During a recent podcast by the website fivethirtyeight.com, the show hosts asked fans to submit solutions to the notion that the NBA draft structure is broken which is leading to struggling teams “tanking.” I was very intrigued with this article, being someone who agrees with this belief, and judging by the nearly 7,000 responses on the website, many fans out there also believe the NBA needs to address this potential problem.
Before divulging some of fivethirtyeight.com’s favorite responses and sharing my solution to help prevent tanking, first let’s answer the question what exactly is tanking? The biggest misconception in regards to “tanking” is that it is when teams are deliberately trying to lose. Well, that isn’t exactly the case. After all, it wouldn’t be too hard to spot if on a yearly basis a few teams were all intentionally throwing games. Instead, tanking is essentially when a team doesn’t do everything it can to win, and then doing that for an extended period of time.
Now, the latter part of that is huge. Any game where a team rests a star player or two shouldn’t send up a red flag for tanking. For example, Gregg Popovich, head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, is known for, and even has even been fined for resting his trio of stars on occasion. While he runs the risk of losing that game, it’s to his team’s benefit during the season that his trio of veterans get the rest they need to make deep playoff runs. His five championship rings over the past fifteen years can also remove any doubters of his strategy I’d say.
Instead, the evidence of a team tanking is generally found near the bottom of the standings where a team has a strong chance at landing a top pick in the following year’s draft. In recent years especially, the NBA drafts haven’t been very deep with talent so teams, especially the smaller markets who struggle to land marquee free agents, are desperate to land a top pick.
The main problem I have with tanking is that it is disingenuous to the supporting fan base. Consider a family of four taking in an NBA game for a fun family night out. Estimate maybe around $100 for tickets, another $10-20 for parking potentially, the rising costs of food and refreshments, and you’re looking at around $150 to take your family out for a game. Obviously a win is never guaranteed, so the least your hometown team could do is give you their 100% effort to win the game for you, right? Unless, of course, franchises let fans know ahead of time that they have given up on trying to win games, and are instead looking to improve their draft picks all at the risk of losing all revenue from ticket sale…yeah, didn’t think so.
Fivethirtyeight.com’s only ground rules for this contest were that the fan’s proposal had to be viable, understandable and as they put it, “cool.” Otherwise, everything was fair game, so here’s a quick look at some of the top responses.
An idea titled “The Tombstone Date” suggested the amount of lottery balls a team receives will be determined by “Elimination Wins.” The author of this proposal defines Elimination Wins as victories that occur after that team has officially been eliminated from playoff contention. That day would also be known as that team’s Tombstone Day. Whichever lottery team has the most Elimination Wins after their Tombstone Day, receives the most lottery balls in the upcoming draft.
Another idea called for a lottery playoff that would immediately follow the regular season. At the end of the regular season, teams that made the playoffs will receive a week off to mentally and physically prepare for their first round opponent, while the fourteen teams who missed the playoffs will partake in a single elimination tournament to decide who gets the top picks in the draft. The top two teams would receive a first round bye, and the winner of the tournament would receive the top pick while the runner-up received the second pick. The rest of the lottery would be determined by regular season win totals giving the incentive to still win as much as possible in the regular season.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking idea, and the chosen winner by fivethirtyeight.com, was one termed The NBA Futures. In this proposal, we disregard the fact that teams own their draft picks all together, and instead, teams own stock market-style futures on other teams. In other words, teams would get to predict other team’s finishing position and therefore get that team’s pick as their own. So this year, the Minnesota Timberwolves hold the number one pick, if they wished to do the same next year, they would have to correctly guess which team would finish in the bottom next year.
I thought all of these ideas were creative, and all would hypothetically help to make even the worst of teams fight until the bitter end of the season, which as a fan, is all that we really ask. My idea was a much simpler plan, but perhaps still would be effective. The premise of my idea is very similar to what is used often in professional soccer leagues overseas known as relegation. With this rule, the bottom few teams in a league get kicked out of the league, and sent down to a lower tiered league the following season. On the flip side, the top three teams in the lower league then move to a higher tiered league to replace them. The perk here of course is while the top teams are fighting for the league title, the struggling teams near the bottom are fighting just as hard but just for them to stay in the league. Obviously from a franchise standpoint, the higher the league you are in, the more money you make from things like sponsorship and ticket/merchandise sales, and then thus the likelier you sign better players, and ultimately win games.
Now, my idea of relegating teams of course wouldn’t fall into the “viable” category which fivethirtyeight.com required because here in the United States, we don’t have any other professional basketball leagues that could compete with the NBA, so I tweaked it a bit. In my scenario, the bottom three teams wouldn’t get relegated out of the league, but instead would be relegated out of the lottery itself, and would instead automatically pick 12th, 13th, and 14th in the upcoming draft. The remaining eleven teams would make up the lottery and the lottery balls would be divided amongst those teams in a similar fashion to how they are currently distributed in today’s NBA Draft Lottery system.
My thought is, usually when you question how many teams are tanking in the NBA, it’s only a few. Sixteen of the league’s thirty teams make the playoffs to begin with, and there’s always a couple teams in each conference vying for the playoffs so they’re also not tanking. That typically leaves just a handful of teams that can see the writing on the wall and therefore know their season is all but over well before the rest of the league. However, those teams will want to win as many games as possible to stay out of the bottom three. Directly from that, teams that are just above those bottom teams, won’t be able to sit comfy either knowing the teams below them still want a shot at the number one pick.