The N.B.A.’s Race to the Bottom

This loss – the Wizards’ twentieth in their last twenty-one games – was considered a success, I suppose. As on April Fool’s Day, everyone knew about the scheme. But this time, even the fans weren’t misled. The reasoning was obvious: The Wizards can only keep their first-round pick in the 2026 draft if the team gets one of the top eight picks; otherwise, due to a complex series of prior trades, the choice would fall to the New York Knicks. And, because of the way the draft lottery is currently structured, the best way to guarantee a top-eight pick is to finish the season as one of the four worst teams in the league.

This has been the plan recently for a number of teams: draft a promising young player as a shortcut to changing the team’s trajectory. The real appeal is that these stars are cheap; a player’s first two contracts are capped by what’s called the rookie scale, which allows teams to sign big-time players before having to pay them what they’re worth. The draft aims to increase parity by sending the best new players to the worst teams in the league. The problem is that it incentivizes losing on purpose — tanking, in NBA parlance.

For many years, the top pick was determined by a coin toss between the worst teams in the Western and Eastern conferences. But teams recognized the value of top draft picks: It was better to be really bad than just mediocre. So, over time, the NBA introduced four sets of significant changes to the draft system to combat tanking and ensure picks went to the “right” teams. Teams that did not make the playoffs were entered into a lottery and lucky enough to get the first pick, with the worst team receiving the best odds. Then came the choice of the second choice, and so on. But, during the regular season, teams with no playoff hopes began scrambling to shatter their records in order to take a chance on a future star player — and some teams, notably the twenty-ten 76ers, engaged in a lengthy process of strategic losing in order to stockpile picks. In 2019, the odds for the three worst teams were flattened, in order to discourage teams from charging down. But this change, like all those before it, not only failed to reduce tanking, it may have even made the situation worse. In practice, spreading the odds meant that even teams that were just bad in general had a chance at landing the top pick. This motivated more teams to tank, not fewer.

An exceptionally strong draft class this season, combined with the complicated math around protected picks — which are included in trades but aren’t always conveyed if they land in certain spots — has increased the incentive for teams to do well in the lottery. Even the third or fourth pick this year could net a franchise player. Even before the All-Star break, many teams were sitting their best players in close games, trading for banged up players, or constructing absurd rosters. (The Chicago Bulls have an absurd number of guards.) Now, on any given night, about a third of all NBA teams are trying to lose.

Of all the challenges plaguing the NBA this season (a series of serious leg injuries, the arrest of an active NBA head coach during an FBI gambling investigation, the shutdown of regional television stations broadcasting local NBA games, and so on), nothing has seemed to excite the league office as much as the tanking issue. On one level, this makes sense: Professional basketball is an entertainment product, and no one thinks a team like the Wizards is particularly entertaining. There are also problems if the integrity of the game cannot be trusted. For example, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has publicly stated on several occasions that the league intends to curb the practice of bottom-out, if not eliminate it altogether. In February, he levied six-figure fines on the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers for not playing healthy stars, and he talked about “substantial” changes to the draft process. Some of the ideas under consideration have been floating around for some time, but last month a list of proposals was leaked to ESPN. None of the ideas, despite their spin, are that radical, and some of them run counter to each other. There are suggestions to increase the lottery pool and place winning floors for teams to get the best odds. There are double lotteries and protections that would put a safety net under the worst teams. What they all have in common is the prospect of unintended consequences, because they don’t solve the real problem: teams are always rewarded for trying to be bad.