Month: April 2026

Tipping Picks Is a Rejection of the NFL’s Potemkin Draft

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A few days before the start of the 2026 NFL Draft, Peter Schrager took to his podcast and social media to beg viewers to stay off social media and not spoil themselves with each pick. Part of his argument was that reporters who get the pick before it’s announced aren’t actually doing anything special:

It’s because the NFL requires that name to be sent to them, and the entire league gets that name three minutes before the pick is made. Anyone who’s got a credential has one source in the league, and that one source in the league, whether it be from the 32 teams or the league office or an agent, they have access to the picks 90 seconds before they’re announced. There is no valor in spoiling an NFL draft pick, so don’t give that joy or that “attaboy” to those who are leaking it beforehand.

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Continuing the Quest for a Solution for NBA Tanking

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Last week’s post laid out the argument that the only true solution for tanking in the NBA is a system of promotion and relegation, but also acknowledged that the NBA owners would never adopt such a system on their own. But I also got a bit carried away listing some of the solutions that others had proposed, some of which weren’t intended to be that serious to begin with, and some of which I got intrigued by as I looked into them. So if promotion and relegation isn’t on the table, how should the NBA address tanking?

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What Is the Solution to Tanking in the NBA – If There Is One?

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It seems like NBA fans and power brokers have been debating what to do about tanking for decades – really going back to the creation of the draft lottery to begin with – but the debate has become particularly acute this year. In February the NBA fined the Utah Jazz half a million dollars after the team twice benched two stars in the fourth quarter of competitive games, taking tanking to a new level of shamelessness; the Pacers were fined another $100,000 for engaging in the comparatively old-fashioned shenanigans of ruling players out of games entirely. Those are just two of ten teams, a third of the league, that have effectively called it quits on the season, leaving the entire set of playoff-plus-play-in teams locked in before the start of April.

This is in the context of what several analysts are calling one of the deepest NBA draft classes in history; ESPN’s Jay Bilas has said the class could be as much as 20 players deep, with any of those players being potential starters or even stars in the NBA, creating that much more incentive to tank. But as Tony Kornheiser has pointed out, does it really? If even a handful of teams that make the playoffs are in line to get potentially great players, doesn’t that dilute the incentive to tank? Shouldn’t a tankworthy draft class be one with one or a handful of great players, like a Victor Wembanyama? What are teams doing tanking for a class where the 20th best player isn’t that much worse than the best player?

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