Take a moment to gaze at the NBA standings. Go ahead, take in the wondrous columns of wins and losses and “games back,” the orderly clusters of title contenders and playoff hopefuls and, way at the bottom, the utterly hopeless. Stare for a minute, as if you’re taking a Rorschach test. What image emerges?
Do you see dramatic races for the second through eighth spots in the Western Conference and frantic jockeying for play-in spots? Do you see the intense three-way battle for fourth place (and home-court advantage) in the East?
Or do you see a league in which one-third of the teams have apparently pulled the plug and are jockeying only for draft position—or even [gasp] “tanking” to pursue better odds at the no. 1 slot and a chance to select Duke phenom Cooper Flagg?
Maybe you see all of it. But chances are, you’re hearing (and even talking) more about the race to the bottom than the race to the top. It might even feel a little like a throwback to the dark days of the mid-2010s, when tanking became the NBA’s biggest buzzword and its greatest scourge, and the Philadelphia 76ers were pioneering new ways to piss off the commissioner’s office.
The conversation around tanking is again reaching a fever pitch—on podcasts and TV talk shows and all the proverbial barstools and barbershops. But the reality is, well, considerably more nuanced.
Yes, some teams have, er, decreased their efforts to win games—by shutting down stars, benching veterans, and playing fringe prospects. The allure of Flagg—a highly skilled, 6-foot-9 forward—has only brightened the spotlight on the perverse race for losses and lottery balls. Two weeks ago, the league fined the Utah Jazz (16-57)—who are vying for the NBA’s worst record—$100,000 for repeatedly resting star forward Lauri Markkanen. Earlier this week, in a game pitting the lowly Toronto Raptors (25-47) against the even lowlier Washington Wizards (15-56), both coaches pulled key starters in the fourth quarter.
It’s not great, Bob. And yet …
With two and a half weeks left in the regular season, 23 of the NBA’s 30 teams are battling for playoff positioning or a play-in spot—a testament to the flatter lottery odds instituted in 2019 and the play-in tournament adopted in 2021. The league wanted to give more teams an incentive to keep competing in March and April. The good news: It worked! The bad news: Teams are still finding creative ways to defy the commissioner’s office (and basic integrity) in the pursuit of ping-pong balls and, potentially, franchise-changing talent.
Which means that tanking—or, in some cases, just the perception of it—is still a problem for the NBA. But on balance, league officials are pleased with the deterring effect of the play-in tournament and the new lottery odds.
“We’ve got 23 teams in contention,” Evan Wasch, the league’s executive vice president of basketball strategy and analytics, told The Ringer last week. “And we haven’t really seen those extreme versions of rebuilding or roster breakdowns that we were seeing [in the past]. … Teams go through periods of rebuilding. But there have not, in our view, been teams that have purposely pursued a plan of losing a lot of games on a multiyear basis, solely to rebuild through top lottery picks. So those are big wins, in our view. And I think we’re really happy with the way those two changes have played out.”
In fact, over the past five seasons, the NBA has seen an average of 23.6 teams per year still “in contention” for, at minimum, a play-in spot with 15 games left to play. That includes a high of 26 teams in the final weeks of the 2022-23 season and a low of 22 teams in the final weeks of last season. The five-year average represents exactly a four-team increase over the prior five-year stretch (19.6 teams)—which, of course, is what happens when you extend a 16-team postseason field to 20 (counting play-in spots). But it’s still a meaningful wrinkle if it’s motivated the teams from 11 on down to keep competing. And it mostly has.
You’ll note that Wasch, like his boss, commissioner Adam Silver, steadfastly refuses to utter the t-word, instead crafting clever euphemisms like “extreme rebuilding.” But that’s more a semantic preference than a refusal to acknowledge what’s happening. League officials see—and cringe at—the same things the rest of us do: the in-game lineup manipulations, the sudden rash of (possibly embellished) injuries to key players on losing teams, and the all-out efforts to “develop the young guys” in March and April, all of which just happen to help teams lose a little more.
But these are thorny areas for league officials to police. The NBA can’t dictate lineup or rotation decisions or how many minutes a team’s best players will log on a given night. The league in 2023 instituted a raft of rules—the player participation policy—aimed at curbing “rest” games and penalizing teams for sitting otherwise healthy stars. But there are limits to how much further it can go. There’s also an understanding that lower-tier teams have a legitimate basis for playing their young prospects in the final weeks of a lost season.
“Once a team is actually out of contention, there still really isn’t in our system an incentive for that team to go chase a lot of wins down the stretch,” Wasch said. “Because once you’re out of the playoffs, or once you’re likely out of the playoffs, there’s just no additional benefit that comes at the end of the year directly from winning games. And so what we see historically is when teams are in that situation, whether it’s under the old system or the new, that other incentives start to come into play.”
Those, ahem, “other incentives” surely include a desire to collect more ping-pong balls for the May draft lottery. But Wasch pointed to more legitimate motives, like managing the health and workload of a banged-up veteran or evaluating younger players. Still, “It is not lost on us that there’s also a potential to be gained with the lottery odds,” he said.
To Wasch’s point, whatever tanking (er, extreme rebuilding) is happening now, it’s not nearly as egregious as it was in the mid-2010s, when the Sixers notoriously embarked on the multiyear teardown known as “The Process.” In a three-season span, Philly won 19, 18, and 10 games, mostly by deploying the weakest rosters possible. The scheme worked. The Sixers earned a top-three pick in four consecutive years, landing a future MVP (Joel Embiid) and a future All-NBA player (Ben Simmons).
The Sixers weren’t the only tanking artists of their time, just the most brazen. In response, the league flattened the lottery odds, assigning the three losingest teams an equal 14 percent chance at the no. 1 pick—instead of rewarding the worst team a 25 percent chance, as it had for years. Now, bad teams (or rebuilding teams or injured teams) still have some incentive to lose, to be sure—but the so-called “race to the bottom” is less extreme than it once was.
“It is absolutely the case that the overall competition throughout the regular season is better, in aggregate,” over the past five years, Wasch said. “Particularly the latter half of the regular season is better than it was in the period before lottery reform and the play-in; and we haven’t seen any of the behavior that we specifically targeted with the lottery reform, which is these multiyear teardown efforts.”
Those flatter odds have made planned losing a much dicier gambit. In the first year of the new system, the New Orleans Pelicans, who were tied for the seventh-worst record, leaped to no. 1 in the lottery and won the right to draft Zion Williamson; the teams with the three worst records and the best odds—New York, Cleveland, and Phoenix—dropped to third, fifth, and sixth, respectively.
In six drafts with the new odds, the no. 1 pick has yet to go to the team with the worst record (although the team slotted second has won three times). Last year, the Atlanta Hawks leaped from 10th to first. (In flattening the odds for the three worst teams, the NBA consequently boosted the odds of getting the top pick for the rest of the lottery teams. So there’s a better chance to move up than there was under the old system.)
But some perverse incentives remain. The team with the worst record is guaranteed a top-five pick. The team with the second-worst record can’t fall further than sixth. And the third-worst team can’t fall further than seventh. In a year with a deep draft class, losing teams still have an incentive to lose more than their loser rivals.
And then there’s pick protection—the practice of trading draft picks with conditions, which can create yet another set of perverse incentives. The Sixers owe this year’s first-round pick to Oklahoma City, but it’s top-six protected, meaning the pick stays with Philly as long as it doesn’t fall to seventh or lower. So the Sixers—who recently shelved injured stars Joel Embiid and Paul George—have every motivation to lose as much as possible. (And they’re doing a damn good job of it, with just three wins in March.)
Two years ago, the Dallas Mavericks pulled the same maneuver, giving away games down the stretch to ensure that they’d keep their top-10 protected pick, which otherwise would have gone to the Knicks. (They drew a whopping $750,000 fine from the league.) Last year, it was the Utah Jazz angling to finish in the bottom 10 to avoid sending a protected pick to Oklahoma City. (That pick is still owed, with top-10 protection this year and top-eight protection in 2026.)
The NBA has no intention of scrapping the traditional reverse-order draft, Wasch said. So any solution will eventually run up against the reality of a mechanism specifically designed to help struggling teams. Which means more tinkering around the edges.
“I think all of what we’re seeing this year is just making us want to think about again: Is there anything further we could be doing to address, on the margins, the types of behaviors we’re seeing this year—where it appears to some fans, some media, that teams may be purposely underperforming for whatever incentive reasons they may have in their particular situation?” Wasch said. “So it’s something we’ll be discussing again with our competition committee.”
The league is indeed attentive to the issue, even if, as Wasch put it, some of the public’s perception “is divorced a bit from reality.”
On the plus side, the play-in tournament—which involves the teams ranked seventh through 10th in each conference—continues to be a potent incentive for lesser teams to keep competing. The Suns and Mavericks, who in another era would have given up on a playoff berth by this point, are still jockeying for the 10th and final play-in spot. The young, scrappy Portland Trail Blazers, though 3.5 games back, look determined to make a run at that spot, too—they just recorded a four-game winning streak. Even the Spurs—who lost stars Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox to injuries—are within striking distance and recently ran off three straight wins.
Moreover, some presumed tankers—like the Brooklyn Nets, who compete hard every game and occasionally pull an upset—have far exceeded expectations. And, if we’re all being honest, we tend to apply the t-word way too liberally. The New Orleans Pelicans, a talent-rich team with playoff aspirations, simply had their season derailed by injuries. The Charlotte Hornets, albeit young and still evolving, did not set out last fall to chase lottery odds—they just couldn’t stay healthy.
Tanking is still here, still a nagging concern for league officials, and still a scar on the standings—just not nearly the plague it once was. But that’s not how most fans and media members see the ink blot. Which means the NBA will have to dust off all the old proposals from a decade ago and perhaps concoct a few new ones.
“We’re certainly not sitting here with our head in the sand or dismissing criticism,” Wasch said. “We do think it’s worthy of revisiting.”
For now, it’s probably best to enjoy the 23 teams still competing for something—and, if nothing else, to appreciate the ingenuity of the teams that are, ahem, “purposely underperforming.”
