Tanks for nothing

Adam Silver made us believe he really hated tanking. The leaked proposals on his fixes don't back that up.

Tom Ziller

— 11 min read
Tanks for nothing
Allegory of Air; Jan van Kessel; 1661

Adam Silver made us believe he really hated tanking. The leaked proposals on his fixes don't back that up.

Good morning. Buckle up, this is a long newsletter. Let's basketball.

Shame on me for believing Adam Silver when all the way back in, uhhh, last week, he said this:

"Certainly going into next season, the incentives will be completely different than they are now," Silver said.

... and this:

"There's such a subtlety to this when incentives don't match, when we're now into it with coaches' decisions on lineups and when players come in and out of the game, injuries, doctors going back and forth with each other, pain levels of players," he continued, "that my sense is when I say fix now, yes, we need to do something more extreme than we did with those incremental changes the last four times along.

As I wrote following those comments, this was a gauntlet shrouded in mystery, both because the league didn't immediately reveal its leading concepts for making the draft-related incentives that lead teams to tank "completely different than they are now" or what would be "more extreme" than the previous "incremental changes." Silver can only promise what his bosses – the wealthy men and women signing off on tank strategies a slice of their teams are currently employing – would approve.

Over the past few months, Silver has expressed what appeared to be genuine anger at how tanking has unfolded this season. When his proposed reforms leaked on ESPN on Friday, they didn't exactly hit so much like an anvil as they did a large whoopie cushion.

Brief digression: now you know I don't like to do media criticism from my perch as an independent newsletter writer, however the first two paragraphs of that ESPN piece that carries no byline but cites Shams Charania's reporting is some of the most egregious state media bulls--t I have ever seen. It establishes the league's branding of the concepts in the first sentence – calling them "comprehensive anti-tanking concepts" – and uses the word "radical" to describe them. Who is giving us this take?! If it's Shams, put his byline on it. As we'll get into, this is pure incrementalism.

Here are the three concepts in as tight a summary as I can provide.

  • Option 1 aka the Play-In Cliff: All 10 non-postseason teams will enter the lottery with equal 8% odds of landing the No. 1 seed. All eight play-in teams will enter the lottery with lower, unannounced odds totaling 20% between team. All 18 lottery picks will be chosen at random. A team with the worst record could theoretically pick No. 18. A No. 7 seed in the playoffs could pick No. 1.
  • Option 2 aka the 20-Win Cliff: All 10 non-postseason teams, all eight play-in teams and other teams that lose in the first round all enter the lottery. Their placement in the lottery will be an average of two seasons of regular season wins. The minimum wins counted for a season will be 20. Only the top four picks will be selected at random. The odds will apparently remain similar to now.
  • Option 3 aka the Incremental Two-Step: All 10 non-postseason teams and all eight play-in teams will enter the lottery. The worst five teams will have the same odds, which will gradually decrease from there. After the top five picks are selected via lottery, a new lottery will be held for Picks 6-18. Teams among the worst five records can pick no lower than No. 10.

Let's talk about the last two options first, because these have minimal merit as making the incentives "completely different than they are now."

OPTION 2: THE 20-WIN CLIFF

This is the most complex and thus requires the fullest teardown. The 20-Win Cliff puts a huge value on being a bottom-4 team over a two-year window precisely because only four picks are being selected by lottery. (It's worth noting that this is the only option that allows the NBA to keep up the ping pong derby. Everything else is going to require code-based lottery, which will surely keep the conspiracists at bay.) When you only decide a few picks via lottery, you have to have a way to assign the rest of the picks. And so the lowest that the worst team can be is No. 5, the second-worst team No. 6 and so on. That's the status quo. The wrinkle here is that a 17-win season is treated like a 20-win season; there's no advantage to losing more than 62 games in a season. The second wrinkle is that the NBA would take 2-year averages a la the WNBA. That theoretically is intended to provide additional assurance that high picks go to teams that need them, and that flash tank jobs based on, say, injuries to your All-NBA point guard in the NBA Finals, don't benefit you in the same way as they do now.

So let's put together an example of what the lottery standings would look like based on the previous two regular seasons. This would have been the standings for the 2025 draft. Where the teams were in the lottery in real life is in parentheses. ESPN's piece is unclear on whether play-in teams that win the first round stay in the lottery or are replaced by the teams they beat in the playoffs, so I left the playoff losers out.

  1. Wizards (2)
  2. Hornets (3)
  3. Jazz (1)
  4. Raptors (7)
  5. Spurs (8)
  6. Blazers (10)
  7. Nets (6)
  8. Pelicans (4)
  9. Sixers (5)
  10. Grizzlies (Non-Lottery)
  11. Hawks (14)
  12. Bulls (12)
  13. Heat (NL)
  14. Suns (9)
  15. Kings (13)
  16. Magic (NL)
  17. Mavericks (11)
  18. Warriors (NL)

This is a pretty good slice of evidence that this is pure incrementalism: the top three teams in lottery odds for the last full seasons we have available wouldn't change! What this system does is benefit teams that have been bad for multiple years (see: Spurs, Raptors, Blazers) at the expense of teams that suddenly become bad (see: Sixers, Pelicans, Mavericks). It incentivizes another year of tanking. This system is just as likely to encourage teams to tank and tank longer as it is to stop! It reinforces the incentives to lose! And the 20-win cliff itself is relatively meaningless. Teams aiming to be bad already frequently win in the low 20s. By creating a hard threshold, teams will just be more mindful about tanking when they're on pace for 22 or 25 wins. (Case in point: the Jazz have 21 wins right now with two weeks left. With a 20-win cliff they would have been incentivized to go harder on the tank knowing the worst the Wizards or Pacers could do is 20 wins.)

Option 2: The 20-Win Cliff – that's a bad idea.

OPTION 3: THE INCREMENTAL TWO-STEP

This is the so-called "5x5" idea. It sucks. Since the teams with the five worst records have the same odds and the same pick cliff (no lower than No. 10), teams will compete to have a bottom-5 record. The stakes will be significant, similar as they are for the bottom-4 records now. The beneficial tweak is that the cliff is all the way down at No. 10 instead of the current No. 5 (which is the lowest spot the worst team in the league can pick). So the upside of being bottom-5 is not quite as great. But it stills exists. And teams have proven that so long as there is any upside in being worse, they will compete for that crown of s--t.

This doesn't have the perverse incentives of Option 2, but it is purely incremental. If Silver thinks tanking behavior is huge gash in the guts of the NBA, this option is like sticking a piece of washi tape over it. Bad idea.

And now for the option that might have some merit and might be a bit better than incremental ...

OPTION 1: THE PLAY-IN CLIFF

This option is relatively bold in comparison the other nonsense: all non-postseason teams have equal chances to pick anywhere in the top 10, which disincentivizes competing for last place, and the eight play-in teams have some chance at top 10 picks, all the way up to No. 1. This second part – including the play-in teams – addresses the key problem with flattening the odds, which is that you create competitive cliffs. If you flatten the odds for the 10 non-postseason teams and don't include the play-in teams, there's a huge incentive to miss the play-in. The NBA appears to understand that and is including play-in teams in the mix.

Here's the problem: there's still likely to be a huge cliff between the 10-worst team in the league (last team out) and the worst play-in team (last team in). The 10 non-postseason teams will evenly split 80% of the odds at No. 1 (and thus the rest of the picks). The eight play-in teams will thus split the remaining 20%. The ESPN story doesn't explain how that 20% will be laid out, just that they will be split in descending order.

Here are a couple of options on what that could look like:

  • The Nos. 9 and 10 seeds in each conference could get 4% odds and the Nos. 7 and 8 seeds could get 1% odds.
  • Flat 2.5% odds for all eight teams.
  • The most likely scenario in my mind: the No. 10 seeds get 4% odds, the No. 9 seeds get 3% odds, the No. 8 seeds get 2% odds and the No. 7 seeds get 1% odds.

Here's the problem with all of those solutions: no matter what you do, there's a huge odds cliff between the worst non-postseason team (8% at No. 1) and whatever feasible odds you put at the worst play-in team (probably 4%). There's also a chance you create some perverse incentives within the play-in race itself – not just teams dropping out early, but teams throwing games to fall back a seed in the play-in and get better odds at a high pick. Most play-in teams don't do much in the playoffs anyway! If it's a decision between a home date or a better chance at a top pick, however small, most teams are going to go for the odds, especially in high-octane draft years.

Part of the tank problem this year was all the bad teams trying to out-suck each other. But another part of the problem was that some teams proactively noped out of the play-in race at the trade deadline. The Mavericks, Grizzlies and Bulls all did that. The Clippers clearly made moves to indicate they weren't interested in the play-in; they didn't own their own pick and were simply too good after trading two of their top three players to fall below the other teams that exited the race proactively. This is going to become more prevalent if Option 1, which otherwise has its charms, is accepted.

This option is clearly better than the status quo. It's incremental. It relies on the same pillars of draft importance that created the current mess. It is not radical or dramatic, and it doesn't completely change the incentives. Teams will absolutely still proceed with institutional tank jobs over multiple years. The higher chance that the worst teams get middling picks could lead to longer rebuilds, frankly.

But most of the tactical tanking – the benching stars in the fourth quarter, the healthy scratches, the trading for injured stars specifically to be terrible, the most egregious stuff that gets many of us including yours truly and Adam Silver riled up – should alleviate. That's worth the try.

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Scores

Since we spent 2,000 words on tanking this will be tight.

Suns 111, Magic 115 – Hey, Orlando beat a non-tanking team! Congratulations. Dillon Brooks is back, Devin Booker is still scoring well but the Magic manufactured enough offense. (How ironic that Orlando is finally on pace to finish top-20 in offense for the first time since the peak Dwight/Stan Van era – the longtime Zach Lowe bugaboo – but it's going to happen in easily the most disappointing Magic season in memory.)

Hornets 117, Nets 86 – We are on Kon Knueppel Rookie Wall watch. 4/12 from the floor in the win.

Mavericks 99, Bucks 123

Raptors 116, Pistons 127 – Detroit is the favorite in the East. Detroit is the favorite in the East. Detroit is the favorite in the East. What they are doing without Cade Cunningham – what Jalen Duren is doing without Cade Cunningham – is remarkable.

Knicks 94, Rockets 111 – No defense from New York. No offense either. Pretty bad combo. Just when we thought we had Houston figured out, they get a couple of good wins. They have five winnable games on the docket now, too. Hmm.

Cavaliers 113, Lakers 127 – Friend of the newsletter Niko pointed up James Harden's January 2019 as a more-recent-than-Kobe comparison for Luka's unbelievable scoring run right now. Fitting that he continued it lined up against The Beard! Both of those dudes love torturing a big man on the perimeter, don't they?

LeBron got a chasedown block ... against Cleveland ... five seconds into the game.

Blazers 114, Clippers 104 – Best win for Portland in a while. Jrue Holiday is expensive and aging, but he's still got it on both ends. And I bet Scoot Henderson's recent uptick has something to do with the mentorship of Jrue and Dame Lillard.

Schedule

I keep forgetting to list the schedule. My bad! All times Eastern. Highlight games in bold. Tank battles in italics.

Sixers at Wizards, 7
Hawks at Magic, 7
Celtics at Heat, 7:30, ESPN
Knicks at Grizzlies, 8
Kings at Raptors, 8
Pacers at Bulls, 8
Bucks at Rockets, 8
Nuggets at Jazz, 9
Spurs at Warriors, 10, ESPN

Hall of Fame news is leaking. Doc Rivers will enter as a coach. Elena Delle Donne and Candace Parker are easy inductees (no surprise). Some surprise: Amar'e Stoudemire is in.

Tom Haberstroh at Yahoo! with some shocking stats about just how non-competitive the tank teams have been against postseason teams the last few months. Deeply disturbing. This is why that 2,000-word column at the top of today's newsletter needed to exist, even though I know many readers and fans want the tanking discourse to disappear.

The Houston Comets are back ... at the expense of a WNBA team in New England as the Connecticut Sun will be moving to Texas at the end of this season. Extremely messy situation.

Joe Cowley with some insight into how Jaden Ivey's locker room preaching was being received by reporters and teammates in both Detroit and Chicago, and drops a nugget that Billy Donovan might bolt if Arturas Karnisovas sticks around.

Jason Kidd standing by his boss on the Luka Doncic trade and now, as the last fireable person standing from that mess, trying to get everyone to drop it is pretty good stuff. Meanwhile, Mark Cuban announces that he regrets that he sold the Mavericks to Miriam Adelson. Well, that regret and $2.50 will get you a cup of coffee at the Waaaah Café.

This is not about basketball but I dabble in the Personal Improvement space as a content consumer and wow! what an incredible takedown of one of the current main characters Arthur C. Brooks by Becca Rothfeld in the New Yorker. Biting and incisive. A key missing piece of Brooks' (and others') advice for finding meaning in life? Stand for something or you will fall for anything.

MLB reached a deal with Polymarket, one of those gambling sites that calls itself prediction market platform, joining the NHL and MLS. Money over integrity with all of these sports league. Not to be cynical, but the odds are higher that the NBA is negotiating with Polymarket and Kalshi than they are that the NBA is not considering such a deal at all.

Alright, that's a long newsletter. Be excellent to each other.

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