NBA’s bizarre ‘tanking’ problem has spewed theories but no solutions | NBA

IImagine you’re the director of football at a Premier League club in crisis in a world where relegation doesn’t exist and the best teenagers on the planet are available for free in a draft every June.

In this alternate universe, you’re also aware of something else: the 2026 Premier League draft is one for the ages. Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsí are among them. The same goes for Lennart Karl of Bayern Munich and Franco Mastantuono of Real Madrid. Sign one and the glory days will suddenly return.

There is, however, an all-powerful curve ball. Teams that finish in the bottom four of the Premier League have a 14% chance of securing the top pick in the draft. But as you move up, your chances of acquiring a top pick and turning things around get worse.

So what would you do in this scenario? Tell your players to keep fighting and maybe move up a place or two? Or would you quietly try to lose for Lamine or collapse for Cubarsí by resting big names and letting sporting gravity take its course?

This essentially describes the bizarre, yet strangely logical, situation in the NBA, the talk of how to stop teams from “tanking” to get a better draft pick has spawned hundreds of theories, but no elegant solution. It’s not that the NBA isn’t trying. Last month, the Utah Jazz were fined $500,000 (£373,000) for not using their best players at the end of a game, while the Indiana Pacers were fined $100,000 after cutting some of their star players. Both teams continue to lose and they are far from the only ones.

Indeed, as I write this on Monday afternoon, there is a particularly illuminating statistic: Since the beginning of February, the NBA’s seven worst teams have a combined record of 20 wins and 87 losses and 13 of those victories have come when two of these struggling teams have faced each other. Not all of these teams tank, but the players know it’s a problem. Michael Porter Jr of the Brooklyn Nets said: “I don’t like the way teams deliberately try to tank to get a good draft pick.”

This is not a completely new problem. In 2021, scholars analyzed NBA games from 2006-2007 to 2017-2018 and found empirical evidence that teams pursued draft picks by resting healthy players and, unsurprisingly, they tended to rest more players after being eliminated from the playoffs.

However, what’s different this season is that more teams are losing more games earlier than ever before and there is much more widespread recognition that something needs to be done about it. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said this weekend: “Are we seeing worse behavior this year than what we’ve seen recently? Yes, that’s my view. There’s been a destigmatization around certain behaviors…the guardrails have been lifted a little bit. We’re going to make substantial changes for next year.”

Silver acknowledged there has been a “perfect storm” this season because four college superstars are expected in June’s draft: Darryn Peterson of the University of Kansas, AJ Dybantsa of the BYU Cougars, Cameron Boozer of Duke and Caleb Wilson of the North Carolina Tar Heels. The pipeline for subsequent projects doesn’t seem as strong.

In theory, the idea of ​​a draft is good in a league without relegation. It allows bad teams to acquire great players, creates greater parity and uncertainty, and offers a seductive dream to every faltering franchise: They may be only two or three years away from glory.

Just look at the San Antonio Spurs. In 2023, they finished with the second worst record. Having acquired Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper in successive drafts, they are now title contenders. In the NFL, the New England Patriots went 4-13 consecutive seasons to this year’s Super Bowl.

This is also partly due to the salary cap that exists in the NBA and NFL. But can we imagine such a turnaround in the Bundesliga or Ligue 1? Even the much more competitive Premier League surely only has half a dozen teams capable of winning it over the next decade.

But the big problem is that teams have more incentive to fail in the NBA than in other major leagues. Because a team only has five starters, acquiring one or two superstars in the draft can change everything. Losing a lot of games can become a winning strategy.

Plus, being a mid-tier team in the NBA is arguably the worst place to be. Because you’re not good enough to compete for the trophy, but also not bad enough to recruit a generational talent to turn around your franchise.

So what should we do? Some have suggested that the NBA should prevent teams from having a top-four draft pick two years in a row – thereby discouraging losses year after year. Others have argued that the lottery should be flattened so that no team no longer has, say, a 10 percent chance of getting the top pick.

In the eyes of Europeans, the 82-game length of the NBA season is far too long and encourages teams that have dropped out of the competition to lose interest and their games. A 58-game regular season, meaning teams play each other once home and away, would surely be enough, but commercial pressures mean that will never happen. Some form of relegation would also solve the problem, but is even more unlikely.

Maybe we should be honest with ourselves. No matter what the NBA does, as long as losing teams are rewarded with higher draft picks, there will always be an incentive to tank. And if you were the head of a struggling franchise, wouldn’t you also be tempted to participate in Tankapolooza?