The Process Sixers may have tanked in the most blatant fashion. But even that claim is becoming questionable.
With the team having returned to the bottom of the NBA, many emotions from yesteryear are coming back for Sixers fans. Sunday night’s win against Utah probably brought up some strong feelings for a lot of Process loyalists. With the loss, the Jazz dropped to 15-49. It’s the second-worst record in the NBA. Charlotte is even in the win column at 15-48 and New Orleans holds the fourth-worst record at 17-48. While Sixers fans are preoccupied with their own race for the fifth lottery slot, Washington, Utah and Charlotte have their own incentives to remain with one of the league’s three worst records — and New Orleans would probably love to crash the party.
Since it’s been nearly a decade since the Sixers participated in the lottery, you might have missed a change that happened after the 2017 lottery which was the last one Philadelphia was involved in. Ahead of the 2019 draft lottery, the odds were smoothed out amongst the non-playoff teams making it less likely for the worst teams to pick in the top three. At the top of the lottery, there is now no difference between the worst record and the third-worst record. The first, second and third-worst records all come with a 14% chance of acquiring the No. 1 overall selection.
To create further chaos at the top of the draft, the NBA added a lottery drawing for the fourth overall selection. Previously, lottery drawings were conducted for the first three picks meaning the team with the worst record could pick no worse than fourth. The odds were also weighted more heavily towards the teams with the worst records so a team that finished as the league’s worst not only held a 25% chance to win the first pick, but also held a 64% chance to win one of the three lottery drawings and stay in the top three. Now? Not only have the odds for the worst team to secure the first pick plummeted by 11%, but with the fourth lottery drawing in place, each team with one of the three worst records in the NBA holds just a 52% chance of winning one of the four drawings and drafting in the top four. Detroit bore the brunt of this in last year’s lottery as the 14-68 Pistons held the league’s worst record, but did not win any of the four lottery drawings, and went on to draft fifth.
Now that we’ve explained all that, it’s easy to see why this came into play this past Sunday when Utah visited Wells Fargo Center. With the first, second and third-worst records all meaning the same for lottery, the Jazz are best served not to win too many games in the season’s final quarter and risk falling to the fourth slot in the lottery, which is where the odds begin to drop off. The Jazz and Hornets are both only two wins clear of the Pelicans and even though things are less certain for the teams at the top of the lottery, it sure seems as if obtaining the most lottery combinations is the only thing that matters to the Jazz. Take a look at Utah’s injury report entering Sunday night in what was a rare opportunity for Utah to win a game.
The Utah Jazz have issued an injury report for tomorrow’s game.
It is impressive.
— Austin Krell (@austinkrell.bsky.social) 2025-03-08T22:48:34.349Z
Sure enough, the Jazz lost by just four points to Philly. It’s not at all hyperbolic to suggest that had Utah been “healthier,” it could have improved by more than four points against the Sixers and won the game. New Orleans lost again on Sunday night therefore if Utah had defeated Philadelphia, the Jazz would have been hanging on to one of the top three lottery slots by just one game. Instead, Utah continues to hold a two-game cushion for one of the coveted top three spots.
The point we’re really trying to make here is that tanking wars are always going to happen in a league in which teams are so reliant on star-level talent like the NBA. You simply do not have a chance to win the title absent at least one, and probably two, superstars on your roster. If Adam Silver and the rest of the NBA league office thought that changing the lottery odds was going to curb tanking, they are sorely mistaken. Sure, the randomness come lottery night has increased, but that’s not stopping teams from seeking out the most ping-pong ball combinations they can obtain and pressing their luck from there.
Sixers fans have likely spent months tracking the lottery odds now with hopes of getting to the fifth slot by season’s end. That race appears to be a three-team race involving the Sixers, Nets and Raptors. Couple that one with what we’ve already discussed now as Utah and the rest of the bottom four teams in the league vie for one of the three worst records, and you have at least seven teams who are better off losing on a nightly basis. Even extending beyond the seventh slot in the lottery standings, you’ll find Chicago and San Antonio. Up until recently when they came to Philly and crushed the Sixers, the Bulls were a team many Sixers fans were tracking and hoping would win some more games to keep them out of the race of the fifth slot. It’s looking increasingly likely that Chicago is going to back its way into the 10 seed in the play-in tournament, a spot that no one wanted in the East. When Victor Wembanyama was lost for the season with a blood clot, San Antonio and its fans probably wanted to lose a ton of games for the rest of the season as well. But it seems like it’s simply too tough for the Spurs to out tank all the teams that had been committed to losing games much longer than they had.
Portland is 10th in the lottery standings and is the first team you can confidently say is rebuilding but not tanking this season. The Trail Blazers appear intent on having their young nucleus grow and win together as they have gone 17-16 in 33 games in the 2025 portion of the season. I’m sure Silver and company would like all of their non-playoff teams to be like Portland, but as you can see, there’s a long way to go to get to that point. Frankly, we probably never will. Back in January, Nets GM Sean Marks slyly admitted the team was tanking and Brooklyn has never been in the race Utah is in to secure one of the three worst records in the NBA.
It’s also worth mentioning that during the three seasons Sam Hinkie ran the Sixers, they only had the worst record in the league in one of the three seasons. In 2013-14, the Sixers finished with the second-worst record to Milwaukee’s worst record. The following season, Philadelphia was the NBA’s third-worst team, behind Minnesota and New York. It took until 2015-16 for the Sixers to be the worst team in the NBA. That’s right. The supposed most clear-cut tank job in the history of sports that saw its architect get forced out by the NBA for the Colangelos also saw three franchises manage to have worse records in the first two seasons of such an awful display of integrity in Philadelphia.
In between Hinkie’s exit and the current tank wars that are going on in the NBA, surely there were plenty of other battles for more ping-pong ball combinations. After all, it took a full three years after Hinkie left the Sixers in 2016 before the NBA altered the lottery odds in 2019. In other words, the league realized tanking wasn’t something that only the Sixers did, knew it couldn’t punish the abundance of teams that preferred to lose games, and made a systemic change to how the top draft picks are rewarded.
This spring’s draft lottery will be the seventh lottery with the new odds. Yet here we are talking about two different tank races amongst the league’s bottom seven teams while also acknowledging the eighth and ninth-worst teams would love to be involved in one of these races but just aren’t as good at tanking. Here’s a look at who has claimed the top pick in the NBA Draft since the 2019 lottery reform and where that team was positioned entering the lottery.
2019: New Orleans (T-7th worst record)
2020: Minnesota (3rd worst record)
2021: Detroit (2nd worst record)
2022: Orlando (2nd worst record)
2023: San Antonio (T-2nd worst record)
2024: Atlanta (10th worst record – lost in play-in tournament)
Perhaps these results are the perfect encapsulation of the point we’re making that multiple tanking races are always going to take place. Under the current system, never has the team with the worst record gotten the first pick, but four out of six times the lottery was won by one of the teams with one of the NBA’s three-worst records lending credence to being in that top three where the odds are the same. The jump by New Orleans from the seventh slot up to the first pick in 2019 is a jump that can more commonly occur under the current odds which would give teams reason to partake in the second tanking race that the Sixers are in this year. Heck, it’s not even entirely a joking manner to suggest teams will tank in the play-in tournament after seeing Atlanta’s jump last year.
The NBA can make an example out of the Sixers and force the Colangelos on us. It can change the lottery odds. It can privately address certain injury reports with various lottery teams. But it seems like it will never be able to do away with the league’s endless tank wars which appear to be growing and not shrinking.