The NBA's problems are so much bigger than tanking

A broad agenda to make the regular season interest

Luka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers is also clearly frustrated and confused by the NBA’s decision making. (Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images)

Slow Boring is on spring break this week! Kate and I are traveling with family and will be online less than usual, while Halina, Caroline, and Ben keep things running. We’ve got some slightly less newsy content for you while we’re out (but a normal Mailbag on Friday) and look forward to resuming regularly scheduled programming next week.

---

This year’s NBA regular season has been dominated by discussion of teams “tanking” (deliberately losing games to improve their draft position) to the point where commissioner Adam Silver wants owners to consider a range of potential anti-tanking remedies.

The basic issue is that the NBA currently gives teams a better chance of scoring a high draft pick when they have a bad record. All of the anti-tanking proposals on the menu involve weakening the link between a team’s record in any given season and their draft odds. This makes sense on some level; if you reward teams for being bad, that creates an incentive to field bad teams.

On the other hand, I find it a little bit confusing.

All the major North American sports leagues use some version of a draft where worse teams get to draft earlier in the interests of competitive balance.

European leagues don’t typically work this way, adhering instead to a more ruthlessly capitalistic ethos. I personally am not deeply invested in doing it the North American way.

The NBA seems poised to expand from 30 teams to 32 teams, adding new franchises in Seattle and Las Vegas. I worry a lot about this diluting talent. In fact, I think the idea of shrinking the NBA to a 20-team “Premiere League” is more appealing. The season could end with a 16 team playoff, plus the bottom two teams relegated to the “NBA 2,” which would also have twenty teams. That would be fun without any incentive to tank.

But the NBA is not remotely considering this. So, given the commitment to the standard North American structure of a closed league with constant bailouts for bad teams, I think they ought to take a more holistic look at the actual issues with the long and somewhat tedious regular season.

The biggest tanking fixes

Silver and most commentators are using a somewhat narrow definition of tanking for the purposes of this conversation.