Frank Dux wrote:The team I follow has a chance to win the lottery, but I would trade it to watch a respectable team. This tanking nonsense is ruining the sport. You should always play to win. I'm starting to hope that the 76ers plan blows up so it will be a cautionary tale to future gms who consider Hinkie's plan of fielding a D-League roster for years to position for top draft picks. It's not a good look for a team, the fans, and the league.
You know what, I agree with you especially on the bolded part. The problem here is the league clearly has an issue. Sports is entertainment, nothing more, but the league has been in the business of marketing stars, is involved in a sport that tends to favor stars, and has created a system that massively advantages teams with the best players by virtue of a max contract.
See, the problem here is that the argument of those both for and against Hinkie is that, for the most part, they aren't actually mutually exclusive. Hinkie and the Sixers were a symptom, not the diseason. Hinkie gets all the criticism, but the Lakers have been right there with him tanking the past 3 seasons and nobody seems to care because they throw out distractions that make people avoid admitting the obvious truth of what they're doing.
This isn't on the Sixers to fix. It's on the league to fix. And the sad thing is that the league sent in a hatchet man rather than actually looking in the mirror to fix its own rules to avoid this kind of strategy. Get rid of max contracts while maintaining the relatively strict cap with a max of 4 year contracts in place right now and tanking loses its value in a hurry, because if you draft the next Durant, you're paying him $70 million per season in 4 years time. Have max contracts and miniscule rookie scale contracts and tiny MLEs that aren't even tied to the average player salary anymore and is a drop in the bucket at this point, and you're basically forcing teams that aren't contenders to choose between tanking, or spending all their money massively overpaying what rare unrestricted free agents are out there willing to take the money from a non-contender in the hopes of not tanking, but they still might anyway.
So really, there are valid points on both sides, but blame directed at Hinkie and the Sixers is woefully misplaced and should absolutely be directed at the league itself. Publicly the league hasn't particularly been supportive of tanking, but their actions and rules clearly demonstrate that they absolutely want tanking around. They tried to change the lottery odds and all the teams that have successfully tanked in the past cried foul and rallied to keep their ability to tank. The owners held a bitter lockout quite some time ago already in order to win max contracts on star players. The NBA has been actively working to keep and restrict rookies' pay and has also limited the MLE as a tool. All of this severely restricts any means of teams to actually build their team but through the draft and encourages tanking about as much as it can be encouraged short of having the draft determined directly by order of finish.
