Tanking has become the white whale of the NBA league office.
Stamping out tanking has become Adam Silver’s quest, but that obsessive effort has the league missing the big picture. Silver runs a multi-billion-dollar business, and he has business reasons to focus on tanking. While many fans in Utah or Sacramento or Washington — or the other six cities where tanking is going on this season — will say they want their team to tank for draft potential, the reality is that there is a steep drop-off in attendance and viewership for those teams’ games, according to league sources. Fans say they are okay with tanking, but they stop tuning in when the product is that bad.
The problem is that the league’s obsessive quest to deal with tanking is moving it further away from the point of having a draft in the first place. It’s making it harder for smaller and mid-market teams to land the players they need to get or stay good.
And, ultimately, not one of the league’s new ideas will end tanking. Full stop.
NBA’s latest anti-tanking ideas
This week, the NBA presented its Board of Governors — made up of the 30 team owners — with three different conceptual ideas that drastically change the NBA Draft Lottery process. In a nutshell those are:
1) Expand the lottery to 18 teams (10 teams that miss the postseason and 10 teams in the play-in), then flatten the odds and give all 10 teams that miss the playoffs an 8% chance at the top pick. Only the top four or five draft spots would be determined by lottery, then it would fall in reverse record order.
2) Expand the lottery to 22 teams (the 18 above plus the four eliminated in the first round of the playoffs), then have those teams’ lottery odds determined by their record over the past two seasons. Also, there would be a minimum win total for each team in relation to the lottery (hypothetically, if that win number is set at 22, and a team only wins 19 games that season, for the lottery it would have a 22-60 record). All 22 teams would be in the lottery, but only the top four slots would be selected, and then there might be a second lottery for the remaining spots, with limits on how far a team can fall.
3) Expand the lottery to 18 teams, but from there it pretty much follows the same system as is currently in place, except that the top five teams would get the same odds (11%, currently the top three teams have a 14% chance) and the odds would slowly decrease from there. The top five spots in the draft would be determined by the lottery, then the rest of the draft would be in reverse order of record.
These are not set proposals for the owners to choose among, league officials emphasize, they are more concepts where they can pick and choose the ideas they like. It’s more of a buffet of ideas. For example, while the league is theoretically open to a lottery that selects the top 18 spots in the draft, there is no way the owners will vote for a concept where, if their team has the worst record, it might pick 18th.
Why all these ideas miss the mark
The NBA is a business, and what the teams are selling to their respective fan bases is either winning or hope. “Come see our good team with a star or two, a team that will win a lot of games and is playoff bound.” Or, “Come see our promising young players as we start to build something — get in on the ground floor of what we will become in a few years.”
It becomes very difficult to sell hope when the flattened lottery odds make it much more difficult for the league’s struggling teams to get the good players they need to turn things around. Put simply, most bad teams will just be bad longer. Fans of tanking teams tend to be okay with it for a year or two (at least on an intellectual level), but drag that process out, and they really tune out. And don’t come back. The league’s lottery odds make that more likely.
This is a particularly big risk for small and middle-market teams that are not destinations for free agents or players with options — those teams rely on the draft to get their stars (either drafting those players or trading their picks to get said player). Decrease the value of those picks and the bad teams get stuck in a cycle where it’s harder to improve. By extension, this is a big win for Los Angeles, New York, Miami and any other market where players want to go.
The point of any draft
These new concepts move the NBA away from the entire point of having a draft — get the worst teams the best young players so they can turn things around.
In the NFL, the Raiders, Jets, Cardinals and Titans had the worst records last season, they get the top four picks in this draft. Simple. Clean. I have written that’s what the NBA should do (with a rule that if a team gets the No. 1 pick, it can’t pick in the top five the next two years). The NBA is never going to do that, in part because the draft lottery has become its own televised show and event. It’s baked into the new NBA national television agreements. If there is one thing we can be certain about, it’s that the league’s billionaire owners are not giving up a penny of that television money, and doing away with the draft lottery would force them to do just that.
These proposals also can make things more complex for fans to understand. Particularly the second proposal, with two-year combined windows. The NBA’s overly complex salary cap is something casual fans hate talking about and tune out discussions on; these new lottery options (especially the second one) have a lot of math that people just don’t want to do to know where their team will pick. Simpler is better, yet the league is leaning more toward complexity and bureaucracy.
This won’t stop tanking
Ultimately, none of these proposals will completely stop tanking. The next time there is a Cade Cunningham or Anthony Edwards or Cooper Flagg — or especially a generational player like Victor Wembanyama — are in a draft, teams will do anything and everything to maximize their chances in that lottery. Because those are No. 1 picks and the kinds of players who turn franchises around — and drive up a franchise’s value. Any marginal help is worth it.
At the end of the day, more than maybe any other team sport, one elite basketball player can change everything. And it’s worth it to teams to do whatever it takes to get a player like that. Even if the odds are longer than they were a few years ago.
