A “Solution” for Tanking

There’s a way to fix it, but people probably won’t like it.

The Sixers are 3–24 in their last 27 games.

That’s pretty bad. Worst in the NBA for any team over their last 27 games, for a matter of fact. But the Sixers are far from alone. Over the same timespan, the Jazz are 4-23, and the Hornets are 7-20. TL;DR — a few of the same teams having been losing a lot of games the past couple of months, and the powers that be in the NBA seem to be taking notice.

ESPN recently reported several ideas pitched from around the league, including a further flattening of the lottery odds for the 14 non-playoff teams, counting wins instead of losses following the All-Star break, and having lottery odds determined by the 14 teams’ records against each other.

This is six years after the last round of draft lottery changes, which made it so that the three teams with the worst records would each have the same 14% chance of landing the first overall pick, in theory disincentivizing franchises from bottoming their records all the way out to be the worst of the worst. In one sense, these changes have succeeded, since the team with the worst record in the NBA has not landed the first overall pick since 2018. However, this change clearly hasn’t stopped or even really slowed tanking over the past six seasons. Just because the odds are worse doesn’t mean that people left the casino.

While tanking isn’t exclusive to basketball in American men’s sports, it’s certainly the sport where it’s most prominently discussed. Tankathon itself was founded by a basketball fan 12 years ago who wanted his favorite team to lose games in order to secure a better draft pick, and to this day, the NBA’s draft lottery simulator is the default homepage for the website. The NFL just hands the top pick to the team with the fewest wins each season. The MLB and NHL have draft lotteries, but they don’t drum up annual thinkpieces calling for reform.

The reason for this is simple — one player can change everything for an NBA franchise more than it can change things for any team in the other three leagues. Plenty of highly touted quarterbacks drafted with premium picks have wallowed on middling teams while lacking adequate support. The Los Angeles Angels famously failed to make the playoffs a single time from 2018-23 despite rostering two of the best players in the history of the sport. (This is where I would say something about the NHL, but I admittedly have almost zero knowledge of hockey).

The NFL has 53 players active on each roster and 11 on the field for each team every snap. Baseball cycles through 162 regular season games each season and waves upon waves of players waiting in the farm system. In basketball there are only 15 standard contracts given out per roster, and of course only five players on the court for each team. There's a good reason so few champions in history don’t include at least one player who made first team All-NBA. The most reliably consistent way to get one of those players is a high draft pick. The Rockets and the Bulls won titles in the 90s because they lost enough games in the 80s to pick Hakeem Olajuwon and Michael Jordan. The Cavaliers went from 17-65 in 2003 to winning the Eastern Conference in 2007 almost solely because those 65 losses brought them LeBron James. The strategy clearly has merit.

This is all a long way of saying that so long as losing improves a team’s draft position, tanking will always exist. Even in the proposed “wins after the all-star break count as losses” scenario, would a team not eventually try to tank the first 50 games of the season in order to knock themselves out of playoff contention, only to ratchet things up post All-Star break in hopes of getting the best lottery odds possible? Gaming the system is simply worth it given the incredible potential payoff.

The only way to truly get rid of tanking is to fully sever the tie between losing games and getting a top draft pick. Flatten the odds – and not just so that all non-playoff teams have the exact same chance of getting the first overall pick. Instead, get rid of the notion that losing can bring a team closer to future success. All 30 first round picks should be decided completely by random chance, making it a lottery in the truest sense of the word.

Under this system, there would understandably be a ton of complaints any year a team coming off a deep playoff run vaulted up to the first overall pick. Additionally, franchises would need to re-think how they’ve handled pick protections and pick swaps in prior trades, and in the hypothetical world where this proposal goes into place, the NBA would have to let teams know when the change was coming years in advance so as to avoid potentially reckless trades. And of course, it would make getting out from the basement of the NBA more difficult than ever.

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This isn’t a proposal designed to make everyone happy. It’s a solution with tons of flaws and reasonable objections. But it would get rid of tanking in basketball. There would be zero connection between losing basketball games and getting a chance to pick, no more reason for a fanbase or for a franchise’s decision makers to ever want a loss more than a win.

There are some slight tweaks that can be made so that it wouldn’t just be a purely random 1-30 draw. It’s pretty safe to say that any team that makes the second round of the playoffs would much rather advance to the final four than they would have odds at acquiring a good draft pick, thus locking in the final four teams at spots 27-30 in the draft order wouldn’t change this hypothetically tank-free world. It’s hard to imagine a team trading a 1-in-8 chance of winning a ring for a 3.85% chance of drafting the class’s top prospect.

If there’s an insistence on having some form of safeguard for the teams that lose the most games, inspiration from the current system could be taken, with the 26 remaining teams only drawing lots for picks 1-10 each year. After those spots have been decided, the next 16 picks could be ordered by record. That still incentives losing games to a small degree, but it’s a far less desirable incentive than what’s currently in place. Losing the most games in the NBA right now guarantees a top-five pick. In this system, that guarantee goes down to pick No. 11. Still a good pick, but one that on average is far less likely to be franchise-altering.

Whatever permutation it takes, it’ll definitely be a drastic option – but it really is the only way to guarantee an end to tanking. Any minor tweaks to the way the first overall pick is decided will just lead to minor tweaks in how teams plan out their tanking operations. If this solution is seen as a step too far in the other direction, that’s okay. But then everyone needs to be okay with tanking and accept it as the best path forward for a solid number of NBA franchises in a given year. Losing games is not fun, not for the players and the coaching staff, and not for the passionate fans who want to watch their teams win games. Wanting to lose is antithetical to the athletic experience so many people have grown to love, either as participating athletes themselves, or as spectators from the stands. It’s just hard to argue that it’s the wrong decision given the way the current draft system is structured.

So long as there is a benefit to losing games, tanking is always going to be a thing. Getting rid of all benefits is the only way to permanently solve the problem.

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Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.

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