The argument for Tanking: Why it works, and you just don't remember

[dougthonus]

The following players have lead their team to 15 of the last 30 titles: Lebron James, Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan.

I think part of the allure of tanking is that all time great players (like top 10) have won most of the titles. Having one is pretty much the best way to build a contender. I get it.

Look at the odds though. Just how long do you have to tank in order to get one of these guys? I wouldn't be surprised if you would have to tank for 100 years on average to land one of these people because even if you have the worst record in a year when one of them is coming out, you only have a 14% chance of getting him. That's not a plan. As others have said, its pure luck.

If you want an actual plan, the goal would be to build up a quality organization with the ability to sign or trade for a second tier superstar (Kawhi, Butler, Davis, etc.) when they come available.

Just as a general note: The new lottery odds have effectively discouraged tanking but the result is that they have made success more random. NOP is a fantastic example. They got Zion with the 7th worst record I believe. The Bulls got Rose with the 9th worst. This type of thing is going to happen a lot going forward where a not-so-bad team adds an elite player.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but I think it oversimplifies things.

To trade for a superstar, you pretty much need that player to want to play for you. In order to do that, you typically need a desirable city and another superstar with you already. How do you already have a desirable superstar? Typically, the draft. Probably half the cities are almost completely excluded from attempting this anyway. Unless the opportunity is overwhelming a lot of teams have no chance of doing this just due to desirability of location. Bulls are fortunate to not be one of those teams. We're probably (all other things equal) somewhere between 5th and 8th most desirable market.

I agree the lottery odds make purposefully being bad for an extended period of time somewhat a fools errand. If you are going to do that, you need to go all in Philly, Boston, or OKC style. Add tons of extra picks when you strip things down, and then build up as best you can after that. The goal is to bottom out once, in a really good draft year, have lots of extra picks, use them, hope that core builds into the team good enough to attract a star, and if not, try again in a few years IMO.

Like right now, the Bulls couldn't practically implement your plan. Yes, we could maybe put together a package where we trade 3 future 1sts and LaVine and some other junk for Harden whom will refuse to sign an extension and leave in 2 years, but then what? The only way you can implement the trade for the star plan is if a star just wants to be in your market or if you already have a great team (likely built through the draft).

The reason the draft is important is draft picks are win/tie assets. A guy is either a value contract and a good player for the price or on a deal small enough that it doesn't prevent you from doing anything. FA is generally lose/tie assets. The guy is typically signed to the most anyone will pay for him, which means his contract is set at the most optimistic value, and then if he performs that well, you get market value performance, and if he doesn't you lose. The exception is superstar contracts obviously.

So when building a team, if you can get a superstar and have control for any length of time, you should probably do it. If you can't, then building through the draft is more likely to be successful than building through FA. Granted, building through the draft shouldn't necessarily mean stripping down to nothing every year. If you are going to strip down, you need a ton of extra assets and then need to immediately start building again.

Effectively, this is what the Bulls attempted to do with Lauri, LaVine, and Dunn. It just didn't work.

[Ice Man]

But he also would never have gone back there had Cleveland not been awful and capable of using that awfulness to draft Kyrie and trade for Love. No tank, no LeBron.

Cleveland was a .500 team after the Love trade and before LeBron came. It happened to get there by being a big loser, but Miami 2019, Brooklyn 2018, and numerous other teams that attracted FAs became .500 through different approaches. The item of greatest importance for Cleveland was not that it tanked, but rather that LeBron was from Akron.

[cjbulls]

^^^ I don't see how one can argue that trading one or 2 vets off the Bulls, aquiring an extra pick, and at least getting into the lottery, preferabby one of the better odd slots doesn't have a chance to work. As opposed to say, making the low rung of the playoffs and signing some or one of the meh free agents on the market.

You know this was the argument for trading up for wiseman? Move WCJ and whatever other vets, get a true high ceiling player and be coincidentally worse in the short term to draft again next year. Most thought giving up some of these young guys was too high of a price.

I wouldn’t call that tanking though. I’d call that roster maximization. Some people have seem to have different definitions.

[fleet]

^^^ I don't see how one can argue that trading one or 2 vets off the Bulls, aquiring an extra pick, and at least getting into the lottery, preferabby one of the better odd slots doesn't have a chance to work. As opposed to say, making the low rung of the playoffs and signing some or one of the meh free agents on the market.

It feels good but when its put into practice, it becomes a treadmill.

Step 1: Draft a player at #4
Step 2: Set up the team to lose
Step 3: Watch the team lose and then when the player is up for an extension, don't do it because the guy has never won and then either watch him leave for nothing or pennies on the dollar
Step 4: Draft another player at #4

Just as a general note, a team can only really develop 3 or 4 guys at once. When you put 6 or 7 guys on their rookie deals together, they start screwing with each other's development. Basic fundamental things fall apart and there is no one to keep things functioning well enough to learn. Massive numbers of picks and young players is a videogame philosophy that doesn't work in the real world.

Could happen. Probably will happen. But Giannis just proved one thing, the new max rules give teams in non-destination cities a fighting chanceto keep drafted franchise talent. And Chicago isn't as bad as Milwakee. And, whoever you traded for is leaving under the same duress in the alternative. You also don't have to sit around with all young kids if you don't want to if you were lucky enough to draft well on a bellcow. My overall thesis is, nothing works as much as anything else. There are no solid plans. But the draft is a possible wellspring for unusual success, as Duck said about which I agree to. It's fine to point out flaws in one plan, but everyone should remember that there are no better ideas than other ideas in terms of becoming finals teams. Detroit model? That's as rare as anything.

[DuckIII]

^^^ I don't see how one can argue that trading one or 2 vets off the Bulls, aquiring an extra pick, and at least getting into the lottery, preferabby one of the better odd slots doesn't have a chance to work. As opposed to say, making the low rung of the playoffs and signing some or one of the meh free agents on the market.

It feels good but when its put into practice, it becomes a treadmill.

Step 1: Draft a player at #4
Step 2: Set up the team to lose
Step 3: Watch the team lose and then when the player is up for an extension, don't do it because the guy has never won and then either watch him leave for nothing or pennies on the dollar
Step 4: Draft another player at #4

Just as a general note, a team can only really develop 3 or 4 guys at once. When you put 6 or 7 guys on their rookie deals together, they start screwing with each other's development. Basic fundamental things fall apart and there is no one to keep things functioning well enough to learn. Massive numbers of picks and young players is a videogame philosophy that doesn't work in the real world.

Nobody cares about trying to develop 7 guys on rookie deals or to even use all of the picks on rookies. They are assets. And your chronology of events can happen, but also can happen differently. Specifically, that the guy you draft a #4 shows he’s a legitimate franchise piece that you don’t trade away and instead try to build up a team around. Happens all the time. Just because it also doesn’t happen that way does not mean it’s an unwise strategy.

It all depends heavily on the circumstances.

[coldfish]

Again, as I noted in the OP, I think the majority of the world would consider tanking to be losing purposefully in the short term for a better long term outlook. If you don’t agree with that definition, then that’s fine, but many do.

First, great thread. Really good way to approach tanking as a topic. Second, I basically agree with you. In fact, depending on how one defines tanking, there is no logical argument against it. Anyone who says a FO should just do what it can to maximize wins every year and things will just work out, I suspect is really at heart just an impatient fan who is more concerned about how entertained they are during the act of watching individual games than they are about the long term big picture. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with having different priorities and ways of valuing your fan experience. But don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

But where I might disagree with you is that “losing purposefully” is a wide spectrum. If the entire spectrum is “tanking” then the conversation becomes a lot more complicated because there are extremes that I do consider counterproductive and unwise. There are also also timing and context considerations.

But, as a general matter, yes making your team worse on purpose is still one of the smart, logical paths to team building. The notion that it is now obsolete is nonsense in my opinion.

Well, that's a wee bit insulting. [sarcasm]I suspect that those that are pro tanking are just video game children who dream of the next Michael Jordan raining the city with championships instead of being willing to do the hard work of building a quality team.[/sarcasm]

The logical argument against tanking can be found in the Lauri Markkanen thread. Lauri was a highly regarded lottery prospect. He was surrounded with a bunch of young guys who didn't know how to play and a coach who didn't know how to teach. The end result is that we really don't know what we have in Lauri and are either going to have to wildly overpay him based on potential, trade him for peanuts or just let him walk.

The people who show how good players like Lauri can or can't be are the players like Thad, Otto and Sato. The vets who will end up winning you a few more games and hurt your draft position. If this system had been in place since Lauri's rookie year, I suspect he would have a ton more value.

Personally, I think that developing Lauri, Lavine, Wendell, Coby and PW by playing the right way has more value than changing from the 4th worst record to the 7th worst record. When you actually look at draft results over time with hindsight, the value isn't as much as people seem to think. People seem to think that the difference is going to get them Luka Doncic or Michael Jordan. While its certainly possible, it usually gets you Marvin Bagley.

Throwing Lauri, Lavine, Wendell, Coby and PW under the bus just so you can draft Bagley instead of Wendell isn't going to build you a title competitor.

[fleet]

^^^ I don't see how one can argue that trading one or 2 vets off the Bulls, aquiring an extra pick, and at least getting into the lottery, preferabby one of the better odd slots doesn't have a chance to work. As opposed to say, making the low rung of the playoffs and signing some or one of the meh free agents on the market.

You know this was the argument for trading up for wiseman? Move WCJ and whatever other vets, get a true high ceiling player and be coincidentally worse in the short term to draft again next year. Most thought giving up some of these young guys was too high of a price.

I wouldn’t call that tanking though. I’d call that roster maximization. Some people have seem to have different definitions.

derailing aside, you can say you want to trade for anybody you want. It takes 2 teams and willingness from 2 teams, and equitable terms. Fact is, nobody traded up for Wiseman. The Bulls are not alone. In fact there were zero draft trades,up or down. Fans can put whatever they want through trade checkers with whatever rumor they like. The real world is on the phones.

[DuckIII]

But he also would never have gone back there had Cleveland not been awful and capable of using that awfulness to draft Kyrie and trade for Love. No tank, no LeBron.

Cleveland was a .500 team after the Love trade and before LeBron came. It happened to get there by being a big loser, but Miami 2019, Brooklyn 2018, and numerous other teams that attracted FAs became .500 through different approaches. The item of greatest importance for Cleveland was not that it tanked, but rather that LeBron was from Akron.

It didn’t “happen to get there” like it was some kind of accident. They got bad on purpose which resulted in the assets needed to attract LeBron’s return.

As for the other examples, of course. I’m not the one out here selling that multiple approaches don’t or can’t work. There are a wide variety of zigs and zags to team building and the choice to zig or zag depends on context.

[cjbulls]

So when building a team, if you can get a superstar and have control for any length of time, you should probably do it. If you can't, then building through the draft is more likely to be successful than building through FA. Granted, building through the draft shouldn't necessarily mean stripping down to nothing every year. If you are going to strip down, you need a ton of extra assets and then need to immediately start building again.

Effectively, this is what the Bulls attempted to do with Lauri, LaVine, and Dunn. It just didn't work.

But without stripping down you eventually start winning. And if you are stripping down constantly you lose your fan base and fan interest, and likely lose value in the deals.

Should the Bulls move on from all their young assets at this point? If they don’t they will start winning soon. What are you getting back in value for all of the Bulls young guys? It appears not very much, at least if your goal is to get more draft picks.

Zach is the only one with real value, because he’s actually ready to help teams now unlike the young guys still on their rookie deal.

[Bulls69]

All your choices are nonsense.

Teams that tank badly lose in the end. Lebron came back. If he did not they fail.


Ellis was more about him and Klay.

Build a winning culture. You can tank for a decade. It is a lazy man's approach.

I agreed The Bulls had numerous lottery picks over the last several years and they are stuck in the mud. Garr/Pax failed the Bulls with poor picks I have more confidence with AK guiding the Ship.

[cjbulls]

^^^ I don't see how one can argue that trading one or 2 vets off the Bulls, aquiring an extra pick, and at least getting into the lottery, preferabby one of the better odd slots doesn't have a chance to work. As opposed to say, making the low rung of the playoffs and signing some or one of the meh free agents on the market.

You know this was the argument for trading up for wiseman? Move WCJ and whatever other vets, get a true high ceiling player and be coincidentally worse in the short term to draft again next year. Most thought giving up some of these young guys was too high of a price.

I wouldn’t call that tanking though. I’d call that roster maximization. Some people have seem to have different definitions.

derailing aside, you can say you want to trade for anybody you want. It takes 2 teams and willingness from 2 teams, and equitable terms. Fact is, nobody traded up for Wiseman. The Bulls are not alone. In fact there were zero draft trades,up or down. Fans can put whatever they want through trade checkers with whatever rumor they like. The real world is on the phones.

And now we’re stuck with another (apparent) middling “raw” prospect that people will be wary to re-sign in a few years when people like yourself want to see tank 4.0 or whatever number it would be.

Unless, that is, the Bulls try to win, continue adding vets around the young guys and allow us to see who PW can be. These all youth tanking teams likely stunt development and mask potential. Now we are stuck with guessing what Lauri and Zach would look like on a real team as their contracts come up and the Bulls need to decide what direction to head.

Hence, the problem with tanking.

[fleet]

Get a good GM,and do whatever. Anything, any idea you want, it doesn't matter. God bless. That's my plan, a smart GM. That's the basic extent of my plan too

[cjbulls]

All your choices are nonsense.

Teams that tank badly lose in the end. Lebron came back. If he did not they fail.


Ellis was more about him and Klay.

Build a winning culture. You can tank for a decade. It is a lazy man's approach.

I agreed The Bulls had numerous lottery picks over the last several years and they are stuck in the mud. Garr/Pax failed the Bulls with poor picks I have more confidence with AK guiding the Ship.

I know GarPax sucks and all, but I was just thinking they actually remained a good drafting team in the sense that none of their picks busted. I suppose WCJ may be heading in that direction but I doubt it. And you could count Dunn as a bust if trades count. But all of their picks are nba caliber guys with long careers relative to their draft slot. In other words, if you did a redraft every year, the Bulls player would be slotted around, if not better than, where they were actually picked.

They just were bad at ever hitting on a great player. That’s still fireable, but interesting to me because they didn’t actually fail on any one pick. The lesson should be high ceiling I suppose, because a bunch of average picks can’t overcome any one great pick.

[ATRAIN53]

We just saw the Eagles do it it Sunday night in a prime time NFL game and people are killing the Jets for winning last week. It was ugly and will start the dialogue on NFL taking and they will probably reform the lottery like the NBA to stop teams from doing it.

That Jets game was a great example of how the media and fans say TANK but you've got pro athelets that don't want to lose so they won't just go out there and lose. They don't care who is on the roster next year, they are playing for their jobs.

So that is one aspect of why tanking sucks - current players have to suffer and they don't want to.


The other side of this is you have to nail the pick. The list of franchises since Kareem was drafted that won title with top draft picks they earned (thru tanking or just sucking) is very short.

Kareem
Walton
Magic/Worthy
Hakeem
Robinson/Duncan
Lebron/Kyrie

MJ wasn't even a top pick, we've had 2 #1 picks that won squat and moved on. We traded Brand who was an automatic double double looking for a more transcendent talent in the draft. Brand went on to win the lowly Clippers first playoff series ever. Turns out he was pretty good, maybe not transcendent but better than anything we picked until Rose.

What works is not just drafting players that have great potential-

It's drafting player who have great WORK ETHIC and then being patient and giving them 3-5 years to figure it out.

This is exactly where we're at with Markkannen. He's not great but he will continure to improve because you can see the kid works. Unfortunaltely he's injury prone like Dunn which ends up killing the plan. Imagine if those 2 were healthy and balling out now, we'd be a playoff team for sure.

We have Zach and Coby. They are talented scorers who you build around.

I do belive Zach played the company line and did participate in the Bulls attempts at tanking the last couple of years. He didn't whine about it or expose them either. That shows how special he is to the team and why you keep him and incldue him in discussions on building the roster.

[fleet]

You know this was the argument for trading up for wiseman? Move WCJ and whatever other vets, get a true high ceiling player and be coincidentally worse in the short term to draft again next year. Most thought giving up some of these young guys was too high of a price.

I wouldn’t call that tanking though. I’d call that roster maximization. Some people have seem to have different definitions.

derailing aside, you can say you want to trade for anybody you want. It takes 2 teams and willingness from 2 teams, and equitable terms. Fact is, nobody traded up for Wiseman. The Bulls are not alone. In fact there were zero draft trades,up or down. Fans can put whatever they want through trade checkers with whatever rumor they like. The real world is on the phones.

And now we’re stuck with another (apparent) middling “raw” prospect that people will be wary to re-sign in a few years when people like yourself want to see tank 4.0 or whatever number it would be.

I'm good with it if so. We'll both have the same amount of rings at that point.

Unless, that is, the Bulls try to win, continue adding vets around the young guys and allow us to see who PW can be. These all youth tanking teams likely stunt development and mask potential. Now we are stuck with guessing what Lauri and Zach would look like on a real team as their contracts come up and the Bulls need to decide what direction to head.

Hence, the problem with tanking.

Nobody said anything about all youth. Not me anyway. I mentioned 2021 draft. I want in the lottery, and hopefully another 1st rounder somehow. All other scenarios past that are fanciful. One step at a time brother.

[dougthonus]

But without stripping down you eventually start winning. And if you are stripping down constantly you lose your fan base and fan interest, and likely lose value in the deals.

Well if you are winning, then you can keep building. The problem is most assets decline in value. Their contracts become more and more expensive relative to their ability, and so it becomes difficult to continue building and you peak out somewhere and have no ability to continue to improve.

Based on where you are when that happens you might take different actions. If you're a 55 win team, you probably make more and more desperate moves of trading future assets to try and move forward. If you are a 40 win team, you probably should strip down and start over.

Should the Bulls move on from all their young assets at this point? If they don’t they will start winning soon. What are you getting back in value for all of the Bulls young guys? It appears not very much, at least if your goal is to get more draft picks.

They also appear to not be going anywhere with these guys either. We'll let time play itself out and perhaps we'll see some significant growth as the coaching staff has more time with the players, but on their current trajectory, this team doesn't project to ever be above .500 with this core group does it?

Zach is the only one with real value, because he’s actually ready to help teams now unlike the young guys still on their rookie deal.

Otto, Thad, Sato, and Zach could all help a team now. Wouldn't surprise me if at the deadline you could move one of Thad, Sato, or Otto for late 1sts to contending teams depending on the situation.

[MGB8]

^^^ I don't see how one can argue that trading one or 2 vets off the Bulls, aquiring an extra pick, and at least getting into the lottery, preferabby one of the better odd slots doesn't have a chance to work. As opposed to say, making the low rung of the playoffs and signing some or one of the meh free agents on the market.

It feels good but when its put into practice, it becomes a treadmill.

Step 1: Draft a player at #4
Step 2: Set up the team to lose
Step 3: Watch the team lose and then when the player is up for an extension, don't do it because the guy has never won and then either watch him leave for nothing or pennies on the dollar
Step 4: Draft another player at #4

Just as a general note, a team can only really develop 3 or 4 guys at once. When you put 6 or 7 guys on their rookie deals together, they start screwing with each other's development. Basic fundamental things fall apart and there is no one to keep things functioning well enough to learn. Massive numbers of picks and young players is a videogame philosophy that doesn't work in the real world.

Could happen. Probably will happen. But Giannis just proved one thing, the new max rules give teams in non-destination cities a fighting chanceto keep drafted franchise talent. And Chicago isn't as bad as Milwakee. And, whoever you traded for is leaving under the same duress in the alternative. You also don't have to sit around with all young kids if you don't want to if you were lucky enough to draft well on a bellcow. My overall thesis is, nothing works as much as anything else. There are no solid plans. But the draft is a possible wellspring for unusual success, as Duck said about which I agree to. It's fine to point out flaws in one plan, but everyone should remember that there are no better ideas than other ideas in terms of becoming finals teams. Detroit model? That's as rare as anything.

"Tanking" as most people define it is being purposefully bad enough to have a reasonable shot at a superstar in the draft - meaning a top 3 or top 4 pick - repeatedly. The issue is exactly what was discussed above - that the scenario Cold layed out "probably will happen."

Most really bad teams - bad enough to pick top 3/top 4 repeatedly, don't actually become contenders. The recent exceptions have been the Cavs, the Thunder (for about 3 years), and the Sixers. Of those three, only the Cavs having won (one) ring (because Lebron and Akron, not really because of Anthony Bennett and Tristan Thompson, though Wiggins netted Love). Only one of those teams remains a (possible) contender - the Sixers. And that tanking happened before the lotto odds were made worse.

Meanwhile, outside of drafting the rare "Lebron's" of the world, most teams get to contention level by smart drafting/trades or big signings, not tanking.

* Toronto (FA-or-trade for Lowry, swap Ross for Ibaka, late pick gold in Siakam, late pick silver in FVV, then the big trade for Leonard and Danny Green plus other trade for Gasol).
* Last year's Miami team (trade for Jimmy, gold mid-round-draft pick in Bam, FA Dragic, gold-UFA Dunn and Robinson, silver mid-round-draft-pick in Herro, FA Olynyk, trade for Crowder).
* Detroit's grime years (drafting Wallace and Prince, bringing in Sheed, Rip and not-yet-blossomed Billups).
* Dallas brining in Kidd, Chandler and older-Marion to surround Dirk. Boston's big 3.
* Building Golden State with a #7 (Curry), a #11 (Klay), a #7 (Barnes), a #35 (Draymond), FA Livingston and I think a trade for Iggy. The Warriors weren't purposefully bad to maximize lotto odds.
* Lakers with mid-round-pick Kobe and then FA in Shaq and trade for Pau.
* The Bucks with gold-mid-round-pick Giannis, FA or trade 2nd round gem Kris Middleton, FA Brook Lopez, etc.
* Houston getting Harden for Kevin Martin, Jeremy Lamb, and a couple of future picks...

Of course you can also just be a destination location for big FAs, a la Miami with Lebron or the Lakers with Lebron...

But remember that Brooklyn only attracted Kyrie and Durant (as a package) because Brooklyn started winning enough to make them a non-laughingstock.

[DuckIII]

The logical argument against tanking can be found in the Lauri Markkanen thread. Lauri was a highly regarded lottery prospect. He was surrounded with a bunch of young guys who didn't know how to play and a coach who didn't know how to teach. The end result is that we really don't know what we have in Lauri and are either going to have to wildly overpay him based on potential, trade him for peanuts or just let him walk.

That’s not a logical argument against tanking being a legitimate team building strategy based on real world circumstances. It’s simply an example of it not working. Everyone already agrees that it’s unlikely to work. Just like every other team building strategy intended to build a contender.

We can all make lists of hundreds of examples of types of strategies failing. Doesn’t mean the strategy itself should be universally discarded.

[dougthonus]

But he also would never have gone back there had Cleveland not been awful and capable of using that awfulness to draft Kyrie and trade for Love. No tank, no LeBron.

Cleveland was a .500 team after the Love trade and before LeBron came. It happened to get there by being a big loser

Not sure what you mean, LeBron came before the Love trade not after, and Cleveland was not a .500 team before then, they won 33 games the prior year.

but Miami 2019, Brooklyn 2018, and numerous other teams that attracted FAs became .500 through different approaches. The item of greatest importance for Cleveland was not that it tanked, but rather that LeBron was from Akron.

I agree, the key is definitely that a player wants to play where you are. LeBron wanted to win one for Cleveland. Desirability can be there for many reasons obviously, we know in general bigger markets, access to beaches, and party markets are generally desirable. This is typically on top of the idea that you need to be able to add other pieces and pay the max which are typically prerequisites unless you are the Lakers.

[Am2626]

Since the Bulls last title there have been 9 different teams to win the title. Only 1 (San Antonio), did so driven by a top 3 pick they they drafted and stayed on the team. Most teams win titles with superstars picked in the middle of the draft or was acquired through free agency or trade.

Just as a reminder, Duncan was selected in 1996. Basically, it has been 25 years since a team got a top 3 pick and won a title with him. The Bulls and Houston got their guy in 1984 so you can probably move the goalposts back further and say "since 1984, only 3 teams used a top 3 pick to win a title."

There is a reason for this. When you tank, you rip the guts out of your organization. It bleeds into the team in a way that is hard to shed. You can get a great player (Antonio Davis, Shaq, Durant, Lebron, Durant, Kawhi) but not have enough time to build around him before he bolts.

The reality is that you are far more likely to win by building a quality organization and then adding a top level player THAT SOMEONE ELSE TANKED TO DRAFT AND DEVELOP than to tank and develop one on your own.

You are forgetting LeBron with Cleveland. While he came back as a free agent I don’t see him ever signing with Cleveland if they never draft him.