We all know what’s happening. The league knows what’s happening. The teams know what’s happening. The only people pretending not to know are the ones cashing the cheques.
It’s called tanking. Not so much losing on purpose. More about finding creative ways to seem competitive while not actually being so. The windfall for doing it properly is a high pick in the NBA draft and, for an NBA team with considerably smaller rosters than in football and hockey, adding one elite talent can make all the difference in the world.
Still, when it comes to the science of tanking the NBA does it best, or worst. No professional league seems to spend as much time and effort finding ways to stay strategically uncompetitive.
The NBA is uniquely vulnerable to tanking because of how the sport is built. One player can change everything. One draft pick can alter a decade. In hockey or football, a top pick helps. In basketball, a top pick can rescue a franchise and that difference matters.
The league’s economics amplify it. NBA contracts are fully guaranteed. Rosters are small and stars carry enormous minute loads. If a franchise player goes down, the season often goes with him, so caution becomes policy, rest becomes “management” and before you know it, nobody is playing regularly and the season is effectively over. Often before it even gets going.
Common perception says professional basketball players are soft, at least compared to players from the NHL and NFL and, in one sense, the accusation is understandable. But the NBA is built differently, and the structure of the game itself is different from a physical point of view with higher minute loads and unique body stress.
This isn’t an excuse. It’s an explanation. NBA players simply have more leverage than players in other sports and this translates to franchises having to act more proactively in how they manage their talent. Oftentimes the risk (of having a mediocre season) isn’t worth the reward (of tanking for a high draft pick) and because the league doesn’t “punish” the practice of tanking, it continues. Losing has its benefits.
So how do you change this? How do you incentivize competitiveness, or rather, how do you penalize the practice of tanking?
You start but not trying to define who’s doing it and who isn’t. As long as there’s a benefit to tanking, teams will continue to do it so the real key is in eliminating, or at least minimizing, this advantage.
Solving this problem demands an understanding of the dynamics behind why people do what they do. Realistically the tanking problem is more about human psychology than it is about manipulating a compromised system. The solution – my proposal, at least – isn’t based on tweaking. It’s about re-invention and a recalibration of the idea itself. It’s also astonishingly simple.
The bottom twenty teams by record are all equally eligible for the first pick overall. No tiered odds. No teams locked out of winning the #1. That translates to 16 teams who don’t make the playoffs plus four who qualify for the playoffs outright.
All twenty of these teams have an equal shot of getting the #1 pick. The top twelve teams in the league are not eligible for the lottery. This takes away the incentive to tank, and also to tank badly. Being shut out of the playoffs no longer guarantees a better chance at first overall. Conversely, qualifying for the playoffs no longer leaves you on the outside looking in. Making the playoffs is now not a bad thing and why should it be?
The draft lottery would operate in a descending order where the tenth pick is announced first, with #1 being awarded last. This means that getting the first pick overall becomes a one in ten chance. It doesn’t favour the lowest teams overall, but it does increase the odds of any lower teams that remain in the hunt until the end.
Yes, that means that a team qualifying for the playoffs could end up with the first pick overall, and that’s okay. What needs to be remembered in all of this is eliminating the incentives for tanking because a team that finishes last overall holds no advantage over a team finishing 13th (the final lottery-eligible team).
There is one major caveat: a team receiving the first overall pick is ineligible to receive it for the next four years. This prevents any team from capitalizing on a steady stream of good fortune. If you are lucky enough to win it once, you can’t pick any higher than second overall for the next four seasons.
I recognize that this seems like a radical shift, and it is when compared to the intricate system as it exists now, but this is really more about realigning logic.
The old system – which had absolutely no advantage for the bad teams – was unfair because it gave good teams a real incentive to be bad. By having weighted odds favouring the bottom dwellers, the NBA took away any inspiration to win. If you were a middling team, it was more advantageous for you to tank than it was to make the playoffs. This proposal severely negates the incentive to lose.
Rather than trying to separate the fakers from the truly bad, it’s smarter, and more logical, to devise a system that simply takes away the benefits of tanking. Bad teams will still be bad but better teams will no longer have an incentive to join the club.