[Howard Beck] NBA Epidemic of Tanking Is Neither Tanking, nor an Epidemic

That was good. Tank you for the article. :grin:

 

I will begrudgingly admit this BR article is good. And not just because he agrees with me -- he agrees with me, and took the time to back it up with facts.

Though, I have to say he's pretty lenient on Boston, Utah and Orlando. They might not be tanking the way the 76ers are, but they are clearly looking for the bounce from hitting rock bottom. Sure, it's smart, but being smart doesn't mean they aren't essentially tanking. What the Sixers are doing is also smart.

But, I don't have a problem with tanking. If a team can catch the bounce and start developing again, it can be fun for fans. It's when the tank-job falls flat and the team continues to be bad for years that it's no fun. But, that's sucking, not tanking.

 

There is very little incentive to win for a rebuilding team. As JV mentioned, I see little difference between Philly, Utah, Boston, Orlando, and the Astros. Philly just started out with a bigger mess of bad non-maximum contracts.

 

There's nothing wrong for a bad team to clean the slate and start over. But the system doesn't have to help those teams. A team needs to start over usually falls into two categories: (1) past mismanagement, and (2) retirement of franchise player.

To (1) I'd say that mismanagement needs to be punished, not rewarded.
To (2) I'd say, "You had your fun. Now it's someone else's turn."

The only "good" cause for hitting Restart is if the team lost its franchise player due to catastrophic injury. The system should do something to help those teams to be competitive again. But even injuries has something to do with management. It's called risk management.

 

This article seems somewhat premature. The real tanking starts in the final month or so of the regular season.

 

I think we need more vocabulary here. Coaches changing their rotations to lose more is a qualitatively different sort of tanking than a managerial tanking in which good vets are traded away. Coaches have a responsibility to win games in a way that general managers do not. So coaches throwing games needs to have a different word than GMs throwing games.

 

Measuring in terms of wins and losses is not the right way to test for tanking. After all, the total number of wins and losses is the same every year.

The real question is, does the incentive to lose lead to an inferior experience for fans? The answer to that is almost certainly yes. I have no stats, but just watching games it's obvious there are many late in the season where players aren't really trying.

The wheel idea isn't bad, and even with that there are other assets that the league can selectively award to encourage parity that aren't as unbalanced as the draft. For example, perhaps the salary cap could be increased for teams that have the worst records. Or perhaps teams with bad records would be allowed to ignore salary matching rules in trades.