NBA TV ratings have fallen drastically. A 36% decrease in TV ratings from 2014, the year Adam Silver was elected commissioner, to 2024. This season’s opening day saw a 42% decrease in viewership compared to last year’s. Many reasons have been put forward as to why this is the case, but the one persistent issue that has dampened the league’s image is tanking.
This was highlighted by the March 7th game between the Toronto Raptors and Utah Jazz in which both teams were without four of their top seven scorers because of ‘rest’ and ‘injury’. Utah have been fined $100,000 this season for resting all-star Lauri Markkanen.
To combat this, Adam Silver administered changes to Draft Lottery Odds in 2019, issued fines to teams for resting players intentionally and, during the 2023 season, tinkered with the extreme idea of implementing relegation.
Simply put, relegation is dropping down a division. The punishment a team faces for having a poor season. Then being replaced by a team more deserving of their spot, usually from a lower division.
While this concept is well known in most sporting leagues around the world, it remains foreign to American sports, where relegation doesn’t exist.
So, what happens to those teams who are terrible during the season?
In America, the pathway to becoming a professional for young athletes entails going to college. Where they can declare for a draft and be selected by those underperforming teams for the following season. The draft is ordered using a lottery system in which the worst teams have higher odds of getting the first pick.
As a result of this system, teams like the mid-2010 Philadelphia 76ers, who finished in the bottom two of the Eastern Conference for four years straight, would stockpile their chances to acquire young talent by ‘intentionally’ losing games. In turn, this would give them higher odds of acquiring elite young players out of the draft as their draft pick would be higher up in the lottery.
You may be thinking that this is appalling behaviour from a professional team. How can a sports team that inspires millions of people, including kids, justify selling merch and tickets to their fans while having the idea to field weaker rotations and players in a desperate attempt to be good later?
Ethically, this sets the wrong message. It takes away from fans and even players who have been raised to play competitively their entire lives, suddenly, not playing them or trading them away to prep for the future just doesn’t seem fair, does it?
But is it that big of an issue? I don’t think so.
Contrary to Baseball and American Football, where the incentive to ‘tank’ is less due to the sheer size of rosters, Basketball is only played with five players at a time. This means that one player can change the entire fortunes of a team. Think LeBron James in 2003, who single-handedly willed the Cleveland Cavaliers to the playoffs from 2005-2010, before returning in 2015 to win them the NBA championship. Their only championship.
The foresight to evaluate where a team currently stands vis-à-vis whether they can win a Championship or not and make moves accordingly to eventually reach that goal is both extremely insightful and an underappreciated skill.
Many instances of this have occurred in the NBA, such as the Boston Celtics. Who traded Kevin Garnett, Rajon Rondo and Paul Pierce to Brooklyn in the 2013/14 season, despite winning the championship in 2008 with the three of them being core components of their roster. However, in 2013, they were past their best, and Boston packaged them in trades for bad contracts and future first-round picks. The Celtics would finish 25-57, while the Nets finished 44-38. However, those picks ended up becoming Jaylen Brown (2024 NBA Finals MVP) and Jayson Tatum (5-time all-star) serviceable players that would help them be competitive in the East for years after the trade and win their 18th Championship in 2024.
Cleveland would also be another example of a team that traded for picks and bad contracts and saw noticeable rewards. During 2010-2014, the four years James was in Miami, Cleveland would be rewarded with the number one pick in three of them, because they finished outside the playoff zone in all four years, using this reward to build a competent roster to lure the 4-time NBA MVP back to Cleveland and win the 2016 NBA Championship.
So, there is evidence to support the notion that trying to lose games now, to build for the future could work. Moreover, this should be seen as a strategy. Some teams like Denver and Milwaukee do not have the luxury of attracting star-free agents. Forcing them to build organically via the NBA Draft.
Is it wrong for them to stockpile picks and assets to try and maximise their chances of a championship window in the future? Absolutely not. It is a risk, and a strategy invoked for the betterment of the future that is not blinded by short-sightedness.
It is an intangible skill of executives to understand that their team isn’t good enough to win and try to fix this flaw to overcome this in the future. Many more teams stuck in NBA ‘purgatory’ should embrace this model, as the reality remains that not all teams can recruit star names to increase their chances of success. Therefore, the viable alternative remains to try and build for the future by stockpiling assets and drafting players astutely. This strategy prioritises patience and foresight over brash moves that could set you back years. One that more teams should look to embrace, as recent history shows that four of the last five championship teams were led by players, they drafted themselves.
