Remedies For The NBA Tanking Problem

According to a report in today’s Washington Post, NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver, will explore “every possible remedy” to rid the NBA of blatant tanking.  Let me take this moment to welcome Commissioner Silver to Planet Earth where this blight on the sport he is entrusted to preserve and grow has been evident to every life form here in a higher state of advance than antediluvian pond slime.  And since he is looking for possible remedies, let me toss out a few for him to consider.  [Aside: Yeah, right!]

• Remedy One:  No draft picks can be traded.  Once a draft order for a season is determined, all teams will draft in that order, and draftees will stay with the “parent club” for some period of time – – say 3 years.
• Remedy Two:  If Remedy One is too drastic, then eliminate draft pick protection when picks for future drafts are traded.
• Remedy Three:  No team may draft in the Top 5 more than once every three or four years.
• Remedy Four:  Eliminate the lottery advantage for posting a bad record by giving each team one ping pong ball in the lottery and determining the draft order for the whole league with that lottery.
• Remedy Five:  Eliminate the draft.  Put the name of 60 players on ping pong balls in one hopper and two balls each for every NBA team in another hopper.  Draw a ball from each hopper and that team gets that player no matter the record of the team or the needs of that team.  And then, Remedy One would apply to that player staying with that team for a specific period of time.
• Remedy Six:  Eliminate the lottery entirely.  Give the picks to the teams in the reverse order of their record – – but not just the record from the current year.  Make it the cumulative record for the last three or four years.  That will not eliminate tanking in the current year, but it should reduce it.  Combine Remedy Six with either Remedy One or Remedy Two above and tanking should be further minimized.

And while I am at it, let me offer up a “Remedy” that should not be considered under any circumstances.  The college football and basketball championships are determined at the outset to include only certain teams, and both use a Selection Committee to pick the potential champions.  The NBA might consider this as a possible remedy, but it is a bad idea.  I know that people like Mark Cuban think that anytime people are talking about the NBA, it is a good thing for the NBA.  And Selection Committees produce lots of debate and focus on their actions.  [Aside: If you are tempted to subscribe to the theory that all publicity and attention is a good thing, ask yourself how that worked out for the Archdiocese of Boston.]

Nonetheless, there are too many fountains of conspiracy theories in such a system.  Imagine for a moment that the NY Knicks and the New Orleans Pelicans have the same lousy record at the end of a season – – say 12-70 for example.  And if the Selection Committee chose to give the higher draft pick to the Knicks, imagine the outcry about “fixing” that would emerge.  References to the “frozen envelope” would inundate the Internet.  The justification for any and all conspiracy theories in that area would be money; the Knicks will draw more eyeballs when they are good than the Pelicans will and more eyeballs means more TV ratings which means more revenues which means …

• Memo To Commissioner Silver:  No “Selection Committees” please!

This is a serious problem, and it is not going to go away on its own.  It is bad enough when the players show pure disdain for the fans who pay their freight by being “healthy scratches” in games just because they played the night before.  There are no rules that are going to cure that problem; until and unless there is a mass “attitude adjustment” among players that minimizes their own sense of entitlement to their “load management”, the NBA will just have to deal with it.  However, there must be some sort of sanction in place to prevent teams from refusing to try to win games by sitting out starters for half a game or by playing the guys at the end of the bench for 40 minutes each in a game.

It is that second pimple on the NBA’s butt that needs addressing because certain teams are currently incentivized to lose games in the current environment instead of trying to win them.  If a player were to perform intentionally below his capability in order to cash a bet or have his second-cousin cash a bet, the fans and the league would do anything to put a stop to that behavior.  Meanwhile, that is exactly what teams are doing when they are tanking – – except the bet they hope to cash is in that upcoming draft lottery.  That is why the current system needs to disincentivize the way the NBA Draft order is determined.

A former colleague used to say that things had to get “real broken” before there was any real energy around making changes for the better.  In my opinion, the NBA tanking situation has reached the point of being “real broken”.

Finally, here is some advice for Commissioner Silver from author Margaret Wheatley:

“Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………