Tanking

In the NBA, to “tank” the season, to purposefully lose games with the goal of attaining a top draft pick, is the most common strategy of roster construction for teams that do not feel like they are currently capable of contending for any real post-season success. That a team must tank, and that said tanking is not a success unless it results in the acquisition of a potential superstar player to rebuild the roster around, is an almost universally held belief among the front offices of the Association, as evidenced by their actions when facing potential tank-inducing circumstances. Everybody tanks. The end of the ‘25-’26 regular season saw Utah, Indiana, Chicago, Washington, Brooklyn, Sacramento, Memphis, and Dallas all engage in some degree of tanking. That’s 8 of the 30 teams who had given up on this season with still about 20 games remaining each. Combine that with some teams at the top likely coasting or nursing their various bumps and bruises down the stretch and you’re left with disturbingly few competitive games still to be played until the post-season.

You can see why many people consider this to be a problem. Alongside modern star players’ tendency to play fewer games than their 20th century counterparts, tanking and the general lack of competitiveness over the long course of the 82 game NBA regular season brings into question the quality of the product being presented to the fans. The passion of competition is what makes sports compelling, fans experience emotion vicariously through the players as they grapple with success and failure. Absent the stakes and suspense of competition, the game appeals only to a minority of superfans like myself, who would happily watch a highschool girls team or a pick-up game at the park if there were a few decent players out there.

So NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has deemed tanking an existential issue. He has recently announced a comprehensive reform of the draft lottery system in an attempt to disincentivize losing - the newest in a long line of adjustments to the lottery that the NBA has been instituting for over 20 years - and yet despite them all, tanking is now more prevalent than it has ever been.

Personally, I don’t think tanking is the worst thing to ever happen to the NBA. I think it’s gotten bad and could use some correcting, but with over 1,200 total regular season games per year, plus many casual fans not watching at all until the playoffs, I find it hard to imagine that tanking (in proper moderation) really affects the “quality of the product” all that much. I care enough about the parity of the league to withstand some tanking, especially in a league historically dominated by a handful of organizations and their sometimes decade spanning dynasties, and especially in a league without a hard salary cap. Tanking has become an important tool for small market teams to achieve competitiveness. Look at the two teams from last year’s Finals, Indiana and Oklahoma City. Neither of these teams can compete with the Lakers, Celtics, or Knicks in the pursuit of high profile free agent players; the core of both rosters was built ground-up, with Indiana drafting Haliburton, Turner, and Nembhard, and OKC drafting Holmgren, Williams, and acquiring a young, unproven rookie prospect Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who was essentially treated like a draft pick in his inclusion in the Paul George trade. Contrasted against the mercenary style careers of guys like Kevin Durant and James Harden who change teams on a whim, this type of home-grown team building is what fans generally like to see, and if a little bit of tanking is needed to kick-start it then I think that’s a fair tradeoff. Has tanking gotten out of hand? Sure, but I don’t view it as a cancer that must be eliminated to ensure the survival and integrity of the league, only an ailment that needs mitigated when it springs up.

But you can never fully eliminate tanking, and this is an undeniable fact. More than any other sport, winning in basketball is dependent on having a superstar player, without one you’re dead in the water. This makes the top picks in the draft, which represent a chance to acquire that top-caliber of player, too valuable for teams to be disincentivized away from pursuing them. Attempting to compel multi-billion dollar entities to act against their best interests with incentive is the same laissez-faire classical liberal ideology that led the President to believe that his tariffs would incentivize re-industrialization of the United States. Turns out, these grossly wealthy institutions are capable of withstanding petty jabs at their bottom line (mostly by passing costs on to consumers) and cannot be compelled to upend their entire infrastructure and supply chain by fucking incentive.

If tanking were truly an existential threat to the league, as Adam Silver believes it to be, then teams need to be forced to stop, not incentivized. And although it will always exist to some degree, even I admit that the tanking at the end of this season was too much. Examples like Utah benching newly acquired all-star Jaren Jackson Jr. at halftime of his debut game with the team, or Washington trading for and then promptly shelving for the season both Trae Young and Anthony Davis, as well as the broadly employed practice of pulling random guys up out of the G-League or sometimes even off the street to play prominent roles for your team in the final games of the season all leave a bitter taste in the mouth of any viewer, except for these teams own fans, who often properly recognize these distasteful actions as the best long term course for their team.

It’s a subjective issue. Everyone has their own idea of how much tanking is too much. To me, tanking via roster construction is not unethical. If a team finally comes to terms with the fact that their roster is just not good enough, and they proceed to trade away their best players in return for draft picks and young prospects, and that act makes the team really bad in the short term but grants more flexibility in the long term, that’s just smart management. Yes, you are purposefully making your team worse in hopes of attaining valuable draft picks, but teams have a right to choose how they go about roster construction, so long as the integrity of the game remains intact. I think you’ve clearly crossed the line when you are purposefully losing specific games, like the Jazz did with benching JJJ, or like Dallas did in 2023. The Mavericks owned a pick that was protected through the top 10 (meaning if they finished with a bottom 10 record they keep the pick, if they finish 11th or better they have to send it to the Knicks) and sat their entire starting 5 to intentionally lose the last game of the year and keep the pick. Head Coach Jason Kidd vocalized his distaste for the strategy in the post-game interview, indicating that it was “an organizational decision” to sit their players. The league responded to this act by fining the organization $750,000, and Dallas would go on to select Derek Lively with that pick in the draft. It’s all the same to then majority owner Mark Cuban (or, for that matter, current owner Miriam Adelson) to be fined in order to keep the pick, as if he were told you can keep the pick if you just pay a fee to the league. If a fine is the only punishment for tanking, and a team decides that the benefit would be worth the money, then it’s not even a punishment at all, it’s just like buying the pick. If a similar situation were to arise with higher stakes, say like, a chance at the number 1 pick in a draft that features a prospect on the level of Victor Wembanyama or LeBron James, it may be hard to find the limit to the amount of cash teams would be willing to pay in fines just for the chance to acquire that player.

The Mavericks situation was a turning point for tanking. It was clear to many observers at the time that this was an egregious act, and that the league needed to take drastic action to set a precedent that said this type of tanking would not be tolerated. They needed to confiscate the pick. When the announcement was made that the punishment would be only a fine, I, and many others, saw this as a league sanction of tanking. The decision to allow the team to keep the pick that they tanked for was the league saying that yes, if you’re willing to pay, then you may do this. And it has been a direct result of this decision that the two years since it was handed down have seen the worst tanking yet.

The reason teams tank is for the pick, so if you really want teams to stop tanking, you have to take the pick away. Any other deterrent will always fall short, there will always arise a situation where some team will deem the pick worth the punishment, these picks are just too valuable. The pick is the singular cause for tanking, a coveted prize organizations are willing to make sacrifices for. There is no solution besides confiscating the pick.

If Adam Silver is unwilling or incapable of enacting strict punishment for these violations which he deems worthy of drastic action then what is the point of having a commissioner at all? One can only conclude that he is so handcuffed as to prevent him from seriously disadvantaging any franchise that he can act only directly in line with the collective will of the owners, serving only the profit-motive of billionaires and venture capital funds. The commissioner should be steward of the game, acting in opposition to profit-seeking institutions when their single minded pursuit of money jeopardizes the quality or integrity of the sport. Instead teams wear Kalshi’s logo on their jersey, the league is sponsored by Fanduel, a full ¼ of the regular season is rendered unwatchable by tanking, and even when there is a game on worth watching you have to subscribe to a million different streaming services to be sure you’ll be able to see it.

The sport has been left entirely in the hands of the owners, people like Miriam Adelson, Robert Pera, James Dolan, and Steve Balmer, whose other business ventures range from funding the Israeli military to selling drones to Russia, and who engage in pastimes such as indiscreetly surveilling and banning fans from the stadium because of their sexual identity and fabricating a non-existent environmental protection non-profit to fraudulently embezzle $50 million to a star player. These people would destroy the game of basketball in an instant if that would make them money, and they will assuredly destroy the game in time if left in complete control, as they are now.

Reconfiguring the lottery odds again is not a solution, it’s not even a temporary solution or a half-measure, it’s only proof of whom Adam Silver acts on behalf of. No amount of convoluted calculations designed to disincentivize tanking will ever be enough. Tanking itself is not the existential issue that it’s made out to be, but a symptom of the greater disease, profit-incentive. Basketball is more than a commodity, and if the game I love is to be saved from the horrifying fate of becoming completely subject to the whims of private equity, then it can only be saved by someone who prioritizes basketball over everything else.