Tanking: the process of purposefully losing games for better draft position, is at an all-time high in the NBA and it seems that an alarming amount of teams are purposefully putting their worst product out on the court every game.
This is a problem for the business side of the NBA. Fans do not want to buy tickets to watch a team that is purposefully trying to lose, and TV networks don’t want to air games nobody is going to tune into.
Ideas have been thrown out to fix this tanking epidemic and NBA commissioner Adam Silver even warned teams that new rules regarding the draft and tanking are in the works for next season.
But that’s enough from the professionals. Three college students whose only experience of running a league comes from NBA 2k can handle it from here. How would we fix the tanking problem and make the NBA watchable during the regular season?
Adan — Abolish the lottery
I think the NBA needs to get rid of the draft lottery. The system creates a pileup of bad teams at the bottom, and I think it has finally reached a tipping point.
Teams like the Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards have been bottom feeders for years and neither of them have had the number one overall pick recently out of bad luck.
This only introduces new teams to the bottom while widening the gap between the championship contenders and everyone else as tanking teams often shop their best players to championship-caliber teams to sweeten those lottery odds.
Right now, the lottery consists of 14 teams while the playoffs consist of 16 teams and with the talent gap, NBA teams sitting on the brink of the playoffs would rather chase a good draft pick instead of getting mollywhopped by a much more talented team in the first round of the playoffs.
Getting rid of the draft lottery and making it like the NFL, where the order is solely determined by overall record, would fix the pileup of bad teams the NBA has right now.
A team sitting in the middle of the standings would most likely make a push for the playoffs by becoming more aggressive with trades and free agent signings. Tanking wouldn’t make sense in this situation because it would be unlikely that the team would lose enough games to plummet to the bottom of the standings.
For the bottom feeders, their inability to play good basketball would be rewarded with a good draft pick, which would immensely help teams like the Jazz rebuild instead of constructing a bad team every year and hoping for the number one overall pick.
Talks about getting rid of the draft entirely are ridiculous to me because it would establish a hierarchy. In this case, the NBA would look like the professional soccer scene in Europe where the best teams almost never fall off and smaller teams never have a chance of signing great players.
Getting rid of the draft lottery would not eliminate tanking, but it would reduce the amount of teams that attempt to tank while keeping the league fair and competitive.
Tanner — Freeze lottery positions
It seems that Adam Silver has a laundry list of proposals for how to fix tanking in the NBA and recently threw a throw-stuff-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks party among executives.
Unlike Adan, I don’t think that getting rid of the lottery would actually prevent tanking. A rat race for what team can set the regular season loss record doesn’t seem like a fix.
Instead, one thing that I think would work well is lottery odds freezing at the trade deadline, removing the incentive to tank close to the playoffs. Freezing odds before teams are mathematically eliminated from playoff contention would both give teams an incentive to win early and cut any reward for late season losses.
Teams do not come into the season looking to lose. Sure, there are going to be some organizations that recognize they’re going to be worse than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re actively trying to lose early in the season.
Exhibit A, the Charlotte Hornets. They won 19 games last season and started this season 15-28. They were well within their rights to pack it up and call it a season, but the incentive of a potential playoff spot was enough to spark a nine-game win streak, pulling them into the heart of play-in contention.
The truth is real tanking comes into effect as soon as teams start getting eliminated from the playoffs. Once organizations no longer have anything to play for, the most logical step is to improve your draft position at all costs.
There’s always going to be bad teams in the NBA, you can’t prevent losing records but what you can prevent is talented teams intentionally having losing records. Freezing odds before teams have a reason to tank might not be the end all solution, but it’s a start.
Ty — Let the worst teams fight it out
As Tanner said, I am going to disagree with Adan that completely abolishing the draft lottery would fix the NBA’s tanking issue. If anything, I think it would make it worse.
I mean think back to the 2023 NBA Draft when Victor Wembanyama was the first overall pick; any team would have killed to have the first overall pick that year, so without the draft lottery, teams would have tried to tank even harder to be the certified worst team in the league.
I agree with the fact that in this case it would give the middle of the pack teams a reason to make a playoff push, but for teams like the Jazz, Pacers, Pelicans, Kings, Nets, and Wizards, we would see all-time attempts for bottom of the barrel teams to tank
Instead, I am going to echo a solution that ESPN’s Tim Bontemps wrote about that is similar to Tanner’s proposal of freezing draft lottery odds at the deadline, however, adds on a major additional detail that I believe would truly eliminate tanking.
The proposal comes from an anonymous league executive who’s idea was to change what improves a team’s lottery odds at the trade deadline.
Throughout the first half of the regular season, a team’s lottery odds would be improved by losing like it is right now. Then, at the trade deadline, the worst 15 teams in the league would be locked into the lottery and the way they improve their odds would flip, and wins would improve their lottery odds.
This gives teams like the Mavericks, Grizzlies, Bulls and Bucks, who are sitting on the outside of the playoffs right now an incentive to make a playoff push even though they might potentially fail. This method also gives the bottom of the barrel teams to play their best players and win games.
The reason I like this proposal is because it does not only discourage tanking, but it is one of the only solutions I’ve heard that encourages winning.
Giving teams a reason to win is going to be the only way to make sure that the competitive spirit of the sport is upheld. Competition and high-level play sell tickets and I think this solution encourages both, which makes basketball more fun to watch.
I can acknowledge that this solution has flaws, but I think the only way to fix the tanking problem is to flip it on its head and make winning a priority, so if in the end a playoff team ends with a Top 10 pick, then so be it.
Jazz forward Brice Sensabaugh dribbles the ball. Photo by Sam Navarro-Imagn on Sports Illustrated.