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Tim Bontemps
Multiple Authors
ON THURSDAY NIGHT, the Indiana Pacers will be in the nation’s capital to face the Washington Wizards and tip off the NBA’s post-All Star break schedule.
It’s a game that should be compelling. Ivica Zubac, Indiana’s recently acquired starting center, has yet to play a game for the club. The same goes for both of Washington’s recent All-Star acquisitions, point guard Trae Young and big man Anthony Davis. Throw in the presence of Pacers All-Star forward Pascal Siakam, and that’s a lot of reasons to tune into a game between teams with a combined 29 wins.
Instead, Zubac remains out with an ankle injury that was announced by Pacers coach Rick Carlisle after Indiana made the trade — one that didn’t prevent him from playing in 15 of 16 games before the LA Clippers dealt him. Young remains sidelined with leg injuries the Wizards diagnosed when they obtained him last month from the Atlanta Hawks, as does Davis with a hand injury he suffered before being acquired from the Dallas Mavericks earlier this month.
Meanwhile, later Thursday, the Utah Jazz will visit the Memphis Grizzlies in what would’ve been a homecoming of Jaren Jackson Jr., who was acquired in a stunning deal by the Jazz ahead of the Feb. 5 trade deadline.
Instead, Utah — after playing Jackson in a few games and getting fined $500,000 for its handling of his and Lauri Markkanen’s playing time in a contest it won in Miami — shut down Jackson for the season after knee surgery. Both teams now seem invested only in piling up losses through the end of the season.
Instead of two games with exciting storylines for fans, these are anything but. And it’s because these three teams — Indiana, Washington and Utah — all have draft picks this year whose value depends on how high they land in May’s lottery. And they’re not alone, either.
That’s why, in two separate answers about tanking that came up in his annual All-Star weekend news conference, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said “incentives” five different times.
“The incentives are not necessarily matched here,” Silver said. “I think the tradition in sports where the worst-performing team receives the first pick from their partners, when any economist comes and looks at our system, they always point out: You have the incentives backwards there.
“That doesn’t necessarily make sense.”
But in truth, it does. Because that’s the way the league has incentivized teams in the lottery to behave.
“Until the league changes the system,” an Eastern Conference executive said, “teams are going to continue to lose if that’s the best way to get players.”
As a result, any discussion about the topic of tanking, and ways to address it, has to begin with the same question: What solution is there that could change those incentives?
What follows is a proposal to fix the NBA’s tanking problem from a longtime league executive.
IN MUCH OF the discussion on trying to fix tanking, the focus has been on trying to de-emphasize losing. Each idea — from removing the ability to protect picks in the middle of the draft lottery to abolishing the draft to completely flattening the odds — all would make it less desirable for teams to lose.
What none of them do, however, is push them to win. But this plan does.
Currently, the order for the NBA draft lottery is determined by which teams have the most losses at the end of the regular season. But consider: At a certain point in the regular season — say, the All-Star break — things would flip, and for the rest of the season a team’s wins would go toward improving its lottery odds instead.
How would this look in practice? Let’s use last season’s standings as an example. Here is how last season’s lottery standings would have changed if this rule had been in place for games after the All-Star break:
The Toronto Raptors (due to an incredibly easy schedule that even strong attempts to tank couldn’t overcome), Chicago Bulls and Hawks would have been the big winners. Toronto would have moved from No. 7 to No. 2, Chicago would have moved from No. 12 to a tie for No. 3 and Atlanta would have moved from a tie for No. 13 to No. 8 in the lottery odds.
Conversely, the Jazz and 76ers — who each went 4-24 after the All-Star break — would have dropped from No. 1 and No. 5 in the lottery standings to a tie for No. 5 and a tie for No. 12, respectively.
Now, since I can’t rewrite history, let’s take a look at what the lottery would’ve looked like last season if teams had simply replicated their winning percentages from before the break through the final couple months of the season:
Utah would have dropped to No. 3 (from No. 1), and Philadelphia dropped to No. 7 (from No. 5) and Chicago and Atlanta moved up to No. 8 (from No. 12) and No. 10 (from No. 13), respectively. But while there was some minor movement in the standings, it didn’t radically alter the standings.
One argument that has been levied against implementing this system is that it would be too impactful for teams at the bottom of the standings. But the fact that a Wizards team that went 9-45 before the All-Star break last season would still land it in the top spot with a 5-23 record after it underscores that shouldn’t be a significant problem.
And again, the goal needs to be about creating a need for teams to try to win.
“Anything that would reasonably incentivize teams to win is better for the fans and a better outcome than ‘team needs to have a star,'” a Western Conference scout said.
“The more fun thing at the end of the day is everyone trying.”
IN ALL THE discussions on this topic, it’s that last point — trying to create the best product possible — that often gets lost.
Imagine a world in which the Pacers, Wizards and Jazz would all benefit from playing Zubac, Young, Davis and Jackson Jr. down the stretch of the season. Would those teams not be far more entertaining, and their fans more engaged?
What about Kyrie Irving, who ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Wednesday has been ruled out for the season, being given a reason to come back and get some on-court time with Mavericks rookie Cooper Flagg this season? What about eliminating the soon-to-be awkward discussion between Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo, who has repeatedly said he wants to come back and play this season, and a franchise that is far better off not having the best player in franchise history do so?
Then take a young team such as the Charlotte Hornets, a franchise that has been starved for success for nearly two decades. Under the current system, if the Hornets make a strong second-half push and miss the playoffs, they likely will wind up with a late lottery pick instead of a solid shot at another difference-making talent.
Under this proposal, a team streaking to the finish line such as Charlotte would be rewarded with a better chance at jumping up in the draft.
Right now, though, the opposite is happening.
As of Thursday night, one can reasonably argue that nine teams — the Wizards, Jazz, Bucks, Mavericks, Pacers, Bulls, Grizzlies, Sacramento Kings and Brooklyn Nets — will probably be spending the next two months doing everything they can to lose every game possible. That’s 30% of the league (and it would be even higher if the Hawks and New Orleans Pelicans controlled their top picks).
All of that creates damaging apathy.
“[This proposal] would be a very unique way to rally your fan base instead of this slow drift away until the lottery in May, because there’s nothing to root for,” an Eastern Conference scout said.
“It’s not just the teams. It’s communities, bars, restaurants … there’s a lot of people who rely on an entertaining product for their livelihoods. And I feel for them.”
LIKE WITH ANY rule change, details matter.
A firm date would have to be established — some sources ESPN spoke to argued for the trade deadline, others the All-Star break and some would rather tie it simply to a number of games on the schedule. If it is the All-Star break, the NBA would have to massage the schedule so that every team played the same number of games before it.
Over the past week, ESPN spoke to more than 10 coaches, scouts and executives across the NBA about this idea. Each person was in favor of implementing it, pointing to the fact that it actually impacts the incentives that underpin the way teams are operating. Some had concerns they would want to address, however.
The first concern was trying to avoid harsh penalties for the worst teams. To address that, one source suggested a tweak on this proposal with weighted wins and losses; doing it this way, the source said, would still incentivize teams to win but wouldn’t punish the less-talented teams quite as much.
The second concern involved teams with a star player who might suffer a legitimate injury, which would derail an otherwise promising season and, under this proposal, lose lottery positioning as a result.
A third concern was that teams, knowing they had two less months to lean into any tanking plan, would be even more aggressive in attempting to do so in the early months of the season.
That said, given how the opening few months of this season have played out, it’s hard to argue the competitiveness could get much worse.
“We want to have fair competition,” Silver said over the weekend. “We want to have fair systems and to keep an eye on the fans, most importantly, and their expectation that we’re going to be putting the best product forward.”
As the NBA begins to fully assess what to do about tanking over the next several months, and what remedies it will employ to curb the issue, this is what the league’s North Star should be: how it’s going to put its best product forward.
Every other plan that has been discussed or debated does the opposite. Each centers on how to make the product less bad, rather than to make it better.
There’s a reason the idea of relegation — while it will never happen for a zillion reasons in the NBA, or any of the other sports here in the United States — is held up as a way to get rid of this problem. There’s no reason for an English Premier League team to go into a game thinking about losing. Instead, its only focus is on winning.
This idea will be explored again at the NBA’s board of governors meeting next month, and it has some backing. Whether it gets enacted, though, and whether the issue finally gets resolved, remains to be seen.
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