To tank or not to tank

The concept of tanking is as entrenched as ever in the culture of the NBA today. The idea of “being bad to become good” is a strategy that some teams have employed, most recently the Sixers of today and the 2011-2012 Charlotte Bobcats. The organizations both built teams to deliberately lose in order to reap the benefits of a higher chance of getting the number one pick in the NBA Draft, who, as we have seen, can turn into a franchise player. But the league has recently been discussing possible reform of its current draft policy, and rightfully so. There have been too many instances where teams have disrupted the competitive balance that the NBA tries to uphold. That being said, I don’t blame NBA teams for using the rules and the percentages to their advantage. The league has indeed encouraged this behavior.

The current lottery’s system goes like this: the team with the worst record in the regular season has a 25 percent chance of earning the number one pick. The percentages then decrease with each subsequent team, from 19.9 percent for the team with the second-worst record to 15.6 percent for the team with the third-worst record. Additionally, for the five teams that qualify for the lottery with the best records, the chances of jumping to the number one pick are each 1.1 percent or less.

The NBA has created two main proposals to reform the NBA Draft system. One of these is the “wheel idea,” which was proposed last year. According to Grantland, the wheel idea eliminates the lottery and creates a 30-year rotation in which every team picks in a specific slot each year based on an algorithm. In this model, teams would know which area of the draft they would pick in each year, and thus there would be no incentive to tank to potentially gain a high draft pick. Would it promote the competitive balance of the league? Maybe, but there are definitely holes in this model. One of them, as Zach Lowe explains, is what happens to a team who drafts busts with its top picks and then is stuck with definite mid/low picks for the next few years.He coins this the “no hope” argument and he has a point. Fans and the organization will have nothing to look forward to in terms of rookie talent, which only further widens the chasm between the top and bottom of the league. This is just one of the many arguments against the wheel idea.

This summer, the NBA decided to construct a new proposal and dismissed the wheel idea. The new proposal, according to Zach Lowe of Grantland, gives the four worst teams, in terms of regular season record, the same chance of picking first in the draft, which is approximately 11 percent. The lottery team with the best record will have a two percent chance of jumping to the number one pick, which is an increase from the current odds. The main goal of the new proposal is to have similar percentages for teams close to each other in the standings. Therefore, there will be less of an incentive to have the worst record if the bottom cluster of teams has essentially the same chance of earning the coveted number one pick.

These discussions are in their early stages, but I think that they are warranted. There needs to be a way that ensures that every team tries to maximize its potential year after year. Having anything else is undermining the concept of competitive balance, the identity the NBA wishes it had.