to miss a star player or two.)
The NBA can’t eliminate the pool of bad teams playing bad basketball, but they can reduce it.
So, finally, here’s my fix.
Get rid of the lottery.
Teams with the worst records get the best picks. That’s it. That’s the order.
You’d still have the Wizards, Jazz and Hornets – teams at the natural rebuilding point of their life cycle. You’d also still have your Pelicans – teams whose seasons were unfortunately derailed by injuries. Those teams exist in every sport.
But ask: If there was no lottery, what would teams like the Raptors, Spurs and Trail Blazers be doing now?
Right now, they are still incentivized to lose so that they can increase their odds at getting a top pick despite the fact that they are 10 to 20 wins better than the Wizards. In the current lottery format, there is a meaningful difference between having the league’s eighth-worst record and 11th-worst record. So these teams are spending March and April racing to the bottom.
(Flattening the odds is not the solution either. That just incentivizes teams outside the lottery to jump in. Imagine if the feel-good Detroit Pistons had to decide between an equal chance at landing Cooper Flagg vs making the playoffs.)
But what if there wasn’t a lottery? Nobody would care about picking eighth vs 11th. Do you know how I know? Because no other league cares. It’s impossible in March to know how the draft board is going to break in June.
The Raptors would probably decide that two months of late-game reps for Barnes are more important than moving up one spot in the draft.
The obvious critique of the no-lottery solution is something like: Well, if you do that, you’re just incentivizing these teams to be bad all season as opposed to just a couple of months.
To that I say: Bet.
Are the Raptors really going to bench their 23-year-old All-Star for the whole season? Were the San Antonio Spurs going to just not play Victor Wembanyama?
Not many owners are willing to risk all of that gate revenue and local fan support. Go against the owner, and every coach or general manager in that situation would be fired.
The Wizards are bad because they’re bad. There’s nothing artificial about it. Everybody got what they expected to get. The problem is when good teams turn bad with an eye toward a ping-pong ball. That’s when fans get something other than what they paid for – monetarily or emotionally. That’s what embarrasses – and should embarrass – the league.
Get rid of the lottery. Let the real bad teams be bad, and let the other teams find something else to play for.