To fix tanking, enhance the punishment

Tactical tanking can have huge benefits and minimal real costs. Change the latter part of the equation to deter the activity.

Good morning. Let's basketball.

The NBA is trying to fix tanking again. As ESPN's Shams Charania reported last week, the league office presented a few ideas at a recent governors' meeting and is soliciting input.

• Limit draft pick protections to a couple of thresholds (top-4 or lottery) to discourage efforts to target placement in-between
• Prevent teams from drafting top-4 in consecutive years
• Locking lottery positions on March 1 to remove the incentive for teams to try to lose games in the final six weeks when tactical tanking peaks

Let's take these ideas one by one. Locking lottery positions at any date only moves up the timeline for tactical tanking. Bad teams will just find ways to hold healthy players out in January and February, especially if teams that end up making the playoffs concede their lottery slots to teams that don't. It may result in teams that could be competitive bowing out early. Pulling the decision on whether to institutionally tank up to midseason feels like a bad idea unless it's paired with bonuses after playoff elimination (like the tombstone wins concept).

Preventing teams from drafting top-4 in consecutive years is an aggressive move and a real bad idea, not because it limits the ability of bad teams to improve, but because it will incentivize definitionally better teams to lose on purpose when a team worse than them is ineligible to pick in the top four. It's like the inverse of when a contender suffers a bad twist, opening up a power vacuum that encourages other teams to go for it. It's a reverse power vacuum.

Creating protection thresholds is a great idea – I have considered the case that all pick protections should be prohibited, you either trade the pick or you don't – but there is a downside. In the Apron Era, the trade market is already quite tight. Eliminating some flexibility in pick protections will further tighten that market. Tightening the trade market even more amid a paradigm where free agency is largely fake puts more importance to team-building on ... the draft! Which further pushes teams to tank, both institutionally (where you build a purposely non-competitive team to gain a high pick) and tactically (where you try to lose individual games, largely toward the ends of seasons, to improve lottery odds).

The NBA has actually made excellent progress to reduce institutional tanking. When it comes to tactical tanking, flattening the odds has also largely worked to prevent the horse race to the bottom. We will likely not see teams like the Kings and Wizards going tit-for-tat with sitting healthy players (like the Utah Jazz the last couple years) or rolling out all-rookie lineups (like the Portland Trail Blazers two years ago). Why? Because they will both be bottom-3 teams and have the same lottery odds. There's no need to compete at that level. What will happen is that if teams in the 3-6 range are clustered, there will likely be shenanigans. For the team in that mix (Utah) that owes a protected pick, it may end up being especially acute.

Could you flatten the odds further? Give the worst five or six teams even odds? You could. But at some point you begin to impact the incentives for teams that aren't good but aren't awful. At some point, teams decide chasing the play-in isn't worth losing a better shot at No. 1 overall, again especially in a league where the draft is especially important to team-building. Flattening the odds further would be akin to strengthening the problem of the mid-lottery protections. Right now, there's no real chance for a Portland (10th worst record) or even Utah (9th worst) to get a bottom-3 record. If the flat odds cut-off were the six worst records? They might give that a shot. Which means losing on purpose earlier in the season. Which is bad, considering both have a shot at the play-in.

Could you expand the play-in? It's already pretty embarrassing having sub-.500 teams in postseason contention. But if you're trying to disincentivize purposeful losing, incentivizing winning is a good way to do it. If you expanded the play-in to teams 7-12 in each conference, you could have your typical 7 vs. 8 (with the winner getting the 7 seed) while 9-12 do a 4-team mini-bracket to produce a challenger for the loser of the 7-8 game. Essentially, teams 9-12 would need to win three straight games to become the No. 8 seed. You move the bar for competitiveness down the table further. And there's still a good incentive to finish higher within the play-in race: there's a huge difference between being 7-8 or 9-10, and the 9-10 teams get home games in the mini-bracket, which is a good revenue driver. (That mini-bracket should involve back-to-backs to concentrate the drama. And you can also grant some bonus lottery odds to teams that make the play-in and win play-in games. Make it as attractive to be the No. 12 seed than to finish No. 13 with the sixth worst record in the league.)

My favorite fix, though, is actually punishing malfeasance. Right now, teams are subject to fines. Healthy fines, in fact. But what is money in comparison to boosting your odds of landing Cooper Flagg or Victor Wembanyama? If rookies were free agents instead of draft picks, the going price would be well above the $100,000 the Jazz were fined for shenanigans last year or the $750,000 the Mavericks were fined in the Dereck Lively II season. That's a business cost. Owners will sign off on decisions that could lead to fines like that if it means potentially improving the team's base talent level in a way money can't otherwise buy.

The solution here is simple: instead of docking teams money for tactical tanking decisions, dock them lottery odds. Strip a set of lottery combinations equivalent to the crime. Look, Portland: you benched a healthy Damian Lillard for obvious lottery reasons. So we're taking 25 combinations from whatever pile you end up with at the end of the season. Your odds are now 2.5% worse than they would have been before you pulled this stunt.

You want to appeal the decision? Fine. Let the league office review your rationale and the medical charts or whatever led to your decision to bench Lauri Markkanen to manage a lower back injury. Maybe you'll win your appeal and get the slots back. Maybe you'll convince us that starting three 25-year-old rookies who were playing in Puerto Rico in November was the team's best chance to win. Maybe not. But the Anti-Tanking Task Force is going to be aggressive to shame and punish teams that are trying to get away with purposeful losing within a season.

There are always unintended consequences. More aggressively punishing tactical tanking could lead to teams leaning heavier into institutional tanking, which is much more difficult to address in this manner. (You can't punish Charlotte for having bad leadership over the past decade. Then again, that has been punishment enough.) You also really don't want players needlessly playing injured. Teams, bad or not, need to be able to manage their players' health with some autonomy. An aggressive anti-tanking stance interferes with that. (The funniest part about the Markkanen affair last season is that after the fine the Finnisher played four straight games, was just OK and the Jazz lost them all before shutting him down for the season. So he was healthy enough to play but it didn't matter because the team was horrible and Markkanen was having a down year. And of course, thanks to the flattened odds, it didn't really matter because the Jazz got screwed in the lottery anyway.)

Purposeful losing is anathema to a competitive sports league that is, at its core, an entertainment product. But the draft is enormously important in the NBA, and the league has set up a team-building system that prioritizes landing stars in the draft above all other modes. That requires a robust, near-constant management of the rules around how draft picks are administered and moved around. Tanking will never go away in the NBA barring a wholesale change to how amateur and international players enter the league, which does not appear to be on the table. So constant vigilance and tweaks will be necessary. It's just important to get each set of reforms right without breaking something else. If the reforms do break something or open up another gap, it's important the NBA addresses it quickly and decisively lest a decade goes by and the face of tanking changes for the worse.

The right time to deal with all of this was probably two years ago. But it's better late than never.

Publication Notes

A couple of items:

• The independent version of Good Morning It's Basketball officially turned six years old last Friday! That's right: it's been six years since I left SB Nation and turned GMIB independent (first on Substack, now on Ghost). I know I have a lot of Day 1s, and I love you all. Thanks for sticking with it.
• We're coming up on 1,500 newsletters published since independence. I'll mark that milestone when it hits.
• I'm going to take Thursday off. We'll be back Friday, though.

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Jokic Down

Nikola Jokic will miss at least four weeks with a bone bruise and hyperextended knee. There's a relief that the injury wasn't more serious, requiring surgery or ending Joker's season early. But this is the first major injury of Jokic's career, and it comes at an absolutely awful time for Denver, who is already missing Aaron Gordon, Christian Braun and Cam Johnson.

Braun and Gordon could return soon, but Johnson's on a similar timeline to Jokic. There are real standings ramifications here: the West is clustered behind Oklahoma City with six teams within four games of each other. Five of those teams will make the playoffs outright; essentially, to get a top-6 seed, Denver just needs to hold off Phoenix (three games back) unless the Warriors or another lower-tier team makes a crazy run.

If Jokic comes back exactly four weeks after his injury, he'll miss 15 games. Ten are on the road; the five home games are all winnable (only one is against a current playoff team). The real risk is in this current road trip the Nuggets are on. They lost in Orlando with Jokic and got drummed in Miami once Jokic hit the locker room. Over the next week they will visit Toronto, Cleveland, Brooklyn, Philadelphia (on no rest) and Boston. The rest of the road games in this stretch are lighter fare. This trip, however, is a huge challenge to The Other Nuggets. This is a huge challenge to Jamal Murray. Time to earn that All-Star nod, buddy.

The other impact here is on the MVP and All-NBA races. Under the absurd NBA rules to discourage rest, Jokic can only miss 17 games and still be eligible for regular season awards. It's extremely likely that he'll miss 18 or 19 games if he's going to miss the next 15 at minimum; there's no way Denver, which has legitimate title hopes, is going to be careless with him coming off of his first serious injury given his age (30). So Jokic, who is having one of the greatest statistical seasons of all time and hadn't missed a single game until this injury, might not be eligible for MVP or All-NBA. Because the NBA was mad that Kawhi Leonard was resting.

Luka Doncic has already missed seven games. Giannis Antetokounmpo has missed 14 and will likely fall under the eligibility threshold. Jalen Williams already missed 19 games and thus can do literally any amazing thing the rest of the season and not be eligible for All-NBA. This rule has been stupid and still is stupid.

Scores

Sixers 139, Grizzlies 136 (OT) – The most important moment of this game was, of course, Bill Kennedy going full Bill Kennedy.

Just kidding, this was the most important moment of the game.

That's only sort of a joke, because this was an impactful call delivered with your usual Bill Kennedy aplomb. The call helped get us to overtime, anyway, where this happened.

Helluva game. Helluva win.

Celtics 129, Jazz 119 – If you don't appreciate Derrick White at his Getting Yammed On By Walter Clayton Jr. ...

... you can't have Derrick White at his Getting Seven Blocks In A Game. (That appears to be a single-game record for a guard. He is a menace.)

Pistons 128, Lakers 106 – Time for another team meeting in Hollywood. Yet another defensive disasterclass for the Lakers, and a real bad offensive effort against an elite defense to boot. The starters went 7/29 (24%) from deep, and the bench wasn't much better.

On the defense, well ...

Luka Doncic really does not like teams getting physical with him.

The Pistons, meanwhile, salvage their road trip after losses in Salt Lake and Inglewood and maintain their 1.5-game lead on the Knicks for No. 1 in the East. They have a big 3-game set starting on New Year's Day: vs. Miami, at Cleveland, vs. New York.

Kings 90, Clippers 131 – It's been just over a year since the Kings fired Mike Brown, sparking De'Aaron Fox's request to be traded to the Spurs. Things are going great. Great for Brown and Fox, to be clear.

The Clippers have won five straight to move to 11-21 closing out the year. L.A. is just 2.5 games out of the play-in. There are a bunch of winnable games coming up in January. We are monitoring the situation.

Schedule

All times Eastern, including a good bit of midweek matinee basketball.

WEDNESDAY
Warriors at Hornets, 1, NBA TV
Timberwolves at Hawks, 3
Magic at Pacers, 3
Suns at Cavaliers, 3:30, NBA TV
Pelicans at Bulls, 7
Knicks at Spurs, 7, NBA TV
Nuggets at Raptors, 7:30
Wizards at Bucks, 8
Blazers at Thunder, 8

THURSDAY
Rockets at Nets, 6
Heat at Pistons, 7
Sixers at Mavericks, 8:30, NBA TV
Celtics at Kings, 10
Jazz at Clippers, 10:30

Happy New Year! Be excellent to each other.