The NBA is committed to ending tanking. “Full stop,” as Commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday.
None of the first wave of proposals will accomplish that goal.
Via Shams Charania of ESPN, the NBA presented three possibilities at this week’s Board of Governors meetings.
We’ll defer to the article for the details, mainly because I got a headache while reading them and will be risking a full-blown migraine if I try to summarize them here. But the bottom line is this: Under each of them, there will still be an incentive to lose games strategically in order to improve the opportunity to land a generational talent.
No solution fixes tanking without completely removing the incentive to lose, or to even evaluate it as a possible plan for all or part of a season, or two.
The only acceptable solution is to give all teams one ball in the machine, independent of how the prior season(s) ended. And finding the right solution is critical, given the age of legalized gambling.
The fact that the NBA is talking about it so openly makes it more important to come up with the right solution. Under any model that creates a temptation to tank at any time, a reckoning is inevitable — in the form of litigation, regulation, or prosecution.
Which is all the more reason for the NFL, where tanking happens less frequently but absolutely does occur, to pay attention to whatever the NBA does.
