Are we sure the NBA needs to fix tanking?

Tanking in the NBA has run rampant. The Washington Wizards, Utah Jazz, Brooklyn Nets, Indiana Pacers and Sacramento Kings are all teams that we know are going to spend the rest of the season tanking. Meanwhile the Dallas Mavericks, Milwaukee Bucks, Chicago Bulls and Memphis Grizzlies will probably (or at least should) join in on the fun at some point, if they haven’t already. 30% of the league could spend the last month and a half of the season actively trying to lose. Of course the league thinks that is a problem and is going to try and change that in the future. However, I think a lot of the tanking talk is hypocritical.

People have made a lot of fun of the Chicago Bulls, myself included, going back years now, for trying to make the Play-In Tournament every season. For being fine with mediocrity. However, we are seeing a lot of teams go in the other direction, including the Bulls, to try to lose games to get a better draft pick and people are mad at that. Getting a really high pick can reset your franchise, especially in this draft which many people consider one of the best we have seen in a while. What do we want these teams to do? Becoming really good is hard and nearly impossible to do from the middle. The way the system is set up is to become a contender you need to bottom out first so you can hopefully draft a superstar player to build around for years to come. We have seen it work in Oklahoma City in the form of a championship and the Spurs are quickly rising the ranks. Yes, lottery luck is imperative but you are more likely to get lucky in the lottery the closer you get to the bottom of the league, even if these new lottery odds have changed that. You also rarely hear fans of the teams who are actually tanking complain about their team tanking.

Let’s take this conversation to a different sport. I root for the New York Giants and in each of the past 2 seasons, the Giants have entered week 17 with the inside track to the first pick in the draft. In both of those instances, they won and didn’t get the first pick. Football doesn’t even have a lottery so there is even less reason for teams to not tank. Yet, the Giants won week 17 in each of the past 2 seasons and won the last game of the season this year as well. I promise you, I was not happy with those results. You don’t think they would be better off with the first pick in the draft versus the results they got, which is picking 5th this year? These teams in the NBA are doing what they should be doing, trying to get as high of a draft pick as they possibly can.

In 2019, the NBA introduced new lottery odds to reduce tanking. If you have the worst record in the NBA, your odds of getting the first pick have gone way down, from 25% to 14%. It creates a lot more drama on lottery night, which is a lot of fun, but the new odds have not limited tanking. In fact, you could make the argument that they encourage teams to throw in the towel late in the season. Since the flattening of the lottery odds, no team with the worst record in the NBA that season has won the lottery. In the last 2 seasons, teams that participated in the Play-In Tournament have won the lottery. The league has made it so tanking the whole season matters less but tanking at the end of the season matters more. Just getting into the lottery gives you a chance, just ask the Dallas Mavericks, who walked away with Cooper Flagg after having a 1.8% chance of getting him.

Changes are coming, there is way too much smoke going on around tanking for the league to not do anything. Adam Silver himself has talked about tanking. Getting rid of the draft is a bad idea. There are too many unintended consequences from that. You could end up creating dynasties that can’t be beat because players just keep going to the defending champions and the league also wants parody. There are a lot of ideas people have to try and get rid of tanking and while I am not sure what the league will do, they will do something in the coming years.

There are always going to be bad teams and those teams are going to have bad records. You are never going to have a league where every team can make the playoffs. That is not how sports work. We need to give a pathway for those teams to get better and the draft is that. Sure, teams tank at the end of seasons to get a higher pick and sure a lot of those teams are bad by design but take the Kings for example. They didn’t want to be this bad but they are and the first pick in the draft would change that franchise for the better (Lord knows they need it). I think there are a lot of potential unintended consequences when we try and find solutions for some things that may just always exist anyways. Yes, the NBA has a tanking problem. For the best interest of 30% of your league to be to lose games is not a good thing but every American sport has that issue and changing it could lead to bigger problems.