No 'Bricking for Vic'? NBA teams aren't tanking for Wembanyama as expected

Victor Wembanyama is a generational draft prospect. But not many teams are tanking to try to get him.

Wembanyama is a 7-foot-4 center who can handle the ball and shoot 3-pointers. He's averaging 22.2 points and 9.5 rebounds in France's top professional league, despite only turning 19 in January. "Wemby" has such potential that it seemed a foregone conclusion that teams would rack up losses for a chance to draft him. However, that hasn't been the case.

There are three NBA teams that are clearly the worst of the worst: Houston Rockets (13-49), Detroit Pistons (15-48) and San Antonio Spurs (16-47). The bottom three NBA teams all have the same odds (14 percent) of getting the first pick, presumably Wembanyama, and all three of them continue to lose. Houston has lost 11 in a row, the Spurs lost 16 straight before winning their last two and Detroit has just one win in its last 10 games — a double-overtime win against the Spurs.

Still, that's really it for the teams not trying to win. The Hornets are the fourth-worst team (20-44), but they had a five-game winning streak last week. They're not great, especially with LaMelo Ball out for the season, but they're clearly trying to win these games. The Magic (26-37) are 5-5 in their last 10 games, and after a 5-20 start, they're a respectable 21-17, not the mark of team losing for draft position.

As for the rest of the projected lottery teams, the Lakers, Bulls and Blazers are trying to make the playoffs. The Thunder and Pacers got derailed by injuries to their best players (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tyrese Haliburton), but they're not tanking. It's a sign that the NBA's anti-tanking measures have helped.

Two measures have made an impact. First, the NBA flattened the lottery odds before the 2019 Draft. Before that, the team with the worst record got a 25 percent chance at the top pick, creating an incentive not just to be bad, but to be worse than anyone else. That led to years where teams had a race to the bottom, losing embarrassingly.

Now, the top three picks have the same odds, and the drop-off is less steep. Fourth-worst gets 12.5 percent odds, fifth-worst is 10.5 percent and sixth-worst is nine percent. Maybe we will see some of these teams shut down veterans in the last two weeks, but there's simply no longer an incentive to be completely awful.

The other factor is the play-in tournament. Now, even the 10th-place team gets one postseason game. It's harder to sell a tanking effort to fans when there's a real chance at the playoffs. This year, the Western Conference lacks dominant teams outside of Denver, which has left 13 of 15 teams still in the mix in early March.

In fact, we've seen more marginal teams make risky all-in moves than we've seen teams pack it in. Perhaps the Rockets, Spurs and Pistons have banked too many losses to make tanking to the bottom possible. But whatever the cause, we're looking at a final month of the season where nearly every NBA team is trying to win. Imagine that.