NBA’s plans to curtail tanking are foolhardy, at best

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The NBA is unhappy about tanking. Again.

Every few years, the league looks around in March, sees half a dozen teams quietly packing it in, and decides it’s time to “do something.”

This time, per ESPN, the ideas being kicked around are louder, sharper, and more aggressive than usual. Fewer pick protections. No consecutive top-four selections. Lottery order locking in early.

On paper, it all sounds proactive. In practice, it mostly sounds like the league trying to outsmart its own incentive structure.

Because here’s the truth nobody likes to say out loud: Tanking isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

You don’t accidentally design a system where the worst teams get the best young talent and then act shocked when losing becomes strategically valuable. That’s the entire point of the draft. It exists to help bad teams get better. As long as that’s true, teams will always look for the most efficient path to the bottom.

Take the idea of locking lottery odds on March 1. All that does is move the tanking calendar up. Teams won’t suddenly decide to compete harder. They’ll just gut the roster sooner. If anything, you risk worse basketball earlier in the season, not better basketball late.

Same with tightening pick protections. Yes, you might prevent a very specific scenario where a team tanks two games to protect a pick. But you also make trades harder, and trades are one of the league’s biggest engines of interest. Fewer deals, more stagnant rosters, more good players stuck on bad teams because contenders won’t risk a lightly protected first.

And the idea of banning consecutive top-four picks? That one sounds good until you think about it for more than 10 seconds. The truly bad teams don’t magically get better because you tell them they can’t draft high again. What you really do is open the door for “gap-year” teams to game the system. One lost season, one premium pick, then right back to winning. That’s not eliminating tanking. That’s just changing who gets to do it.

Here’s the deeper issue: The league keeps trying to solve tanking without admitting what actually drives it. It’s not apathy. It’s rational decision-making.

If you’re bad, staying mediocre is the worst outcome. You don’t get stars. You don’t contend. You don’t reset. You just exist. So teams choose the path that gives them the highest upside, even if it’s ugly in the short term.

The uncomfortable part for the league is that tanking often works. Not always, but often enough that front offices would be negligent not to consider it. Lottery luck matters more than good intentions. Being smart helps, but being lucky helps more. That’s not theory. That’s reality.

The NBA wants parity. Adam Silver talks about it constantly. But every attempt to clamp down on tanking chips away at the very mechanism designed to create parity in the first place. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t reward losing and punish teams for embracing that reward.

Could the league go nuclear? Sure. Kill the draft. Install a wheel. Let rookies choose where they go. But everyone knows where that road leads. Big markets. Shoe companies. Competitive imbalance on steroids. The NBA isn’t ready for that, and it shouldn’t be.

So we’re left where we always are. Tanking is bad for the product, but essential to the ecosystem. Fans hate watching it, but love what comes out of it when it works. The league wants fewer bad games, but still needs bad teams to have a path forward.

That makes tanking less of a problem to be solved and more of a reality to be managed.

You can tweak the margins. You can shame the optics. You can fine teams for being too obvious. But you can’t legislate away incentives without breaking the system that created them.

Bad teams are inevitable. How they get bad is almost beside the point. They’re all trying to get better as fast as possible. Until the NBA changes what “better” actually means in its structure, tanking will remain exactly what it’s always been.

An ugly, unavoidable, and very necessary evil.