Why the NBA's Tanking Discussion is Overblown and Disingenuous

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver speaks at all the NBA’s marquee events, like the NBA Finals, Summer League, and the All-Star game. This year, the first question he got at the Intuit Dome, just before the league put on its All-Star Saturday events, was about tanking. And people are latching onto this quote:

“Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view,” he said.

That's the headline everyone is running with, but buried in his answer is the acknowledgement that despite a couple of teams taking it to extreme levels, not that many people actually have a problem with it.

The issue at hand is the Utah Jazz, following in the footsteps of last year’s Toronto Raptors, playing fast and loose with the league’s anti-tanking regulations. They aren’t sitting healthy players, they're just not playing them down the stretch of winnable games. That's led to some blown leads and losses that probably should have been wins.

And I admit that's not a great look, but the fans in Utah don’t seem to mind. They're getting to see the promise of what could be, then they're losing games and better positioning themselves for a stacked draft. Even Silver gets that. As part of his same answer on tanking, he said, “In many cases, you have fans of those teams — remember, it’s not what they want to pay for to see poor performance on the floor, but they’re actually rooting for their teams in some cases to be bad to improve their draft chances.”

The rumor swirling around the league is that OKC’s Sam Presti is pressuring the NBA to keep the Jazz in line because the Thunder are owed Utah’s draft pick this season if it falls below eight. The Jazz have the sixth-worst record, but if they rose to ninth, the overwhelming odds are that the pick would go to the Thunder.

And so the Commissioner fined the Jazz half a million bucks and told them to cut it out.

Presti, used to be the Northwest Division’s best M1 Abrams operator, but now that the Thunder are champs with a boat load of draft picks, no one cares how they got there. Presti is a genius, the Thunder are the best-run team in the league, and everyone marvels at how perfectly they are set up for the future.

But I remember when a healthy Al Horford was sent home for helping the Thunder win too much. I remember Presti voting against lottery reform, which was presented to discourage tanking.

Does anyone care about that anymore? No. Of course not. Because it worked for the Thunder, so now we all turn our attention to the next team trying to follow in their footsteps, clutching our pearls, wondering why no one is thinking about the children.

How dare these teams do what teams have been doing since the lottery system was put in place? How dare they recognize a loaded draft and an opportunity to instantly become winners? Why aren’t they willing to win a few more games and rise to … well … the middle of the pack?

The Commissioner knows.

“This is where teams are in a difficult place,” he said. “Many of you in this room have written understandably about our teams that the worst place to be, for example, is to be a middle-of-the-road team. Either be great or be bad, because then that will help you with the draft.”

Yes. Most people in that room have written that, haven't they? All of us in the media know that teams either have to be good, or be bad. If you’re not one of those, then you’re the Chicago Bulls, and no one wants to be the Chicago Bulls.

Yes, John, we get that. We’re not necessarily mad at the Jazz, we’re mad at the system, which rewards this behavior.

And that's certainly fair, but there's no answer to this system that doesn’t create another problem. No matter where you assign the top odds, a team will try to manipulate the system to get to that spot. The league wants the worst teams to have the best chance at getting good in a hurry, so there will always be an issue. Silver said the league is “reexamining the whole approach to how the draft lottery works,” but no matter what they do, tanking will be an issue as long as the worst teams are getting the best picks.

Can the league tweak things to make it better? Certainly. Eliminating pick protections might help alleviate some of the issues. If Utah owed the Thunder their pick this season without protections, they’d be incentivised to be better so they don’t feel as bad about losing the pick. A lot of the recent tanking has been more about keeping protected picks instead of falling to the bottom to get the biggest star. Wanting to tone that down makes sense.

But tanking itself will never be stopped. However, the sanctimonious crying about how it’s such a massive problem can be. The complaints about tanking have been happening for years, and much like the political discourse in this country, the script from which people read to make those complaints gets passed around depending on who is good and who is bad.

Well, this new CBA is going to make sure every team is bad at some point, and those bad teams will have to tank to start getting good again. OKC will be back at the bottom some day. So will the Nuggets, Celtics, and every other team that has seen some recent success. The CBA is destructive by design, and the top of the heap will be at the bottom before you know it.

When they're there, they will be as bad as they can be, and we shouldn’t care that they're doing it. We’ll be able to occupy ourselves by the teams who already tanked and drafted the guy who made them good, celebrating those front offices for all the work they did to build around their young star.

The complaints about tanking are conceptual and overblown, and the Thunder (and the Spurs, twice, by the way, and others) are living proof. Once it works, people move on and complain about the next team. If the Jazz win the lottery and start reaching the playoffs, the Ainges will be celebrated just like San Antonio and OKC right now. They’ll move on to the next sausage factory, peer into the window, and complain about how their sausages are made, all the while enjoying a sausage sub like it’s 2 a.m. outside a club near Fenway.

We get it. It’s not ideal, but it’s not the end of the world. The fans of those teams understand, the fans of the opponents are happy to get some easy wins, and we all know that in a not-so-loaded draft, the tanking won’t be as bad as it is this year.

So just let go of the pearls. We are thinking of the children, and they’ll be just fine, just like they have always been.