Dear NBA,
For the love of all that’s holy, please stop trying to convince me that this has anything to do with the fan experience or the integrity of the game.
Your pal,
Relegated in River City
***
Let’s get this out of the way. Are the Sacramento Kings tanking? Sure. So are the Indiana Pacers, Utah Jazz, Washington Wizards, and (late to the party) Dallas Mavericks, and perhaps even (later to the party) Memphis Grizzlies, Chicago Bulls and Milwaukee Bucks.
Two teams not mentioned here are New Orleans and Brooklyn. The Pelicans have no pick to tank for, and Brooklyn is just sort of young and bad.
That said, all of the bottom five teams (Kings, Pacers, Wizards, Nets, and Pelicans) have been bad all season. The Kings, currently on a pace to win 18 games, have never projected higher than 23 wins, and that was right after their four-game win streak in mid-January – they were on a 17-win pace just before that streak.
To paraphrase Huey Lewis, tank is the stank, but sometimes bad is bad. The Kings may not win 20 games this season, but was this team even a Play-In contender at any point this season? The team was 5-15 at the end of November. The roster, regardless of who is and who is not available, stinks. It is unbalanced. It lacks the firepower to compete from beyond the arc (see the loss to the Orlando Magic recently). It does not possess a top 10 player at any position other than center, and it does not do anything particularly well on either end of the floor. Add to this that the Kings are cap-strapped, with parts that are only moveable when you attach sweeteners.
The Fan Experience
This leads me to the fan experience. For Kings fans, the only glimmer of hope is in (a) watching the youth* on this team play, and (b) scouring the college and international game tape for this June’s draft class. And the same holds true for most of the other teams racing for the bottom. For these fan bases, the reason to watch is to root for youth and losses. Should youth pull out a victory, that is still fun – if Max Raynaud flipped in a buzzer beater to seal a win for the Kings, it would be very enjoyable. But if Demar DeRozan foul lines his way to a Kings win, it is a lot emptier and hollower. It is not even to the level of empty calories. It is pure cholesterol, blocking the arteries of future Sacramento Kings relevance.
(*Youth relative to the overall roster, not the NBA.)
I think we can all agree that the overwhelming majority of tanking team fan bases support, follow and root for this race to the bottom.
As it pertains to the fans of other teams, who cares? Do the fan bases of the best teams give two squirts about the health and welfare of the bottom feeders?
No, nor should they.
The bottom five teams are going to lose seven out of ten games when they are “competing.” They lose eight out of ten when they choose to rest their “better” players. Could this impact a playoff seeding spot or the play-in pecking order?
Maybe?
But all of those teams could easily look back on their own schedule and find several games that they could have / should have won without wringing their hands over the bottom few teams in the league.
The “Integrity” Of The Game
While we’re at it, can anyone explain to me why teams with zero playoff chances should roll out their highly paid players in games that are meaningless to them? If the Kings brought back Sabonis in the name of league integrity (give me a break) and he blew out his knee, who pays the freight on that? None other than your Sacramento Kings and their fan base.
It makes zero sense.
I get that the NBA is different from MLB or the NFL when it comes to draft impact, but it is amazing that with those two sports, “tanking” is encouraged by the national media and fans alike. Each of those sports is rife with annual articles and podcasts and publications pointing to which teams should sell off and reload, listing out which teams should be buyers or sellers at their respective trade deadlines. And even in the NBA, if you sell off your talent at the deadline, that is fine. It is just not OK to sit your investments once you have determined that you are not going to compete that season?
Give me a break!
And the integrity argument rings more hollow with me than anything. It is dripping with hypocrisy. You have Giannis’ prediction market ties, Kawhi’s under the table dealings, illegal gambling, an NBA ref that was convicted for fixing games. And as a league, you have reportedly elected to get into bed with gambling / betting entities.
And the problem is tanking???
You want to address tanking?
Fine.
You should get to that right after you suspend Giannis and Kawhi and cut all ties with all gambling-related entities. Get back to me once that is done.
I won’t hold my breath.
Meanwhile, I don’t really care if someone gets jobbed out of their prop bet because Utah decides to sit Lauri Markkanen in the fourth quarter.
It’s Called. Gambling. For. A. Reason.
To be clear, I have no real issue with the NBA looking at things like pick protection revisions (maybe just top 3-4 protection for one year), restrictions on consecutive top 3-4 picks, etc.). Whatever is put in place, the fans should be considered – KEEP IT SIMPLE! Fans should not need an advanced degree in NBA CBA in order to understand where their team stands in the upcoming draft.
But can we please stop lip-sticking the pig and trying to make this about fan experience of integrity?
This is, after all, what the NBA is all about, and that is money. And that’s fine. Capitalism for the win! But don’t try to cram fan experience and integrity down my throat, especially when the organization that runs my favorite NBA team possesses neither.
Tanking Is Not The Problem
Tanking is not the problem in Sacramento. Tanking is not the reason that this team sucks arse, and has for a long time, and likely will for a long time. The problem sits courtside on a nightly, with a cavalcade of B-list celebrities and former Kings players. Dismiss that little chap from the league, and watch how quickly tanking may no longer be an issue, at least in Sacramento.
The topic of tanking is there to distract from the NBA’s real issues, and it is there to supply the national media with low-hanging content (there is a reason why tanking articles outnumber Kawhi articles 1,000-1, and that is because it is easier to cut and paste).
I’m not buying the hype.
Well there have been few things I have enjoyed reading on this site and its previous iteration than Rob with his righteous indignation redlining. Absolutely on full tilt when bringing up Kawhi, prediction markets, betting, et all. Any one of those does more real damage to the product than tanking for a draft pick, ffs.
Excellent work Rob.
FIFY: Well there have been few things I have enjoyed reading on this site and its previous iteration more than Rob with his righteous indignation redlining.
Unless you are meaning to say that you only enjoy reading Rob’s articles here. In that case I have to disagree.
Semantics
Utah’s tanking has been egregious*, but I otherwise I agree with this sentiment. I actually think the flattened lottery odds make the problem worse – everyone who sucks thinks they can get a top 3 pick by sucking a little bit extra and when combined with the pick protections it gets kind of ugly.
Straight lottery odds, limited pick protections, and increased rookie salaries at the top of the draft would be the best solutions to tanking. I would unbind the the salary for the first overall pick and then set the max for remaining lottery picks scaled to that, making the top of the draft a bit of a double edged sword.
*Utah has, right now, a team that would probably win somewhere around 45%-55% of their games if they bothered to try. They’re aiming for like half that which kind of makes a mockery of competition.
I agree with your point on the flattened lottery odds. If more teams have a chance at #1 then it just gives them more incentive to increase those odds with tanking. If it was a simple as worst team gets the first pick then there are really on 3-4 teams that would even attempt to tank. Squads like the Bulls, Grizz, and Mavs and even Utath would be too far from last to worry about lottery positioning. Jockeying between the 5th and 9th pick doesn’t have much incentive like increasing your odds for the #1 pick.
When you allow a team like Dallas last season to jump from 11th worst to #1, you increase the numbers of teams tying to attempt that feat. Something,something about rocket science and such.
Yes! The ping pong balls lottery is dumb and always has been. Talk about fixed, there’s some rigged gambling right there if you ask me. Tanking will be solved, along with poverty guys, just a few more adjustments.
Sports fans have been lectured about how terrible, seedy and destructive gambling is since the 1920s. I guess the problem was actually that the ‘wrong’ people were making money off of it. But I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise, anything now can be justified in the name of profit.
Watching the NBA continually flounder away at solutions to tanking has become laughable. Do they really think that really this time, their latest tinker will fix the problem? Or are they just going through the motions as a PR exercise? Everyone knows that as long as in some way, shape, or form lottery odds are associated with wins and losses, teams will find a way, and really have to, lose on purpose.
There are two possible solutions to end tanking. Either end the draft altogether, and make all rookies free agents. Or keep the draft, but base it on The Wheel or some other method that does not tie draft order to record. Of course neither of these will ever happen – universal rookie free agency is drastic and may cause as many problems that it solves, and the Wheel, while elegant, is too wonky for the general public to accept.
But tanking isn’t the problems, as Rob’s article outlined. The problem is NBA’s relationship with gambling.
Yes, gambling has been around since before the invention of sport, but the problem today is the new relationship the league has with gambling institutions. The tanking narrative is just the SQUIRREL! the NBA and media are focusing on.
Was tanking a problem when the Lakers got three #2 picks in a row? Was it a problem when OKC sent a healthy Horford home for the majority of a season to “focus on youth?” Was it even a problem during “The Process?” NO. It is only a hot topic issue today because of the NBA relationship with professional bookies who now make up the majorly of their advertising dollars. Gone are the days of athletic wear, sports drinks, and breakfast cereals being the NBA’s partners. Now it’s all, “this halftime report is brought to you by Draft Kings.”
It’s the league’s relationship with their largest sponsors that are driving the narrative, because those sponsors don’t like it when stars sit and the prop bets diminish. No one is betting the spread on a Jazz game because you have to idea who’s going to play and when.
The league doesn’t have a taking problem, it has an integrity problem. Players are already seeing an uptick in online and courtside threats. How long before some unstable fan does some real harm because they’ve had gambling shoved down their throats by a league that frowns upon gambling.
Silver’s singular focus on tanking is like complaining about the stinky backed up toilets on a sinking cruise ship.
Yes, tanking was a problem way back then as well. It has been for as far back as the early 2000s(?) It’s not a new topic, which is why the league has been “trying” for years to tweak the lottery to address it. Heck, the old site was writing about it going back to the Ziller days. The ‘Process’ was a controversy at the time, occupied a ton of media space, and got Hinkie exiled.
The very real tanking problem is one of the numerous things that has led to the NBA’s current credibility problem. Their integrity issues did not appear out of the blue the minute they made a deal with Draft Kings. It’s been brewing for a long time with tanking, bad officiating, publicly-funded stadiums, the OKC move, Donaghy, player controversies, unscrupulous owners, load management, and yes, of course, gambling.
In no way did I justify sports’ embrace of gambling and it’s obvious that the NBA is conveniently making a big deal again about tanking because of how it adversely affects betting. The point of my comment was that the NBA is either stupid or disingenous about genuinely fixing tanking because continued tweaks to the lottery will never suffice and just futher contributes to the bad optics.
Good article RH.
This commissioner has destroyed the NBA and the fan experience, and he has done so intentionally and willingly in order to appease bug business.
The fans are last on the minds of the commish and GMs. We just have to be honest about that. It’s turned me off to the point where I only passively follow the NBA (no longer watch games).
Also, in addition to the suspect business activities mentioned (Giannis and LBJ ties to gambling sites, the Clips/KL debacle, sus refs), you can’t tell me that some shady stuff wasn’t going on with the Luka trade and the Mavs getting the first pick and Flagg…I believe it was orchestrated.
F vivek and Silver and the cronies that have ruined the Association.
David Stern isn’t walking thru that door and Silver solves nothing and usually makes things worse . Tanking issue is just to get media ( gutless ) from attacking Balmer, Kwai, and Clippers . Being worth 200+ billion brings a lot of protection .
Well said. Board of Governors need to vote out Silver or nothing will change and it will continue to get worse.
Sadly I believe the board of governors are all on board. Being in bed with gambling institutions is lining their pockets now. The cash cow that was cable revenue is practically dead. This is the evolution of a for profit business that has traditionally relied on advertising dollars for a large chunk of their revenue.
You’re 100% right. Unfortunately, that evolution comes at the expense of the integrity of the game and requires constantly pushing an addictive, toxic, potentially life-ruining, vice onto their viewership. I miss when sports gambling was all bookies and under the table stuff.
The good old days when gambling was illegal and run by the mafia…at least the crooks were honest about it.
Hear, hear!
A couple of additional
rantsthoughts:If the league is genuine when it comes to teams having its best players on the floor nightly, end back-to-backs, which likely means shortening the season, which will never happen. Next, step up to the reality that teams (as they do in most sports) shut down their biggest investments once they have nothing to play for. Feel free to flatten the lottery odds once all that is done, but realize that the more you flatten it, the greater the odds that “RIGGED!!!” charges will crop up, as the more you flatten them, the more you increase the odds of teams jumping up significantly via the ping pong ball drop.
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And as long as I’m on a “never going to happen” tangent, Expand to 32 teams. Play 62 games (2 games vs. each team, one home, one road), Nov. – Mar., roughly 12 games per month, no back-to-backs. 32 team tourney (all best of 7) starts in April and wraps in mid-June. You get slotted in the draft as you get eliminated from the tourney (per rounds), with coin flips (or a rock-paper-scissor tourney) as the tie breaker. Organizations are obviously rewarded via more games the farther they go, and players would share in those additional earnings over and above their salaries. Also, with today’s streaming options and the ability to see the game’s greats on a non-stop basis, the whole all-star thing is obsolete, so flush that.
Never happen, but it eliminates back-to-backs (which is a big contributor to players missing games), incentivizes winning come tourney time, and all but eliminates tank talk.
This is an actual good idea. Three changes I’d make, since we’re never doing it anyway:
A portion of player salary (20%-25%?) is tied to how far teams get in the tournament. For every playoff game they win, players get more of that missing salary. If players get to the later rounds, they get salary over and above their normal annual pay.The tournament order wouldn’t strictly be based on record. There’s no point in having Oklahoma City inevitably play the Kings in the first round. Come up with some incentive or randomness to shuffle the order at least a little bit.First round stays best of five, because some of these are going to be squashes, and a best of five sometimes lets a lower-seeded team surprise an upper seeded team.
I miss the best of 5 opening series…the underdog always had a puncher’s chance to steal a series.
This would absolutely increase season long interest in the league and viewership, but the NBA won’t do it due to less revenue even though it’s what the fans want.
I’d absolutely love a shorter season and a 32 team playoff tourney. It just seems so natural to have that with 32 teams. Maybe you can even have a consolation bracket for first round losers that satisfies some owners for gate sales. Players don’t give a damn about draft position so maybe offer some kind of incentive in the consolation bracket like there is for the in-season tourney?
I’d like it if they started the tourney after the all-star break and deadline. Have a nice little break at the end of the season, allow for some practice/camp time then kick of the “second season” of playoffs for all 32 teams.
I don’t know if it would work, but what about a pool play playoff of 8 groups of 4, like there is in the FIBA. Best of 3 game series each then top 2 teams from each pool move on for best of 7 sixteen team tourney?
There are a lot of opportunities if the league does in fact expand to 32.
I like this. First round losers play for draft position. Winners of the loser bracket get the highest picks, and players who win the loser bracket get paid more money for winning.
I thought about that, but then the worst teams would likely never get the #1 pick. Rewarding the best of the worst doesn’t raise the floor.
Also, teams would still find a way to game that system. Why would you want to go to the winners bracket as one of the worst teams, when you can go to the losers bracket as one of the best teams with a shot at the #1 pick.
Money. (Again, this is never happening.) Players get a substantial portion of their salary for winning games and series. If there’s a multi-million dollar salary addition by winning a first round series, players will be motivated, no matter what ownership wants to do or what happens in the next round.
I totally agree that the players would want to win as much as possible, especially if there is a financial incentive. That is what I would like to see in the consolation bracket.
What I was referring to was management. If your team was on the bubble of of the winner’s bracket and the loser’s bracket, it might be more desirable to be in the later if gets you the best opportunity to land a generational star by winning that bracket.
I could just envision “tanking” that first playoff series to get a chance to land a Wemby. Even a top 10 team could attempt that, especially if they have no real chance of winning it all.
And therein lies the rub- “never going to happen”. I’ve read good ideas on how the league could be better, but it almost always boils down to, yeah, they’ll never do that. I’m fully on board with the +2 expansion/62 game season, but yeah, they’ll never do that (the 62 game component).
When talking about league integrity, let’s not forget both a current player and NBA coach were arrested for participating in a mob gambling fraud scheme.
The problem here is that Adam Silver is a garbage commissioner, hand waving and smoke screening about tanking in an effort to distract from the mess the league has become off the court.
Silver is not even good at that. You want to distract, get involved in a sex scandal, start threatening Roger Goodell, hold ESPN hostage or relentlessly blame it all on David Stern.
“get involved in a sex scandal”
Anjali has entered the chat.*
My solution to tanking:
Imagine the excitement if the Kings were playing a game where the winner gets #1 pick, it just might be the highest-rated Kings telecast since 2002.
Great piece. Tanking is really only a problem because gambling sites say tanking is a problem. It’s no coincidence that as they have become more directly intertwined with the league, the league’s messaging has become increasingly hostile toward tanking. Oddly enough, every strategy the NBA has implemented to “stop tanking”, has only lead to more and more teams tanking. Mainly because the people in charge of the NBA are seemingly incompetent at putting forth a good product, in terms of the game itself.
I wouldn’t just curtail pick protections, I’d eliminate them altogether. Want to add a pick or two for that player you want? Great, that pick becomes your trading partner’s regardless of where it falls.
Thank you, Rob for your pointed comments and open concerns.
The specter of gambling has been a disappointing partner for us fans. The biggest scandals of sports (Black Sox, the College point shaving (CCNY) in 1951 ,Donaghy) are when the games are gamed. There is a reason I don’t watch WWE. That horse racing and boxing (at least, used to be) strongly regulated and tested, that the Olympics have been shrouded in controversy too many times. Cheating. And cheating is done for profit, whether it is in the name of money, political/national pride or personal gain.
Integrity.
Bringing gambling to the NBA table is inviting cheating. It is erodes integrity. And that is why you don’t do it, and all the denials that this is not the case are falling on deaf ears.
Maybe I’ve read to many Mario Puzo books (and watched the movies) but getting in bed with gambling is easy, divorcing yourself from them is not.
This is the NBA (and other Leagues) today. What do you think it will look like in 5, 10, 20 years?
As for the draft – you have to incentivize winning and at the same time deincentivize losing. The Vivek Ranadives of the world are allowed to give us this crap product and he still collects plenty of coin. Eliminating the draft doesn’t address bad management, in fact, it worsens it. SoapBox alert: and this goes to your “it’ll probably never happen” discussion: No playoffs in 5 (or 3, or 4)years, your team goes up for sale. After two more years of vetting a new owner (and all the strict legal additives to insure the team doesn’t move) you lose your team. Vivek, go shaka somewhere else.
Flattening the odds argument is apropos: the lottery is…. gambling! Teams are gambling that they will either get the top pick, or if you’re the worst team, no worse than 5th. It’s still gambling. Agree that you remove ALL pick protections. Simple. That also removes the conditionals – (if it doesn’t convey this year, you get two 2nd rounders, etc.). KISS (keep it simple, stupid) them pick contortions goodbye.
Why aren’t terrible, incompetent ownership/front offices considered a threat to the integrity of the league? Why were scumbags like Sterling allowed to run shitty franchises for years with no repercussions? Yeah, he was finally kicked out, but way too late!
Look at the state of our own franchise and who’s been backing up the garbage truck and burying the team in a sea of garbage for the last 13 years. Where’s the accountability from the league there?
As for tanking, I just don’t think the league is being honest with us or themselves about that. Outside the draft, what recourse do non premier destinations have in landing the type of talent required to win a championship? The odds of us, for example, landing that type of talent via a trade or FA signing is pretty close to zero. The other dregs of the league are in the same boat.
So what are they supposed to do? Flounder along winning 35-45 games working up a sweat on that treadmill of mediocrity? And what does it say that at the start of any season there’s what, 4-5 teams with any hope of winning a title?
I’ve heard in more than a few places that the idea of eliminating the draft all together and just letting rookies hit UFA may work. My biggest fear of that is small market teams will always be slighted. In addition to that, deep pocketed owners could easily find cap space by cutting and stretching players they simply don’t want so they can sign the stud rookie. The middling NBA players and end of the bench guys would be among the first go. I’m not sure the Players Association would be cool with that.
More importantly, parity would be out the window. We’d come close to baseball in terms of talent distribution. I don’t want that.
The only way I can squint and seeing it work is if the teams in the bottom of the standings were given some kind of cap exclusion to have more financial flexibility to entice star rookies to sign there. In the end however, what #1 prospect would take $20M per year from Sac when they can take $15M per year in a major market with lucrative Aspiration type sponsorship deals.
The draft is what breathes life into small markets.
What do you think about a hard cap? Tell the teams you’ve got 200 mil (or whatever the number ends up being) to fill out a roster of 15. So, if you want to pay Star X 60 million, fine. Now you’ve got 140 million left to pay 14 other players. Have fun!
No draft, all free agents. I do believe there’d need to be rules around the process- rookie scales, vet player scales, stuff like that, but I like the idea of the hard cap.
I don’t think the Player’s Association would go for that. That would squeeze out the middle talent of the NBA, which is the majority. The stars would always get their share, but the role players would not.
On top of that, this whole Kawahi Leonard/Aspiration thing would become the new normal.
Would anyone be surprised if the Giannis Bucks get the first or a top draft pick? I think I’d take the over on that bet.
Sarcasm aside, if we get another Mavs/Cooper Flagg situation, I might start being conspiracy theorist. Some of what this league is doing is getting really fishy and I’m losing trust.
Badge Legend