INGLEWOOD, Calif. — NBA commissioner Adam Silver wondered out loud Saturday if a moral code in pro sports has been decisively crossed as more and more teams are blatantly losing games — the hated practice of “tanking.”
Silver conceded that the league is still struggling for solutions to punish teams that lose intentionally for long-term gain.
“I think there was a more classical view of that in the old days, where it was just sort of an understanding among partners about terms of behavior,” Silver told reporters at the Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers and site of Sunday’s NBA All-Star Game.
The NBA’s annual draft allows the worst teams to have the first chance at picking the best young, amateur talent in hopes of boosting those clubs’ sad fortunes. With losing equating to better draft position, teams have learned that if they’re not in playoff contention, bottoming out could be the best path to restocking talent.
The 2026 NBA draft class is recognized as the best in recent years, with multiple names at the top of the board that could alter a team’s future.
The practice of “tanking” is getting worse, Silver said.
“I think what we’re seeing is a modern analytics, where it’s so clear that the incentives are misaligned,” he said.
The league this week fined the Utah Jazz $500,000 for “conduct detrimental to the league,” in connection with the team sitting star players in the fourth quarters of consecutive games.
“The league is 80-years-old. It’s time to take a fresh look at this and to see whether that’s an antiquated way,” Silver said. “We got to look at some fresh thinking here. We’re doing, what we’re seeing right now, is not working. There’s no question about it.”
“Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory?” Silver added. “Yes is my view.”
Jazz owner Ryan Smith sarcastically responded to the NBA in a statement: “agree to disagree.”
Smith also pointed out that one of the games, in which the Jazz were accused of trying to lose, was won by Utah.
“We won the game in Miami and got fined?” Smith said. “That makes sense.”
The NBA has tried disincentivize intentional losing by determining draft order via a weighted draft, so losing the most games doesn’t automatically result in the first pick.
Silver said, though, that he’s not entirely sure that teams with the worst records are necessarily the most needy.
“It’s not clear to me, for example, that the 30th (best) performing team is that much measurably worse than the 22nd (best) performing team, particularly if you have incentive to perform poorly to get a better draft pick,” he said. “So it’s a bit of a conundrum.”
The practice is so ingrained in NBA culture that even suggestions to fight it seem hard to come by. Popular talk show host Colin Cowherd, who is paid to have opinions, threw up his arms recently on the topic and said his only suggestion was for Silver to channel his more-confrontational predecessor David Stern and yell at losing teams.
“I don’t know what you do with tanking, they’ve been doing it forever. But they did it a lot less with David Stern,” Cowherd said last week. “People feared David Stern.”
