By: Garrett Kilcer

In this post, I will be going over some recent pieces of media and news about tanking in the NBA and I will be giving my opinion on the matter.

What Set Me Off

There is a bee in my bonnet. This particular bee goes by the name of “tanking” and he resides in the National Basketball Association. “Tanking” refers to the act of teams purposefully losing games to ensure a higher draft pick. So you may think that my issue is with the teams supposedly doing the losing right? That would be incorrect. My problem is with the people that are upset about tanking.

Three things I have heard and seen recently have really got my motor running in terms of this topic. First was a report that went out just before Christmas about how the league was brainstorming ideas to dissuade tanking which I will discuss later in this piece. The second one was a podcast that I was listening to that argued that the last seed in both conferences do not get to keep their first round draft pick. The third was a community post on Youtube from the creator Frank Michael Smith where one of his subscribers suggested that there should be no draft altogether because it ‘goes against everything sports is supposed to stand for.’

Late Stage Capitalism but with 3 Pointers

Where I will start is with that last point actually. This person went on to say that it is unfair that anyone at the top of their respective profession is not allowed to negotiate salary or even decide where they would like to work. The commenter finished his statement with a suggestion that, instead of a draft, ‘Franchises should be able to sign athletes out of college like free agents.’ This would create a system where the good teams can plug holes in their team with the best talent available while the bad teams are stuck with the rest. 

Imagine you are the best center coming into the NBA out of college. Would you want to go to a bad team in a small market? Or would you want to go to Los Angeles and catch lobs from Luka Doncic? This would create a system like college athletics had before NIL where the best players went to the best programs, learned from the best coaches, competed against the other best players every day in practice, and then got the most screen time on television. Nick Saban does not win 6 national championships at Alabama without this system in place.

The NBA just had their seventh different champion in the same amount of years. Cities that won the championship include Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, and Toronto. What American college student would want to move outside the country to live in a cold city they have probably never been to like Toronto? That is not to say that Toronto is a bad place because I have been there and it is a wonderful city. However, cities and teams like that would suffer in this model creating teams that are bad and stay that way for years which is bad for the league and the people that support those teams.

Who is Doing the Losing and What is the Cost?

The next point I want to address is the clip on a podcast that I heard. This came from the ‘No Dunks’ podcast which I have listened to for years. Fans of the NBA may remember them from their show called ‘The Starters’ which aired on NBATV during the mid-2010s. The remark was made by Leigh Ellis and his idea was that, if a team finishes last in either conference, your first round draft pick is revoked. The idea here being that there is an incentive to win because there is a punishment in place. 

I have two issues with this line of thinking. My first problem is that the players on the team are going out every night and trying their hardest to win. If they go out and give a half effort or phone it in, it is their job on the line that they are messing with. The players on these bad teams do not want to lose. They grew up their whole lives winning so they hate to lose. They would not want to be really bad on a bad team so that the franchise can pick a new young guy to come and take their spot. Nic Claxton on the Nets does not want Cameron Boozer to come in next year and take his minutes. 

The retort here is that it isn’t so much on the players being bad on purpose as much as it is the front office of these teams purposely putting together poor rosters that they know aren’t good enough to compete. This brings me to my second issue.

Leigh (whom I respect and enjoy listening to) believes that there should be a punishment for being a bad team. A punishment? You want to punish bad teams? Being bad is the punishment! Being a bad team does not just affect your standing in the league, it affects everything within the organization. It impacts how people talk about the team (if they even do), how people feel about a team or city, how many people show up to the games and buy tickets which affects how many jerseys and other merch you are able to sell. If there is no one at the games, you are not making any money on parking or concessions. Being a bad team affects every aspect of operating a franchise. These teams are tanking because they have no other choice. It is not a decision that is made lightly.

On January 20th, the NBA posted to their website the top selling jerseys so far this season (https://www.nba.com/news/top-selling-jerseys-first-half-2025-26). Of the top 15 players, 13 of them are on teams with winning records. One of the two from a losing team is 2-time MVP and former defensive player of the year Giannis Antetokounmpo. Regardless, wherever Giannis is, he will move product. You must be wondering about the other man whose jersey is selling like hot cakes. Well it is none other than this past draft’s #1 pick Cooper Flagg! This is why landing a top pick is so important to these teams. Not only will the team be able to win more games but they will also be able to make more money.

Of these 15 players, 8 of them are top 3 picks and within those 8, 5 of them were the #1 pick in their respective draft class.

As a nail in the coffin to this point, the NBA also published the top 10 franchises in total merchandise sales and only 1 of those 10 are a team with a losing record which is the Dallas Mavericks. The team who had the pleasure of drafting Cooper Flagg.

The NBA’s Solution

Just before Christmas, the NBA board of governors got together and brainstormed ideas that would curb the tanking “problem”. These ideas were: (https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/47398198/sources-nba-looking-new-ways-prevent-teams-tanking)

• Limiting pick protections to either top 4 or 14 and higher, which would eliminate problematic mid-lottery protections
• No longer allowing a team to draft in the top 4 two years in a row
• Locking lottery positions after March 1st

I will go through each of these.

For some context on the first bullet point, a protected pick means that when it is traded, if that pick lands within a certain range, the team that traded the pick away will keep it. For example, say the Nets traded away their first round pick this year but it was top-10 protected. This would mean that if the Nets pick lands within the top 10 then they get to keep it and the team that that pick was traded to gets nothing. On the other hand, if that pick lands 11 or higher, the rights to the pick will go to the team it was traded to.

This was put into place so that if you traded away picks for a star player and he were to get hurt, you could still keep your pick if your record was not very good. Essentially it allowed teams to hedge their bets.

If we only allow protections for top 4 picks then it would force teams in the 5-10 range to make a decision. Either try really hard to win and get smoked in the playoffs with no first round pick or swallow your pride and sit all your players for a chance at a top 4 pick. It would make the race to the bottom even more drastic.

The second bullet point was that no team is allowed to draft in the top 4 two years in a row. The NBA flattened the lottery odds effective for the 2019 draft. Since then, only two teams have had the privilege of doing that, the Houston Rockets who drafted that high 4 years in a row and the San Antonio Spurs who did it 3 years in a row. Unsurprisingly, the Rockets ended up playing very well last year finishing second in the west in the regular season. Even less surprising is that the Spurs now claim the number 3 spot in the western conference with the Rockets right behind them at 4. 

This is how valuable drafting high in consecutive years can be. With the odds flattened, it is much harder to do but the teams that can do it, end up at the top whereas the teams that do not fare well with draft lottery luck, are stuck at the bottom for years drafting the scraps from the lucky teams. 

I will not spend much time on the last bullet point. Locking lottery odds on March 1st? So teams will do their losing before then and then what? Magically become good basketball teams after that? I don’t really understand the reasoning behind that. 

Closing Thoughts

So how bad is tanking? Is it worse now than it was in years prior? 

Above is a graph of the average number of wins the bottom 5 teams had each year from 1995-2025. I will agree that we are a little on the low side at the moment but we have been lower so I don’t want to hear any “back in my day”. (Side note: I checked some of the years where the numbers were especially low like 1998 to see if losing coincided with a star player but the #1 overall pick that year was Michael Olowokandi so no, not really). This year the bottom five records are on pace for an average of 21.2 which is kinda average (pun intended).

On January 19th, Draymond Green went on a podcast and proclaimed the Charlotte Hornets to be tanking. He made this comment because Charlotte had just played a game where their best player came off the bench. This clip absolutely aged like milk because the Charlotte Hornets are one of the hottest teams in the NBA right now (1/31/26) with the longest win streak and they have won 6 road games by 15 points or more this month. The only two other teams in NBA history to have done that were the ‘02 Lakers and the ’12 Heat who both went on to win the championship that year (stat is from ‘No Dunks’, the podcast from earlier). Even at the time, the comment was dumb because giving your star player with a long injury history a minutes restriction happens all the time and is not a sign of tanking.

I think the way we talk about tanking is strange. These are the worst teams in the NBA and they are struggling. For some reason, we need to pile on them and decide that what they are doing is bad for the league. We can praise the Rockets and the Spurs now because they are done tanking but the Wizards and the Nets get lampooned for doing the same exact thing. Regardless of how you slice it, someone needs to be the worst team in the league, that is the nature of the beast. To all the anti-tankers out there, how many wins should the Wizards have right now? How many should the Pacers have? The Pelicans are one of the worst teams in the NBA and they don’t even have their pick this year because they traded it away during last year’s draft. What number of wins would satisfy your anti-tanking agenda?