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?
One answer is that it’s important to get the player you want out of this class right, especially given that upcoming draft classes are expected to be weaker (though that makes me wonder if some of the players expected to be among the stars of this class could return to school for another year in hopes of being a higher draft pick next year, especially with NIL meaning they don’t necessarily have to give up money to do so). Another answer is that the randomness of the lottery means there’s actually more incentive to tank when there are more good players and you can improve your team even if you whiff on the lottery.
But another answer, related to the second, is that the incentive to tank is so strong that no matter how many tankworthy players there are or how good they are relative to one another, no matter what the standard is for determining draft chances, teams will do whatever it takes to maximize their chances of getting the #1 overall pick. If we returned to the very earliest days of the lottery where all non-playoff teams had the same odds, teams will tank their way out of the playoffs if they don’t think they have a chance to win the title, or even if they do but don’t think a chance at one title is worth giving up a chance at a player that can win them multiple titles. (Certainly it’s been suggested that even attempting to hit owners in the pocketbook won’t work if teams decide it’s worth a certain amount in fines to go for a top pick; one team told ESPN’s Bobby Marks that they’d write a blank check to cover any fines they’d get for the chance to pick in the top three.) There’s a case to be made that the steps the NBA took to flatten lottery odds in the last few seasons only increased the number of teams trying to tank since they have that much more of a chance to get a top pick (something that was cause for concern even when flattened lottery odds were being proposed 12 years ago), while making it harder for genuinely bad teams to improve. As Nate Silver points out, right now the steepest drop-off in lottery odds is between 20th and 23rd in the standings, or teams that just miss the play-in, effectively disincentivizing teams from trying to make the play-in.
That suggests that all the sturm und drang to stop tanking will ultimately do little in the long term. As ESPN’s Brian Windhorst notes: “The first anti-tanking measure was the lottery, that was in the early 80s. There have been five adjustments to the lottery. Then there was the play-in tournament, so that’s seven adjustments. So whatever adjustment this is, even if it’s inspired, will be the eighth, and guess what: it may work in the short term, but there will be a ninth, there will be a tenth.”
Many of the proposals the league has floated to attempt to curb tanking seem like good ideas on paper: freezing lottery odds partway through the season; restricting pick protections so the only range within the top 14 where picks can be protected is in the top four (Utah’s pick is top-eight protected so they’re losing as much to keep their pick at all as to maximize it); preventing teams from picking top-four in consecutive years, after consecutive bottom-three finishes, or the year after making the conference finals (this last would apply to this year’s Pacers); and assigning lottery odds based on teams’ records across multiple seasons. Other suggestions, such as including play-in teams and flattening lottery odds even further, should be considered counterproductive even on the surface… so naturally, those are the ones that the league narrowed down to more concrete proposals two weeks ago.
But even with the more reasonable-sounding proposals, it’s easy to imagine teams resorting to tanking earlier in the season than ever, when they’re very much still alive for a playoff spot, or even before the season even starts with an eye towards minimizing their multi-year records. Restricting when teams can pick in the top four could help but could also be gamed (prevent teams from getting a top-four pick after consecutive bottom-three seasons and teams will just try to end up with the fourth-worst record) and more importantly, won’t actually do much when teams tank as much to maximize their draft position if they don’t end up in the top four as to maximize the chances of ending up in the top four (which is especially apparent in the case of this “20-player-deep” draft class). So one suggestion I’m surprised I haven’t seen floated is how I initially thought the lottery worked when I first started watching it in the 90s: randomizing all of the spots in the lottery, so bad teams can improve their chances of a better pick but have no guaranteed floor. (This would be a good tradeoff for de-flattening lottery odds.)
Others have plenty of their own suggestions for how to solve the problem. Charles Barkley, besides supporting completely flat lottery odds as in the earliest days of the lottery, called for preventing below-.500 teams from raising ticket prices and abolishing pick protections entirely. Bill Simmons has suggested that the only real solution might be hitting owners in the pocketbook, proposing restricting teams’ salary cap and refunding season ticket holders for the following season for each loss a team takes over 55, although Zach Lowe noted on Simmons’ podcast that that went against the notion of the draft as a mechanism for distributing talent (and, I would add, could send genuinely bad teams into a downward spiral) and suggested simply taking away teams’ luxury tax revenue instead.
Simmons’ podcast also saw more outlandish ideas floated with varying degrees of seriousness, such as letting high draft picks pick their teams, forcing teams with #1 picks on their rookie deals to host only two first-round playoff games, and having committees either determine the draft order entirely or just move lottery odds around based on how teams are seen to have conducted themselves during the season (versions of which were discussed separately by both Lowe and Simmons within 24 hours of each other). Silver proposed replacing the draft with an auction system where each team receives draft currency based on their finish order, which could be interesting and entertaining, but the optics of a bunch of rich white people bidding for the services of a bunch of strong, fit black people might be too cringeworthy. There have been several proposals, most recently by Kevin O’Connor, for a “draft wheel” that makes a team’s record completely irrelevant to their draft odds by dividing teams into groups whose odds rotate through several tiers year-by-year. Mark Cuban went so far as to argue that the league should embrace tanking and focus more on making games more affordable and better experiences, noting that fans typically understand the need to bottom out as the best avenue to have hopes for improvement.
Awful Announcing’s Michael Grant made the interesting argument for abolishing the draft entirely, without substantially changing anything else about the structure of the league. He claims that while sports leagues say drafts are about maintaining competitive fairness by ensuring every team has a chance to land the best rookies, they’re actually about keeping player salaries low. I’m not sure I buy that because not only is the draft somewhat orthogonal to the goal of keeping salaries low, the steps leagues actually take to advance that goal, such as rookie salary scales, are somewhat independent of the draft. Even if the goal of the draft is to reduce salaries by making the number of high-talent prospects each team has access to relatively even, there’s nothing preventing leagues from making the draft order completely random, by adopting the draft wheel or something similar, in that instance. This is a case where the simplest explanation is probably the truest one: the draft is a mechanism to enforce parity – far from the only one, but certainly an important one – by giving the worst teams an opportunity to restock and get the best talent so they can catch back up to the best teams. (It is worth noting that Stan Van Gundy’s approach to enforcing parity without the draft would also address the player salary issue, by maintaining the salary cap but removing the per-player maximum, though that assumes the most valuable teams would be dumber than they’d likely actually be.)
The problem, though, is that there’s only so much parity you can have in the NBA. There are only five players on the court at any one time, fewer than in any other true team sport, and a single player can have an outsized effect on their team’s fortunes. According to Basketball Reference, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has the most win shares per 48 minutes this season at .327. The 30th-ranked player in that metric, James Harden, has only .154 win share per 48 minutes, meaning if the top 30 players were distributed evenly across all 30 teams, the team that ended up with Harden would need two more players to match the win shares provided by Gilgeous-Alexander alone. In fact, the bottom fourteen teams, nearly half the league, would need that, putting more pressure on lower-ranked players and forcing those teams to use up more spots on the floor – of which, remember, they have only five total – just to compete with Gilgeous-Alexander alone. (In raw win shares, the 30th-ranked player has 6.6 to SGA’s 14.8, and as in win shares per 48 minutes, only 16 players come within 6.6 win shares of SGA’s total.)
If you have a generational talent, you don’t need any other players in the top 65 of the league to have at least a middle-of-the-pack, play-in worthy team. That’s not the case in any other sport. Hockey has a similarly small number of players, but cycles them in and out regularly so forwards generally don’t spend much more than a quarter of the game on the ice, and there’s a lot of luck involved in scoring and preventing goals. In baseball one player is ultimately one of nine in the batting order, and the way to maximize a star player’s production at the plate is to put other good players ahead of them to put runners on base; it’s not possible to build a whole offense around one player the way it is in the NBA. Football has 11 players on the field at any one time and players generally only take the field for half the game on offense or defense; the quarterback is the one position in any team sport that might come close to a star basketball player in terms of impact on his team’s fortunes, but it’s rare that one comes along that’s so great as to be worth tanking for, and the shorter length of the NFL season means the line between contending for the playoffs and going for the #1 overall pick is surprisingly thin. If you consider soccer a major sport, one star player can make a big difference there, but they really have to be backed up by the rest of their team.
All this explains why tanking is so much more acute, so much more of a problem, in basketball than in any other sport. When one player can make that much of a difference to a team’s fortunes, it’s probably not possible to stop tanking entirely as long as draft odds favor the worst teams. And yet, ideas like the draft wheel aside, they have to favor the worst teams because fans of those teams have to have some reason to hope for the future, have to have something worth rooting for their team for, and the one goal every team has is to win a championship. If a team isn’t in position to win a championship, the next best thing is to root for them to be as bad as possible to have the best chance to pick up a player that could put them in position to win a championship. Cuban’s claim that basketball games are more about the experience than the actual game may be questionable – that seems to more often be said about baseball – but on this front, his instincts seem to be correct: fans understand the need to tank now to maximize the chance for future glory, and removing the incentive to tank by flattening lottery odds or divorcing draft position from team records entirely comes at the cost of reducing the hope for fans of bad teams in small markets, and thus, reducing the incentive to stick with them.
But while enforced parity allows the NBA to sustain a 30-team league with fanbases invested in all of them, it’s not clear that it produces the best product. “Of all the professional sports, parity hurts the NBA the most,” Simmons wrote in a 2009 exchange with Malcolm Gladwell. “Ideally, you want a league with a distinct upper class and a distinct lower class.” The peaks of the NBA’s popularity have tended to come when it had superteams, when a handful of teams dominated the league with multiple star players on each – the 80s had Bird’s Celtics vs. Magic’s Lakers, the 90s had the Jordan-Pippen Bulls dynast(y/ies), the 2010s had the “Heatles” with LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. The occasions where already-good teams picked up the #1 overall pick, either because someone traded it to them without protections or they happened to have a down or injury-crippled year, such as when Tim Duncan went to a Spurs team that already had David Robinson, or when the Magic got the #1 overall pick in consecutive years and turned them into Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway, produced entertaining, title-competitive teams right away, whereas most of the time high draft picks struggle on teams that still need a little more talent to actually contend for titles and, more recently, start picking up bad habits as those teams continue to tank. The flattening of lottery odds in the Adam Silver era arguably represents the league internalizing the lessons of Simmons’ 2007 column on tanking: it’s not a disaster for the same team to string together multiple high draft picks and create a league of haves and have-nots. It’s only bad for fans of the have-not teams.
Regardless, given the above, it’s understandable why Simmons is skeptical that the noise about expansion the league has been making recently is a good idea. Adding two more teams means two more teams in the lottery with incentive to tank, while also spreading the talent pool even thinner so it’s that much harder to put together enough talent to catch up to the teams with the very best players. The idea that the NBA would choose now, of all times, to explore expansion, in the midst of the worst season for tanking in years, seems like lunacy. If anything, the best way to end tanking, or at least reduce its relevance, would seem to be to drastically reduce the size of the league, so there’s less of a gap from the best teams with the superstar players and the worst teams with the best chance to get the next superstar, with less of a purgatory space for the teams in the middle, not good enough to contend for a championship but too good to get the best players that would allow them to contend.
And yet, it’s not like there’s such a lack of talent that adding two more teams would require picking up scrubs off the street – indeed, in other contexts Simmons has said the depth of talent is better than ever – and there’s certainly the demand for two more teams given the values that franchises have been selling for recently (although Simmons argues that the Lakers aren’t really worth $10 billion because Mark Walter already owned a stake in the team and was paying to make it a controlling stake on top of the value of the extra shares themselves). At the very least, the lack of a team in Seattle is a stain on the league that it has inexplicably allowed to fester for nearly 20 years now. Speaking with Lowe a week ago (and on his own a few weeks before that), Simmons – who once dedicated multiple mailbag columns to showcasing the cries of Sonics fans despairing as their team was robbed from them – wondered why, if the league needed to address the lack of a team in Seattle so badly, they didn’t just relocate an existing franchise. But the solution to a problem caused by a team being ripped out of a market isn’t to rip a team out of another market, perpetuating the original sin that put the league in this position in the first place. (And it’s certainly not to move the Portland Trail Blazers, as Simmons seemed to suggest, a team Sonics fans know primarily as their longtime rival.)
The core problem is a mismatch between how fans see the relationship with their team and how leagues see it. For fans, a sports team is an integral part of the community, a rooting interest that binds them together, and in a more vulgar sense, their tribe’s warriors that establish not only their team’s, but their tribe’s, supremacy over other tribes. To take a team out of the community is to rip out the heart of the community itself – and more than that, it exposes the lie in all the other teams’ attempts to put down roots in their communities. It reminds fans that as far as leagues are concerned, teams are little more than franchises that happen to be in particular markets, and they exist in those markets only by the grace of the league, to be picked up and moved at a whim if the league or owner feels like it, and with the threat of relocation used to coax free money out of cities to build arenas and stadiums that typically bring little benefit to the community on their own. (A big reason the NBA hasn’t returned to Seattle by now is because it likes being able to hold the prospect of a Seattle relocation over existing NBA cities’ heads to coax giveaways to billionaires out of them.) That’s why the plight of the Sonics, of the Columbus Crew in Major League Soccer, even the Oakland Athletics – questionable case for remaining in the Bay Area and all – all sparked outrage not only in their own markets but among fans throughout their respective sports. The only team relocations in the traditional major sports in the last 40 years not to spark widespread outrage were the move of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg and the “Browns/Ravens”-ing of the Arizona Coyotes to Utah, two teams that essentially had no fans to speak of in the markets they left.
In the end, the only way to truly end tanking for good may well be to dispense with the idea of enforced parity entirely. That could mean adopting a draft-wheel-type system, but that still has one foot in the idea of enforcing parity by spacing out how often teams can get top talent, and it might only marginally improve the merits of expansion. The true solution to tanking, in my view, is hiding in plain sight, but the owners would never adopt it on their own. The best alternative to the draft and enforced parity, while also allowing as many teams as the market can bear to thrive, is to move to a promotion and relegation system.
In the United States, calls to adopt promotion and relegation are usually associated with soccer, where certain fans consider the existence of a closed system an abomination on the sport, but promotion and relegation is a European thing, not a soccer thing. European leagues for other sports, including basketball, use the pro/rel system as well. Basketball may be particularly well suited to promotion and relegation: it has the smallest playing field of any sport, allowing a significant number of teams without taking up a lot of space, and one that’s relatively simple to set up to the point of being present in every high school gymnasium, while the small team sizes mean it doesn’t take a lot of players to support a large number of teams. With promotion and relegation, every market that can support a team can have one that, at least nominally, has a chance to compete on the same level as the very best in the sport – but if they can’t, they can at least fight to be promoted to and stay on the top level, and place as high on the table as they can to receive higher monetary payouts for the next season. Meanwhile, if the best players concentrate in the top handful of teams, the result is a more entertaining, exciting game when they square off.
After claiming that promotion and relegation wouldn’t work for basketball, Simmons clarified that basketball players are too competitive and wouldn’t want to play for a team that’s not in the top flight, more so than in soccer. I think that’s somewhere between missing the point and completely untrue. Once the teams with a reasonably good chance of staying in the top flight every year have filled out their rosters, there should be players willing to accept the possibility or reality of competing at a lower level and fighting to get back to the top flight. There is certainly the possibility of a high-value, talented team getting unlucky with injuries and plummeting down the standings, but basing promotion and relegation on multiple years’ worth of results could temper that.
In a 2008 mailbag (alluded to in the Gladwell exchange) Simmons acknowledged that as it stood, cap space only really mattered for five “destination” franchises: the Lakers and Knicks for their history and attractive places to live, the Heat and Magic for their warm weather and lack of a state income tax, and the Suns for its warm weather, Western location, and proximity to Las Vegas. In the truly free market of a promotion and relegation system, the best talent would be expected to coalesce around those franchises. Add the Bulls, Sixers, Celtics, and Warriors as storied teams in big markets, the Mavericks or Rockets as another big-market franchise in another warm-weather, player-friendly state, and maybe replace or supplement the Suns with an actual Las Vegas team, and protect those 10-12 teams from relegation for the first five years of the system so the teams have time to start consolidating talent as contracts from the enforced-parity era expire, and also so a deadbeat owner of one of those franchises (perhaps one whose name rhymes with Dames Jolan) can bail out and sell to an actually competent owner before their incompetence tanks the value of the franchise by getting it relegated.
That gets to another virtue of a promotion and relegation system – and also why it’ll never happen without sports leagues being forced into it. Too many owners across American sports are incompetent cheapskates who can get away with putting bad teams on the field year after year because they’re not only guaranteed to have one of only 30-32 teams in one of the most lucrative sports leagues in the world, but at least in the NBA, they can actually be rewarded for losing with an all-time talent, and keep fans from turning away from them by selling the hope of such. With a truly open system, the only thing an incompetent owner can look forward to with rampant losing is relegation tanking the value of their team.
Promotion and relegation, and an overall restructuring of American professional sports to align with it, is good for players by allowing them to realize their true market value, and good for fans by giving them a relatively local team no matter where they are, aligning the actual relationship between a team and its fans with how fans perceive it, and ensuring teams have reason to compete to win every game while maximizing the quality and entertainment value of games pitting the best teams. The only group it doesn’t work for is team owners, which is why American leagues twist themselves into contortions with various enforced-parity mechanisms, and numerous other things besides, to accommodate their closed cartels and keep fans content with the status quo. The NBA may say it doesn’t want tanking, but everyone knows that as far as the people in charge are concerned, it’s far better than the alternative of introducing actual risk to owners’ investments.