While the NBA’s focus is fixed on the Finals, in NetsWorld, talk is more about whether Brooklyn will tank again. We asked our ProfessorB, who dabbles in the NBA when not surveying the world to give us and the Commish his take.
Mr. Commissioner, the NBA has an embarrassing problem—too many teams doing their best to lose. “Right now there are nine teams tanking,” a league executive told ESPN in March. That would imply that about half the league’s games involved at least one team trying to lose. Not infrequently, in a twisted parody of sports, both teams were trying to lose. “And next year’s draft is going to have maybe more franchise players than this year’s draft,” that executive added. “A year from now, you may still have nine teams tanking.”
The reason, of course, is the draft. In a sport where one star can transform a team’s fortunes, any system in which losing records result in high picks creates a big incentive to lose. Since the 1980s, the NBA has relied on the draft lottery to blunt that incentive. Unfortunately, despite repeated tinkering with the odds, it hasn’t worked. Instead, you have the worst of both worlds—more and more teams tanking, while the lottery dilutes the whole point of the draft, which is to funnel talent to bad teams to increase competitiveness.
You have acknowledged that tanking is a “serious issue” and assured us that the league is “always looking to see whether there’s yet a better system.” Well, there is. It would completely eliminate the incentive for teams to lose, while also preserving the draft’s basic goal of increasing competitiveness. Simply require every team to trade their first-round pick before the season starts. Bad teams would get much more return for their picks, increasing competitiveness. But once the picks were traded, no team would benefit from losing games. Win-win.
Following a stretch in which the worst team received the top pick in four straight drafts (a 1-in-256 fluke), you reduced the worst team’s chance of getting the top pick to just 14%. But even that has not discouraged teams from tanking. If anything, spreading the odds has tempted more teams to get in on the action. It has also substantially undermined the effectiveness of the draft as a talent equalizer.
This year’s lottery outcomes underlined that cost. The right to draft Duke star Cooper Flagg went to the 39-43 Mavericks, who were in the NBA finals just a year ago. The second pick went to the 34-48 Spurs, who will get to pair another top talent with their generational pick from 2023, Victor Wembanyama. The worst teams in the league, the Jazz and Wizards and Hornets, landed outside the top three, and they’ll be back tanking again next season.
Your fitful attempts to directly penalize tanking have been even less effective. This season, you fined the Jazz $100,000 for repeatedly sitting star forward Lauri Markkanen. They could recoup that money twice over by raising next season’s ticket prices by 25 cents. Two years ago, you fined the Mavericks $750,000 for sitting key players in the last game of the season, intentionally missing the playoffs to retain a conditional draft pick. They ended up with Dereck Lively, who has turned out to be one of the best young players in the league. When his rookie contract is finished, the Mavericks will happily pay Lively about 250 times that $750,000 to play for four more seasons.
You have broad power to impose stiffer penalties. But given the difficulty of distinguishing intentional tanking from legitimate injuries and roster management choices, penalties stiff enough to matter would inevitably be highly arbitrary, incentivizing teams to game the league’s enforcement rules while still trying to lose. It would be fairer and much more effective to eliminate the incentive to tank in the first place.
If nothing is done, the tanking scandal will be exacerbated by the league’s newest trend—bad teams trading to reclaim their own picks, just so they can tank. Brooklyn Nets GM Sean Marks innovated that strategy last summer, trading a treasure trove of future assets to retrieve the team’s first-round picks in 2025 and 2026 from Houston. Oddsmakers got the message, picking the Nets to finish last in the league this season. When the team unexpectedly won nine of its first 19 games, Marks traded starting point guard Dennis Schoder for an injured player (and more draft picks) to get the tank back on track.
“These are the decisions you have to make when your ultimate goal is long-term sustainable success,” Marks told reporters euphemistically. Later, he conceded that “some of the decisions we make … may not always be in line with winning the next game or putting the most talent out there.”
The Nets were only modestly rewarded for their efforts, ending up with the 8th pick in this year’s draft; but they will have another chance to tank next season. Meanwhile, speculation has turned back to Houston, which may be able to turn yet another big profit by trading the picks received from the Nets back home to Phoenix, setting up another epic race to the bottom.
Letting teams retrieve their picks is the exact opposite of what you should be doing—requiring them to trade their picks. This simple fix would not only eliminate the incentive to tank; it would also enhance the equalizing efficiency of the draft by eliminating the need for a lottery. If they wanted, the worst team in the league could simply swap draft picks with the second-worst team—and then spend the season striving to surpass them in the standings. Both would be significantly better off than they are in the current lottery system, which gives them just a 40% chance of a top-three pick.
Would trading all those picks be a huge headache for NBA teams? Not really. Most teams had already traded their 2025 picks before the season started, at least conditionally. Additional trades would just get rolled into the annual summer flurry of deal-making. And teams would retain a good deal of flexibility regarding trade strategies. A team hungry for young talent might simply swap picks with a similarly good or bad team. Another team might prefer to trade for an established player, producing immediate improvement, or for additional picks in future drafts.
Of course, some teams would make better trades than others. No system can prevent bad management from making bad decisions. But the same might be said of the draft. The Kings had top-ten picks in ten straight drafts from 2009 through 2018, but zero winning seasons. The Hornets had top-ten picks in ten of twelve drafts between 2004 and 2015 before getting their first playoff win in 2016. The Pistons won no playoff game between 2008 and 2025; they are finally regaining respectability after landing four straight top-five picks. The Wizards have had top-ten picks in five of the last six drafts, but find themselves near the top of the lottery again this season. Requiring these teams to trade their picks might have been a blessing in disguise.
Tanking is an affront to the spirit of sports. As The Athletic’s Eric Koreen wrote following a titanic late-season tank fight between the Jazz and the Raptors, “This is getting gross, as it often does in the NBA at this time of the year.” The way to end that chronic embarrassment is to eliminate the incentive for teams to tank.
Please get on it, Mr. Silver.