Tanking has the chance to become the NBA’s biggest scandal since Tim Donaghy.
For that reason, the NBA is considering more changes to the draft lottery.
Via Shams Charania of ESPN.com, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told the league’s General Managers on Thursday that changes could be coming to the NBA’s draft lottery.
Per the report, several concepts are being considered. Possibilities include freezing the lottery odds at the trade deadline or some other date, preventing teams from picking in the top four in consecutive years (and/or after consecutive finishes in the bottom three spots in the league), preventing teams from picking in the top four the year after making it to the conference finals, determining lottery odds based on the combined record over two seasons, extending the lottery to include the play-in teams, and flattening the odds for all lottery teams.
None of those devices would eliminate tanking. It would simply change the analysis for teams that are hoping to land a key prospect in the next draft. Until the incentives to win are fully aligned with the incentive to get the best incoming players, some team at some point will be tempted to try to not win games.
On Thursday, Silver reportedly was “forceful” regarding his message that the problem must be solved.
And it must be. As Suns owner Mat Isbhia said on Thursday, teams trying to lose games is bigger than any prop-bet controversy the league has experienced. Beyond tanking being an integrity problem, it can become a business problem. Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal, citing multiple unnamed high-level team executives, reports that tanking is “now affecting ticket values and game experience across the league.”
How can it not be? Although former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban has said that the league should embrace tanking and focus instead on game experience, how does tanking help game experience if a fan purchases tickets weeks or months in advance with the anticipation that the “experience” will include watching star players who ultimately don’t play for reasons other than injury, the experience is diminished.
It’s a mess for the NBA. It’s an embarrassment to the game. The only true solutions are to set the draft order randomly every year or to determine the draft order not based on worst-to-first but first-to-worst.
If dibs on incoming players were one of the spoils of victory, every team would try its damnedest to win every game. Likewise, if the worst teams no longer have the inside track to the best new players, there’s no reason to do anything other than win as many games as possible.
The proposed changes will simply muddy the draft-lottery waters with more factors and complications. Some teams will still find a way to game the system by not trying to win each and every game.
And while tanking is not yet a full-boil problem for the NFL, pro football needs to be watching what’s happening to the NBA. At some point, the NFL may need to come up with an approach other than its current one — ignore it.
That’s why there’s no NFL draft lottery. Anything other than a firewall between being bad in the regular season and parading around for several months with a prime draft pick opens the door to normalizing talk of tanking.
Unfortunately for the NFL, the fact that tanking has become such a hot topic for basketball will necessarily splash a little mud on the NFL’s current ability to keep people from noticing the clear connection between losing late-season games and winning offseason benefits.
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