The NBA couldn’t have picked a worse time to address tanking

Why do NBA teams tank? It’s seemingly simple question with a deceptively complex answer. The easy explanation is that teams tank to get stars. While stars have been found at every point in the NBA Draft, the higher the pick, the more likely it is that a star can be found. Get that homegrown star and you’re off to the races… or so you’d think. 

Here’s a startling thought for bad teams: it is actually somewhat rare for an NBA champion to be built off the back of a tank. It can certainly help. It gave the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder Chet Holmgren, but OKC was built around Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Boston had two critical, homegrown top-three picks in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, but those picks were acquired in a trade with the Nets. The Nuggets drafted their best player, Nikola Jokić, in the second round. Stephen Curry was the No. 8 overall pick. Giannis Antetokounmpo went 15th. 

Before that, champions were very often built through veteran additions. The 2020 Lakers added LeBron James and Anthony Davis. The 2019 Raptors got Kawhi Leonard. The 2017 and 2018 Warriors added Kevin Durant. The 2016 Cavaliers brought James home through free agency. James was also an external addition for the 2012 and 2013 Heat. Shaquille O’Neal was for four champions earlier in the century. Every team that tanks for a top pick hopes that he’ll lead them to five championships as Tim Duncan did for the Spurs, but Duncan is the outlier here.

Now, even all of NBA history represents a pretty small sample in the grand scheme of things. There have only been 79 total NBA champions, but many of those champions have featured overlapping cores. Really, since the 1976 merger, there have been 15 one-off championship roster-builds and 10 multi-time champions that revolved around at least the same top player, so there’s not really a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not tanking “works.” Teams know they need these top players in order to win a championship, and the draft represents by far the easiest way to get one.

But there’s something deeper going on here. Think about some of the ways those champions acquired their best players without tanking. James joined his championship teams through free agency. So did Durant, and Shaq got three of his four rings after signing with the Lakers as a free agent. The Lakers traded for Davis. The Raptors traded for Leonard. Though these players weren’t stars yet, the Lakers needed the Hornets to trade them Kobe Bryant and the Thunder needed the Clippers to trade them Gilgeous-Alexander. Boston got Tatum and Brown because someone else was bad, not because they were.

What all of these methods of acquisition had in common was a lack of control. You cannot force a free agent to sign with you, and lately, you haven’t really been able to rely on a player you want even becoming a free agent. You cannot force a team to trade with you, and lately, prices on any meaningful trades have gotten so out of hand that getting even a good non-All-Star has become an enormously risky venture. When you have someone else’s first-round pick, you cannot force that team to be bad.

The reason teams tank, really, is that it’s the only component of the roster-building process they have any means of control over. You cannot expressly select where you will draft, but you can make yourself bad, and you can trust that by doing so, you’ll at least get a pretty good pick with the chance for something better. This desire for control is so great that we’ve seen teams pay a premium to get it. Think about the trade the Nets made with the Rockets in 2024. The Nets so badly wanted to regain control of their own picks in 2025 and 2026 that they were willing to surrender three other picks plus a valuable swap to get them. As the Milwaukee Bucks sifted through Giannis Antetokounmpo offers at the deadline, this was a persistent theme. The Portland Trail Blazers control Milwaukee’s picks in 2028, 2029 and 2030, and getting those picks back would likely have made the Bucks more amenable to a deal.

The NBA plans to address tanking, but there are problems with the league’s seven potential solutions

Jack Maloney

This is so relevant today because commissioner Adam Silver reportedly informed the league’s 30 general managers that the league plans to make anti-tanking rule changes next season. Some of the proposed changes are small and hopefully harmless. Others could do substantial damage, as the league’s decision to flatten lottery odds in 2019 ultimately was. Wherever this goes, it’s almost certain to further deprive bad teams of their ability to control where they draft. Tanking critics will call this is a good thing. They’ll say bad teams shouldn’t be so reliant on the draft, that they should build their rosters in other ways. 

And to that I would ask… how?

What happened to free agency?

NBA free agency is basically dead. There’s an idea that it died because stars have realized they can secure more money in an extension and then simply force a trade to their desired destination afterward, having their cake and eating it too. There’s some truth to this, but it goes much deeper. The last two Collective Bargaining Agreements were signed in 2017 and 2023. The last real free-agent frenzy came in 2019, when players like Leonard and Durant moved. But once the full effects of that 2017 CBA set in and were amplified by the 2023 version, free agency mostly became a relic because the rules governing contract extensions were dramatically loosened.

• In the 2011 CBA, the most a player could earn in the first year of a standard, veteran contract extension was 107.5% of his previous salary. In 20217, that figure jumped to 120%, and in 2023, 140%.
• The 2017 CBA introduced designated veteran extensions, or “supermax” deals. These extensions aren’t at all limited by a player’s previous salary. If a player is eligible, even if he was previously making the minimum, he can jump all the way up to the 35% max.
• In the 2011 CBA, veteran extensions could cover no more than four total years. In 2017, that figure jumped to five, or, in the case of designated veteran extensions, six.
• In the 2011 CBA, contracts covering three or fewer seasons could not be extended, and contracts covering four years could not be extended until the third anniversary of signing. In the 2017 CBA, that rule changed so that a three- or four-year deal could be extended on the second anniversary of signing.

All of this made it significantly easier for players to sign contract extensions. When a player signs a contract extension, this removes that player from the free-agent pool. When there’s less talent in the free-agent pool, teams place less of an emphasis on cap space. If there’s less cap space available, more players are afraid of becoming free agents only to find few teams capable of paying them, so they wind up extending. It’s a vicious cycle that has ultimately all but eliminated high-level free agency. Major free agents only really come along now when someone so significantly outperforms their old deal that they are functionally impossible to extend at a fair price. This sort of happened with Jalen Brunson, though he has said he was willing to extend at his max before his breakout and Dallas declined. It’s happening with Austin Reaves now, though he is widely expected to just remain with the Lakers.

OK… so what about the non-lottery portion of the draft?

Speaking of Reaves, the anti-tanking brigade will tell teams that they should simply draft well enough outside of the lottery that they don’t need ping-pong balls to determine their fate. The Detroit Pistons tried this. They wanted to draft Austin Reaves No. 42 overall in 2021. He told them no. Yes, you can do that. “My agency put me in a good position to, you know, have all of that. We could’ve gotten drafted 42nd to Detroit but kind of declined that to put me in L.A. for a better spot,” Reaves said on All the Smoke.

Now, if a team submits a name on draft night, the player cannot simply reject the selection. As Reaves alludes, this phenomenon is the result of agency machinations. The Pistons wanted to give Reaves a two-way deal. Reaves, knowing the uncertainty that comes with a two-way contract (also introduced in, you guessed it, the 2017 CBA), asked the Pistons not to take him so he could seek out a better opportunity. 

The Pistons could have taken him anyway, but elected not to in order to protect themselves from the headaches that come from drafting a player who doesn’t want to play for you. Teams, frankly, are very often unwilling to draw the scorn of an agent over something as small as a second-round pick. You might suggest that they should suck it up, but in this world of limited free agency and frequent trade demands, agents wield more power than they ever have. It can be dangerous to defy the wrong one. If you’re going to do it, it’s probably going to be over something a bit bigger than the No. 42 overall pick.

As Timberwolves president Tim Connelly explained last year, this has taken the second round of the draft from a team-driven selection process to an agent-driven matchmaking system. “It was really curious how agent-driven the second round became, you know? I think we called players left and right, and there was 20 deals done before the draft even started,” he said last June.

Can teams at least build through trades?

So there are no free agents to sign and the second round of the draft is now driven by the agents. Maybe you could build through the trade market? There is some theoretical hope here because of how draconian the aprons and repeater tax have become. Teams are inevitably going to be forced to trade away good players in order to balance their budgets. But we are in perhaps the greatest seller’s market in NBA history when it comes to trades.

Ivica Zubac just went for Bennedict Mathurin and two first-round picks, one of which effectively has a 50-50 chance of landing in the top nine of June’s draft. Desmond Bane went for four first-round picks and a swap last June. A year before that, Mikal Bridges got five first-round picks and a swap. This is pretty notable considering none of these players has reached an All-Star Game. 

Yet this has become the standard. According to Marc Stein, the Pelicans wanted a “Desmond Bane-type offer” for either Trey Murphy or Herb Jones. If you want to get talent on the trade market for a reasonable price now, it usually means doing what the Wizards did with Trae Young and Anthony Davis and taking back contracts so bloated that few other teams even wanted them.

Now, there was not an explicit rule change or league machination that drove these changes to the trade market. Teams are free to make or decline whatever trades that they want. But it’s hard not to view the changes to the non-star trade market as a trickle down effect of these other issues. If teams can’t get young talent in free agency and they have limited control over the draft, they have to hold onto the valuable young players they do find because they don’t have obvious ways of replacing them. There’s no guarantee that the Grizzlies find another player as good as Bane even with all of the picks they got for him, so they were right to set a high price when they decided to trade him.

Those high prices make the consequences of missing on a trade of this size catastrophic. The Knicks spent years accumulating assets for their inevitable star trades. They spent all of them in a summer on Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns. They might win a championship because of those trades. It is increasingly looking like they will not, but they’re boxed in. Towns reportedly has minimal trade value on his supermax deal. The Knicks just signed Bridges to a hefty extension. They’re going to have a very hard time flipping those two if it turns out they need to. Those trades might have cost New York its chance at Giannis Antetokounmpo. 

Most teams are rarely realistically in the running for players like that, but the same basic notion applies. If you trade four first-round picks for someone and it doesn’t work, it’s not as though you’re likely to have four more picks to flip for the next guy. Almost any trade involving a projected long-term starter is so costly now that teams can only really afford to do it once, maybe twice, unless they’ve stacked so many assets from prior trades, as the Thunder and Spurs did, that their asset pool is artificially inflated. The easiest way to get the sort of player you could one day trade for such an asset surplus, by the way, is tanking.

So how does all of this tie into tanking?

In a world in which building through free agency, trades and the back of the draft is harder than ever, bad teams or more reliant on the lottery than ever. This has inconveniently coincided with the 2019 flattening of the lottery odds to force bad teams to stay bad longer than they organically should have because they’ve gotten unlucky in the draft. The worst team in the league last year was Utah. The second-worst team was Washington. If the Wizards had drafted Cooper Flagg instead of Ace Bailey and the Wizards had drafted Dylan Harper instead of Tre Johnson, these teams might have been good enough or satisfied enough with their long-term upside not to so aggressively tank this season.

The whole point of having a draft is allocating good young players to be bad teams so they don’t need to be bad anymore. But if the worst teams aren’t getting high picks anymore because of this tanking hysteria, those teams are going to remain bad far longer than they would in an NFL-style system in which the worst teams get the highest picks.

So this is what I suspect will happen: the NBA will change the rules this offseason. There will be less tanking over the next few years, but that won’t be the result of rule changes. It will be organic. The 2026 draft class is expected to be great. The 2027 and 2028 classes are not. Several teams are just organically at the end of their tanking cycles. The Jazz and Wizards made win-now trades at the deadline. The Nets have significant cap space this offseason and do not control their 2027 first-round pick. The Pacers will have Tyrese Haliburton back. It might very well look like the league has successfully curbed the scourge of tanking. 

And then, toward the end of the decade and perhaps into the 2030s, we will start to see the unintended consequences of whatever changes the league made. And suddenly, it will be 2031 or 2032, and we’ll look around and realize, “hey, Team X has been bad for five years now, but hasn’t made a top-three pick and has no immediate path forward.” Some team, maybe multiple teams, are going to get trapped at the bottom. And there will be some measure of outrage at a system that made that happen, and people will call for changes.

This is how it always goes. The lottery odds were entirely flat through 1989. In 1990 they introduced a system that somewhat favored the worst teams, but was still flatter than it would eventually become. The Magic won the lottery in 1992. Great. The system working as intended. The relatively young small-market franchise gets its superstar. That superstar leads a 20-win improvement. The Magic aren’t bad anymore! And then they win the lottery again with a 1.52% chance in 1993. People are outraged. And in 1994, the odds are steepened. The worst teams have a 25% at the top pick, because we can’t have the Magic picking No. 1 in consecutive years. Just like we can’t have the Spurs picking in the top four three years in a row. Preventing teams from picking in the top four in consecutive seasons is one of the proposed changes the league is considering. The lottery panic is cyclical. Time is a flat circle.

This is where we’re probably going if the league institutes some or all of the measures being publicly discussed. Maybe there is a more radical reinvention of the system that could avert this. I’ve written about some of the bolder ideas out there here, though I confess that none of them are perfect. More likely, we’re getting some of the more vanilla changes that have been floated through reporters.

I don’t think these ideas are going to work, but if any anti-tanking measure has a chance, I think it has to be paired with several broader changes that make it easier for teams to build in other ways. You can’t weaken tanking without strengthening other approaches unless you’re comfortable with the idea that certain teams just won’t have any reliable ways of improving.

Why non-tanking fixes will be so difficult

But any of those changes would be enormously difficult because they would have to be collectively bargained for, not just between the players and owners, but within those groups independently. Why would the player’s association, for instance, give up any of the ground it has gained on extensions? These new rules have made it far easier for them to get paid without changing teams. That’s what most players want, and it’s not something they are going to sacrifice without a fight.

One way to reinvigorate free agency? Remove restricted free agency. Let first-round picks have full autonomy over their destinations after just four seasons. That holds teams accountable for their poor decisions because it means players can leave badly built teams sooner. In the process, more teams would prioritize having cap space to try to sign those players, and the teams that miss on them would have to spend that money on other free agents. That would send the message to other players that there’s money available for them in free agency, disincentivizing extensions.

Sounds great, right? The unintended consequences would be enormous. Do we want a world in which a team drafts a young star, struggles for a few years, and then bolts for the Lakers or Knicks because his original team didn’t have enough time to put a winner around him? Owners certainly don’t want that risk. That’s why restricted free agency exists, much like the franchise tag does in football. Teams want as much of an advantage in keeping their stars as possible. This is especially critical for small markets, who, as you probably assumed, are the teams that stand to get hit hardeset by any anti-tanking measures.

What about the second round of the draft? Could the league potentially declare that only undrafted players and free agents are eligible for two-way deals and insist that second-round picks get full roster spots? Sure… but teams probably don’t want to give second-round picks guaranteed roster spots.

Is there a way to loosen up the trade market? The NBA could perhaps do away with the Stepien Rule, which dictates that teams must have a first-round pick in every other draft moving forward. But seeing how aggressive certain teams are, this would inevitably lead to some team trading away all of its draft control in a way that doesn’t work in the present and absolutely bankrupts the future. Phoenix basically did this even with the Stepien Rule through first-round pick swaps. This probably does more harm than good.

These aren’t easy issues to address systemically. There’s an invisible hand component to these markets that might lead to changes just based on team behavior and new strategies forming, but that’s not reliable. Tanking is the one component of roster-building teams actually can control, and the harder the league makes it to do so, the more teams are going to struggle to escape the bottom of the standings. Teams tank to exert what precious little control over the roster-building process that they can. Take that away and you’re going to see certain franchises languishing at the bottom, year after year, without even the faint hope of ping-pong balls to save them.