The NBA has tried to stop teams from intentionally losing, but their changes have only made tanking easier.
Tanking, it’s what all the kids are doing these days.
About a month ago, this very blog discussed how prevalent intentionally losing still is in the current league, in spite of the NBA implementing new rules to disincentivize such behavior.
They flattened the odds in the lottery so the three worst teams in the league all have a 14% chance of getting the top pick in 2019. After the bubble season in 2020, they brought in a play-in tournament to give the ninth and 10th seeds a chance at winning their way into the seventh or eighth seed and make the playoffs.
The hope was that team’s wouldn’t feel the need to be as horrible, and can still sneak into the playoffs so long as they don’t slip too far down the standings. They hoped with less incentive to the be the worst team in the league, teams would still trot out competitive lineups every night.
Half a decade into these experiments, they’ve had the opposite effect.
The Sixers have learned this the hard way as they desperately try to retain their top-six protected first-round pick in this year’s draft.
They’ve had to compete with nearly a third of the league in the race to the bottom, including the Chicago Bulls, who tried to fall out of the Play-In seeding at the trade deadline, but the Eastern Conference simply wouldn’t allow it.
So why aren’t teams attracted to another chance to make a playoff run? Simply put, the talent gap between the top seeds in the NBA and play-in teams is too large to make any kind of noise. The Bulls have been ridiculed these last few years for how content they’ve been to settle into the ninth or 10th seed without much room for improvement.
There’s a level of variance that exists in the postseason in other sports that simply doesn’t exist in the NBA. More often than not, the best teams with the best players prove that to be true over the course of a seven-game series.
For the sake of comparison, here is the success lower seeds have had in the NBA Playoffs since 2006-07 compared to MLB and the NHL. That year was selected for this exercise to go back to the “We Believe” Warriors upsetting the No. 1-seeded Dallas Mavericks.
There have been nine teams in the NHL to be the six seed or worse who have made the Stanley Cup Final since 2006-07, three of those have gone on to win it. (That includes the 2021 Canadiens, who were the lowest-seeded Canadian team — hockey seeding is weird and their COVID seeding was even weirder.)
In that same time there have been eight wild card teams that have made the World Series — four of them went on to win it.
Forget making the Finals, there have been 12 teams in the NBA who have been a six seed or worse that made it out of the first round. Only three teams, the 2024 Pacers, the 2023 Lakers, and the 2023 Heat won multiple rounds.
Not to take anything away from them, but the Pacers got a fair amount of injury luck to get them to the Eastern Conference Finals, just to be handily swept by the Celtics.
The 2023 Heat were an even odder case, as they were the No. 1 seed the year prior with virtually the same roster. Their franchise player at the time, Jimmy Butler, had developed a reputation by that point of coasting through the regular season.
So far, the Play-In has done little to encourage teams on the edge to keep going for it. If anything it’s encouraged playoff teams to take the regular season less seriously than they already do, another problem the NBA has been desperately trying to solve this year.
That ties into the second change the league hoped would stop tanking — flattening the lottery odds. Not only do the three worst teams have a worse chance of getting the top pick, but they now have a better chance at falling out of the top three with the fourth pick now being a lottery drawing as well.
If you were running a team on the verge of the 10th seed, isn’t an 8% chance at a top four pick way better than like, a 1% chance of pulling off an impossible upset?
The Dallas Mavericks took a lot of heat for tanking their final games of the 2023 season to keep their lottery protected pick rather than fighting for the Play-In despite having Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving on their roster.
They ended up being on the right side of that argument though, as they kept their pick and landed Dereck Lively II, who played a big role in their run to the Finals the following season. Other teams who have finished seasons in that area of the standings have benefitted even more from the flattened odds. The 2024 Hawks and 2019 Pelicans jumped all the way to get the No. 1 overall pick.
It’s also not like worsening the odds has stopped teams from trying to be the worst team in the league. The Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards tried their best to win less than 15 games this year, hoping they’ll land Cooper Flagg to show for it. There were similar results two years ago for the Victor Wembanyama sweepstakes.
In a sport where one great player can turn around an entire franchise, teams are always going to put their hat in the ring for that chance if their season isn’t going to plan. There will always be rebuilding teams, but the flattened odds gives teams in a one-off lost season another incentive to bottom out that year and try again.
This year’s Sixers for example certainly didn’t expect to be in the tanking race — they certainly didn’t want to. Injuries forced them on this path though, and it would still be the correct path even if their pick wouldn’t be sent to the Oklahoma City Thunder if it falls outside of the top six.
Wanting the league to do something about tanking is reasonable. It’s a big reason March and April regular-season games are unwatchable slop. Anyone wanting more changes from this league should be cautious though. Every tinker they’ve made so far has only made the situation worse.