The NBA's Anti-Tanking Proposals Make No Sense

Last week, the NBA Board of Governors, they met in New York.

They talked expansion.

They talked a new Euroleague, and yes, they talked about fixing tanking.

Here we go.

The barnacle on the league's backside, tanking, uh, which has grown larger this season, and, uh, Adam Silver says the NBA is hell-bent on fixing it.

Take a listen.

It has business implications, has basketball implications, has integrity, integrity implications for the league.

So it's one that we take very seriously.

Um, and we were gonna fix it, uh, full stop.

So Rachel, the NBA has promised a vote on tanking reforms , and I want to run down the three reforms that were discussed.

If you can do this quickly, I really admire you because they're so convoluted.

I'm going to try to truncate it as best I can.

Uh, the first one is an 18-team lottery.

The 10 teams that missed the play and the 8 that qualified, the bottom 10 teams have.

X percentage, I don't know what it is to, to get the, one of the top picks, then it descends from there.

The second one is where 22 teams are in the lottery with with records that are weighted across two seasons, which is the most complicated of the, the three proposals.

The third option, which is the 5 by 5 method, and this one, the same 18 teams.

From the first concept.

The bottom 10 that missed the plan plus the 8 that make it, they would go into the lottery.

The teams with the 5 worst records would then all have the same odds with them descending from there, and there would be a lottery drawing for each of the top 5 picks in the draft.

Um, your thoughts?

Wind her up and let her watch her go.

Uh, look, I, I think all of this is insane and ridiculous.

This is not addressing the problem.

It is just trying to address the symptom.

Tanking is a symptom.

Tanking is not the problem.

It is a symptom of teams not having enough good ways to get better.

No team wants to tank.

No team sits there and like, you know what would be great this year?

Let's alienate a bunch of our fans.

Teach our players how to lose and string together as many losses as we can so our attendance dip, our profits dip, our concessions dip.

Nobody is looking to do this.

They are doing it because they have to.

So making it harder for bad teams to get good is going in the opposite direction that we need, which is what all of these proposals would do.

My proposal is get rid of the lottery.

The worst team.

Should get the best picks and then maybe put in a rule or two of like, hey, you can't pick in the top 5 in consecutive years.

You can't pick in the top 52 out of 3 years, whatever it is that you want to keep teams from just bottoming out and bottoming it out, but at least give them the chance to get better.

Now you're talking about with some of these reforms, some of these proposals have teams that lost in the first round.

Get the chance at the number one pick?

Let's say the Nuggets and the Lakers play in the first round against each other this season.

One of them could get the top pick, and a team that hasn't gotten to the playoffs in a decade, can't, can't get a sniffet.

Come on, man.

Like , I just don't understand how we have seen reactionary rule changes fail over time, over and over again.

The player participant.

rule that we are just talking about now, oh my gosh , you're watching a guy like Cade Cunningham who absolutely deserves to be on an all NBA team, not make one because we were so scared about one thing we had to make a rule about something else.

Now you are talking about a time where what?

The supermax was a result of Kevin Durant going to Golden State, and now we've all got problems with the way the supermax operates.

This is gonna be yet.

Another thing that people are gonna rush, wave their hands around, make a convoluted rule change that doesn't actually fix the problem, and we're gonna be sitting here in 5 years saying, oh, they gotta undo that.

Here's my bottom line, Chris.

The bottom line is this, if the owners wanted to fix tanking, they wouldn't need any of these rules.

They would need to pinky promise each other that none of their teams were gonna tank because you know who controls tanking?

The owners of the teams.

None of these teams are tanking.

Oh my God, how is this happening?

How is this happening in our league?

I don't know.

They're, it's happening because these owners are letting their teams tank.

Fix your own problems.

Clean up your own house.

I agree with you, um, on the fundamental problem that it doesn't address the issue of the worst teams getting the best players.

That is the fundamental problem that the league has, and the idea that you're gonna put 18 teams in the lottery, or why have a lottery?

Almost it's almost like, why have a lottery?

You can sit there or why have a draft.

It, it is it.

It's, it's nice to say that there are other ways for teams to get better.

There are not.

There is one realistic way for teams to get better, and that is through the draft.

The Charlotte Hornets are a great example of this.

The Charlotte Hornets, one of the better stories in the NBA.

How many years in a row have they been in the lottery?

I'm like 6, something like that.

Lamelo Ball, how many years in the league has he been?

Lamelo Ball, Con Knipple, Miles Bridges, Brandon Miller, like.

These are high draft picks that they've needed to keep churning to get to the point where they've got the foundation of a young contender.

That's done through the draft.

Go through the list of recent champions.

The Boston Celtics fundamentally are a team that was built through the draft.

Um, Oklahoma City Thunder Oklahoma City, San Antonio Spurs.

Oklahoma City made a good trade with Shay.

But fundamentally built through the draft.

That's another problem with these reforms, by the way.

You had teams that made trades based on the rules as they are now.

If you pass any of these three proposed lottery reforms, you are completely changing the value of the picks that those players were traded for.

No, no, no, think about that.

I want you to think about that, right?

You had players recently traded for a lot of picks.

Those picks now will have a completely different value.

How is that fair to the teams that made those trades?

It's not, uh, and, and you'd have to, I would think if you do any of these rules.

Like, could you make it?

Like, could, could they, would they have to be enacted years down the line?

Like it is, it is unfair for the teams that have built out a collection of draft picks.

And look, there are other teams out there who have crappy draft picks.

All of a sudden their crappy draft picks are now gonna be worth more.

That's not fair to any of these teams.

And by the way, the kicker on all of this, on all of this is it has been reported that if Adam Silver still.

After any of these changes, he thinks the team is tanking, that he will be able to sit there and reach in and take away a draft pick or kick it to the end.

And by the way, how in the world is he gonna do that?

You heard him at All-Star.

Like at All-Star, he's like, we don't want to do this.

We can't be the tanking police.

It was bad enough they had to slap two teams with six-figure fines.

I, I don't think that is, that's deal.

When it gets to the votes, you and I were talking just before we went on air, and I'd love you to repeat it if you can, that the masterful job one of these teams is doing right now to say which, which team it was, but I was talking to a coach that recently played against one of these tanking teams, and he was telling me about the masterful job the coach of the tanking team did.

Um, to tank down the against them to tank down the stretch, effectively running low percentage plays.

Like it doesn't look like tanking.

It's not tanking because your guys out there trying to score, but you're running low percentage plays.

I, I, that, that was a new one to me that, that struck me on Adam Silver is gonna get into the X's and O's down the line.

I mean, come on, they don't wanna do that.

I would love them to sit here and say we're getting rid of the lottery.

See, let me, let me, let me hit you on this because.

I was on that team for a while.

I, I've been kind of talked out of it over the last few days when I brought this up to, uh, people that are on the board of governors, people in the league.

One thing that's brought to my attention is that like you couldn't just do it without having safeguards in like you talked about.

Like you can't draft in the top 52 years in a row.

But what that does, the way it was explained to me by some people, like what that could do is that other teams.

Because they're, they're thinking, they're these teams are smart.

Like they're like, wait a minute, we don't have to be like one of the 5 worst teams in the NBA to get the number 1 overall pick.

We just have to be like 5 to 10 because if you can't, like the team that gets the 1st overall pick probably isn't gonna be that good the next year.

But like, so these teams out there, it would make it easier for teams that are kind of in the middle to strategically plan to be there, and they can get the top pick.

If that makes sense , they can get the top pick.

Just by being 5 to 10 because if that those teams in the bottom 5 can't draft 2 years in a row, but I, I wouldn't say that.

I would say it's they can't draft in the top 22 years in a row.

They can't draft in the top 3.

You, you can make a sliding scale of like, OK, they can't drop in the top 22 years in a row.

They can't draft in the top 33 years in a row.

They can't drop, you know, I mean, you, you make it so that it's a scale.

The, the, to sort of summarize in a, a vague way, that is a system that NBA people believe is easily manipulated.

That that they can, I know, but it's not, look, I was on board.

I was abolished the lottery truther as of like 3 days ago, like when I started talking to league people about this, the bottom line is if owners in this league wanted to stop teams from tanking, it would happen tomorrow.

They would go down to the front office and say, Hey , you're not allowed to tank anymore.

We've decided as an ownership group it is to the detriment of the league.

We have decided across the board, 30 owners, soon to be 32 owners, that we just, none of our.

Teams are allowed to tank anymore and we are all going to our front offices and we are going to say no more tanking.

That's what would happen to curb tanking.

That's the only way it's gonna get done.

But the problem is no one trusts each other and no one would actually do it.

So don't sit here and be hypocrites and make 14 rules that involve 18 teams and 16 draft picks and 14 lottery picks.

And by the way, your picks that you thought you were trading for aren't valuable anymore.

And now these are and all the stuff.

If you are not going to walk downstairs to your GM and say no more, then don't sit here and have this farce of rules changes for me, because all it's gonna do is make it more complicated.

It's going to make it harder for fans to know what they're even rooting for, right, in draft lotteries and in drafts and any of this stuff, and it could be easily solved tomorrow by you guys.

So do it.

If you really believe this is the scourge of the league, solve it yourselves.

Don't make all these rules, all these reforms.

I don't think any of them pass.

Um, I think it's far more likely that we see much more minor tweaks to the system that already exists, whether that's protections that say in the current system you can't draft in the top for two years in a row.

Pick protections, not eliminated because that's a tough one to get by the competition committee, but You can't do certain things, certain takeaways.

You can't be in this Indiana range where it's like 1 to 5, 10 to whatever, like those, those you, you get to keep.

So, I, I think that's more likely to be on the table in May.

I, I've looked at these, I've made a whole bunch of calls.

I don't think any of them pass.

And if they do, I don't think it's a good idea because I think you're gonna wind up seeing a lot of teams that need these players, not get these players.

The worst thing, the worst thing that could could have happened to, uh, advocates of the lottery system is what happened last year with the Mavericks getting number one.

And the Spurs getting number 2.

The Spurs getting Dylan Harper with the 2nd overall pick with low percentage, less than 5%.

Same thing with Dallas, less than 5%.

Dallas had a 1.9% chance of getting that pick.

Again, there should be no lottery.

There should be some rules in place that you can't manipulate the system at least as much as possible, but guys, if you want to eliminate tanking as ownership, go downstairs and tell your GMs you cannot tank but their GMs are gonna tell them like how else are we gonna get better, man, dude.

Again, I'm sitting here.

I'm the one saying tanking is the symptom.

It's not the problem.

But if you want to insist it's the problem, and you want to insist it needs to be stopped right now, go do it.

Whose voice was that?

That was all of the owners combined together.

That was a collective.

Go do it.

You don't need 18 convoluted rule changes.

You can just do it yourselves.

And if you're not gonna be big boys and assorted girls and do it yourselves, don't sit here and screw with the fans and screw with the players and sit here and make all these rule changes and make us not know.

It's just.

Like the NBA's got a problem where a lot of their stuff is complicated.

Like the in-season tournament is complicated.

Nobody really gets it.

And when I Say to certain NBA people like this makes the lottery more complicated.

Like, no, no, no, it just adds on to it.

Well, the lottery was already complicated.

You're further complicating what was already kind of a complicated system.

So hard.

I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm all for simpler solutions when it comes to this.

I'm just not sure that the NBA is ultimately gonna get there.