The art and agony of the tank (split from game thread)

But...you used Bing.

With the Fakers latest win and Phx pretty much locked into the 2nd worst record, perhaps a game might erupt.

We cannot do a thing to ensure a loss. At this point, just grab a big bowl of popcorn and your favorite beverage and watch the show. Nothing this season has gone the way we expected anyway, so why should the last two games be any different?

The last time the Kings and Suns played it turned into a battle between Skal and Chriss. It seemed like both players were mindful of the debate over their relative merits, and were extra hyped as a result. It was fun to watch (especially as a Kings fan visiting in person in Phoenix!)

Who knows what is going on? The Lakers have won 4 in a row and the Suns have won 2 in a row--two teams you would be expecting to tank. Can't really stop young guys and journeymen trying to prove they belong in this league to join in on the tank.

Looking at the standings, the Lakers have one more win than the Suns. If the Suns beat the Kings, they could end up tied with the Lakers for the second spot. The spot would then be decided by a coin flip. If they lose, they have the second spot all to themselves.

Surely the NBA can figure out some way to prevent tanking while rewarding the teams that are at the greatest disadvantage? Tanking just sucks. But so does life for suckee teams that don't tank but never get a high draft pick because of it. I think the lottery and the ping pong balls were designed to add some element of chance so as to prevent tanking. And maybe it works to some extent. It just isn't enough at this point.

How many teams get screwed in playoff seeding because the teams they are fighting with play teams that have given up? I'm guessing that is beginning to be as big if not worse a problem for the integrity of the league than the handful of truly bottom feeding teams.

I think the best case I've seen is keep the lotto system as is, but add the wrinkle that you can't get a top 3 pick 2 years in a row. So like the Lakers for example, you'd remove them from the lottery and then just automatically slot them into the 6th spot (the lowest they can go with the 3rd worst record in the NBA). Same goes for worst team and 2nd worst team if they had a top 3 pick the previous year; worst team gets slotted at pick 4 and second worst team gets slotted at 5.

They still don't get punished for sucking by getting a high lotto pick, but it removes any need for them to "need" to lose games to try and stay in the top 3.

At 33 wins with 2 games left New Orleans is pretty much locked into the #10 spot. They could potentially move up to 9 if Dallas wins a game and then loses the coin flip but if you've watched Dallas lately you would know that's very unlikely. Dallas is playing all D-League call ups and telling them to shoot nothing but threes. It's a mockery of good basketball, but a damn effective tanking strategy.

I peek in on other lottery bound teams reddit pages to get a small sense of how the fanbase feels about who to pick,etc. Every single one I see the same thing. A fanbase divided after wins due to the lottery system. Fans accusing others as being "fake" or "idiots" if they dont support tanking or are happy after a win.

This is not new and it isn't healthy for the game. Like PdxKingsfan mentioned it also affects playoff seeding. Its also tough to judge the performance of players up for contracts when the opponents level of play is skewed.

I hope something changes with the system or we at least rise out of the lottery for a while. At least then it wont smack us in the face season after season. I am a basketball fan not a lottery fan. Think of a way for the league to make money and ratings that incorporates incoming players into the league and you have your fix. I still say a playoffs for picks but it has its flaws too.

How about have each lotto team sends a representative to a die roll. You roll a standard 6 sided die with -3 to + 3. Each team has their draft number raised or lowered by that amount, tie break now becomes record (coin flip on a dual tie).

Or...

Take a wheel with a spinner, put it into 14 zones. Spin the spinner once. That number is your pool number - say it comes up 7. You put the teams into groups of 7s. - 1-7, 8-14, 15 & 16.

Spin the wheel again, that # is the lotto winner. All the teams in that zone after the winner get moved up, then you go back to the order of finish.

In this scenario the worst team could get moved all the way to the last pick in the lotto with the wrong spin combo, so there's really no incentive to tank thanks to double randomization.

Or...

just have the GMs ro-sham-bo for it.

Or...

Have them play a game of Monopoly -- winner and first two runner ups get the top 3 picks. I guess a 14 player game wouldn't really work but you could pool the teams into three groups and then have the winners of each group play each other to determine the top 3 order. As long as we're just rolling dice, might as well have some fun with it.

I mean make it a comedic reality show.

That's potentially very true. I think its down now to just the Clips and the Jazz that any playoff team positioning really matters, but this last month of blatant tanking for draft position has had to effect league wide seeding implications.

A lot of these potential "solutions" or "fixes" won't work because you aren't fixing the problem. Teams have an incentive to lose. These solutions being thrown around here just make it harder for losing teams to land the top pick, but the odds still increase the more they lose. You need to give these teams an incentive to WIN! Below is how you could change that incentive...

Once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, they are able to start accruing "lottery points." They get these points by WINNING games. The team that has the most points by the end of the year will have the #1 pick (or #1 spot in the lottery).

The worst teams will be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs first which means they will have more games to accrue points. For instance, the first team eliminated from playoff contention may have been eliminated after 62 games which means they could get potentially 20 lottery points (since there would be 20 games left for them to play). Another team could get eliminated with 12 games left in the season meaning they could get a max of 12 lottery points. However, the team that got eliminated with 12 games left might win at a higher percentage than the team that was eliminated with 20 games remaining. Maybe the first team wins only 25% of their games and the second teams wins 33% but since the first team had 20 games (versus 12 games), they got 5 points while the second team got 4 points.

Thus this system still gives an advantage to the worse teams, but it would force all of the teams out of the playoffs to play their best ball to the very last game. Could you imagine having a toilet bowl game where the team that wins gets the #1 pick? That would be fun/intense/exciting to watch.

"You mean we just spent the last 6 hours locked in a room playing that stupid game with people we hate for no reason at all?!"

"Yup. Oh and we're cancelling the draft this year so I guess you all tanked for nothing."

Wouldn't ever happen, but it would be great if it did. As a fan of good basketball I hate tanking too, but not doing it when everyone else is feels like taking a moral stand for something that doesn't actually matter in any moral sense and has never been against the rules of the game as it defines itself anyway. The whole point of a 'game' is that you define the rules clearly so that any moves/strategies which do not violate them explicitly are not only legal but also good strategy if they're effective. That last part can be argued in this case, but it seems self-evident that all of the 'players' involved in the game of professional basketball management believe that it is.

Anyway, none of that matters really. The league office will do something about it if the owners feel like it's impacting their bottom line enough and they're actually able to agree on a solution. I'm not holding my breathe.

There's a problem with this solution too though:

Once a team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, they are able to start accruing "lottery points."

You're still encouraging teams to tank -- you're just inverting it and encouraging them to tank faster to get themselves more chances to earn points. If a team is eliminated from the playoffs on March 15th because they have only 8 wins, they now have a month to try and win games and guarantee themselves a higher pick. If you know you're not making the playoffs anyway, you can still game the system by tanking games in January and February and "resting" all your NBA players who will then miraculously recover at the end of the year for a late lottery charge. Maybe it makes the last month of the season more competitive for teams vying for playoff spots and eliminates some of the randomness of teams moving up in the playoff seeding simply because they play a slate of tankers, but it doesn't remove the incentive to lose for better draft odds. Maybe it would be an improvement, maybe not. It would certainly be different. You would probably get the curious phenomenon of bad teams becoming buyers at the trade deadline just so they can position themselves for that late surge.

I think they should go back to the original format where all lottery teams have the same chance and you can fall anywhere from 1-14 -- even if you have the worst record. Is that fair? No. But neither is the current system which incentivizes teams to lose in order to gain. The reason the old system was changed was because Orlando won back-to-back #1 picks and did so the 2nd year when they were 41-41.

While the Orlando situation isn't optimal, it's better, IMO, than all the jockeying for lottery position we have now. If missing the playoffs meant you had an equal chance for any of the top 14 picks, then most every team would try to win at the end of the year because there wouldn't be anything to gain from losing. The worst you might see would be a a team or two tanking in the final week to get into the lottery rather than to be a sacrificial #8 seed. But that's far less likely and only limited to a team or two that'd be in that position anyway.

Go back to the envelopes!! It'd made for better TV anyway because you had no idea where any team was gonna fall.

No denying that you'd still get some people doing some iffy things with their lineups before they are mathematically eliminated, but this would result in more competitive games. Isn't that the overall goal here?

I also was thinking through this idea of making players ineligible after elimination. For example, if Player X only played 50% of the games before being eliminated from the playoffs, that very same player can only play in 50% of the games after being eliminated. This would help prevent a team from benching their good players in the beginning only to play them big minutes once they are eliminated from the playoffs. You could do the same with trades. If you trade for a player mid-year and he ends up only playing 10% of the games for your team before you're eliminated, that player can only play in 10% of the remaining games. This wouldn't impact playoff teams obviously, so trading for a player at the deadline to make a playoff push or strengthen your team would not be affected.

I haven't thought through it that much yet, so there could very well be some glaring loophole I'm missing.

An idea was floated a few years ago I liked when compared to the lottery. An NBA Draft Wheel. Every team would know exactly where it was picking for the next 30 years. You were guaranteed a top 6 pick every 5 years and at least top 12 every 4 years. Done. No more tanking. No more pick protections.

Could it suck? Sure. Certainty is a lot better than continuous bad luck some teams have with the lottery. Tanking would be eliminated. I think it could have merit. Not sure where the idea went since first being "leaked". No doubt to gauge interest.

Was it really? I thought they changed after Patrick Ewing. There was a reddit thread the other day about sports and the Mandela Effect Kazaam moment, this would be mine if true!

24 teams make the playoffs. 6 teams have an even up lottery for 1-6 picks. No weighting.

Now this is interesting. Especially if the first round of playoffs are best of 3 series between teams 5-12, and you give the players a huge playoff bonus for qualifying and advancing to the next round.

"The Wheel" is a terrible idea, and if I recall correctly the NBA owners did discuss it and shoot it down. One of the problems with The Wheel is that adopting it locks the league in to a 30-year experiment. Let's say the Kings, knowing our luck, turn out to be the 16th team to get the number 1 pick when the order is determined. Then, 15 years into The Wheel, the league decides it's a bad idea after all. And lo and behold, the Kings went through half the wheel and then never get their #1 pick anyway! Awful.

The other problem with the wheel is that while it addresses "tanking", it does NOT address league competitive balance. The reason the NBA has a draft in the first place (its technical name is something like "Competitive Balance First-Year Player Draft") is exactly to distribute the best young players to the worst teams. Places like L.A. will never have difficulty attracting top free agents. Places like Sacramento always will have difficulty. The whole point of the draft is to try to balance that out, so we don't have teams like Sacramento and Minnesota and Milwaukee, etc., going 18-64 every single year for the duration of the franchise.

People get very caught up in their distaste of tanking, and they forget or don't realize that keeping all the superstars from gathering on the Lakers/Knicks etc. is more important - MUCH more important, in fact - than preventing bad teams from jockeying for position in the late portion of the season (or, hey, in the case of Hinkie's "Process", all season long). One problem is that many of the suggestions to curb tanking do a worse job of ensuring that truly bad teams get good draft picks than the current system.

My take on the issue is twofold. 1) Competitive balance is way way way way way more important than stopping tanking. I will live with tanking, to the degree that it happens, to retain a draft system (lottery or no) that better addresses competitive balance issues. 2) I doubt in all sincerity that an objective system (based on record, or wins after elimination, or anything like that) can be devised which a competent "tanking" GM will not find a way to exploit. Show me the rules, and I'll show you a "tanky" "cheaty" way to get my team the best odds. The only way to avoid this is to force teams to WIN to get good draft picks, which completely blows the whole purpose of the draft out of the water, because now it's BETTER teams that get good picks.

If we really DO want to tackle tanking, I think there may be a solution, and it's only a bit outside of the box. The solution could be to remove objective reference to team win/loss record completely. Instead, create some sort of subjective vote among all 30 team front offices. Teams vote for which teams get the best picks (obviously you can't vote for your own team - though even if you could it would all come out in the wash because every team would vote themselves first). That way, regardless of what a team's record is, the front offices across the league would take a close look at each organization and decide which team is "safest" to give the #1 pick to. Sacramento and Minnesota might end up tied at the end of the year in record, but presumably a lot of GMs would look at Towns+Wiggins and decide that they'd much rather slot Sacramento into the draft ahead of Minnesota. This would, at the very least, not incentivize tanking, because the other front offices in the league should know the approximate strength of your team no matter how hard you tank (or if, say, David Robinson is hurt for the year).

The one problem I can see with the above "voting" approach is that of traded picks. What happens with, say, the Nets' pick this year? Obviously the Nets are so bad they do deserve the #1 pick, but everybody knows it's going to Boston. And that would totally affect a subjective vote. If the Nets were keeping it, sure, they'd get #1 or close to it. But no front office is going to want to gift Boston with a #1 pick with the team they've put together right now. I suppose the argument could be made that once such a system were established, trades for future draft picks could be made with the system in mind. A terrible team like the Nets could trade for a first-rounder from the Cavaliers - the Cavaliers aren't giving up much (they would normally pick in the late 20s) but the Nets might end up getting a very good pick out of it. And obviously a team that acquired, say, 5 first-round picks would end up getting pushed back a bit, even if they were bad. Nobody would want to give them five great picks, so instead maybe they get a good pick or two and a bunch of middling picks. Obviously it would be unfair to apply such a rule to picks that were already traded, but if such a system were being implemented, you could say "All right, starting in 2021 these are the new rules. Do as you will." Teams that thought they were going to be bad would be in the market to get draft picks any way, from anybody, and teams that thought they were going to be good would have no more incentive to hold on to their picks than they do now, and less incentive to ask other teams for picks in trade.

Anyway, that's the way I think it should be done - eliminate tanking while preserving competitive balance. And a system like that voting system seems to me to do a better job of both goals than any other.

The Lottery system still needs to be weighted to help the really bad teams, but I think the weight of the weighted system needs to be changed, to not give the tanking teams such high odds of getting a top 3 pick.

A system such as for:

worst record, gets 14 ping pong balls (out of 105 total balls) (13.3%)
2nd worst, 13 ping pong balls (12.4%)
3rd worst, 12 ping pong balls (11.4%)
4th worst, 11 ping pong balls, etc....

Then, whichever teams wins the top 3 picks in the lottery, they are banned from the lottery for the next 2 years. The top pick they could get is 4th for the next 2 years. That would make them want to compete, because they can not tank and get a top 3 pick for another 2 years. That means that every given year, there are 6 teams (out of 14 non-playoff teams) that will not be eligible for the lottery, therefore, less reason to tank badly. Therefore avoiding the 5-6 year tank jobs like Philly is doing.

Tank mode seems to go full effect after the allstar break. Maybe there is a way to factor in teams entire year performance, this could also give less indication of how much talent is in a specific draft worth tanking for.
Its over my head at the moment, but this years extreme tank combined with a perceived good draft seems a bit too obvious.

@Capt Factorial

I can see the reservations with the wheel concept. Another flaw to the "vote" concept is that no one is going to vote for a team in their own division. You could make the votes public to maybe discourage that but its no guarantee.

Aside from tanking the current system does not ensure the team in most need gets the best pick. In addition to the odds percentages you have to deal with who actively tanked better, had injuries,etc. When we won 17 games we got the worst possible pick. Not one 1st pick for the team that has missed the playoffs the second longest.

Its not just about the pick either. Fans of lottery teams get half a season give or take with the current jockeying for last place.

Team record should be a 3 year period. Teams that win the top 3 lotto are not eligible the next year. Still can get it with traded picks.