How To Fix NBA Tanking
Tanking, intentionally losing to improve a team’s draft lottery odds, has become endemic in the NBA. My friend Joe Voyticky and I propose modifications to the NBA season and its draft structure to give teams positive incentives to win even for weaker teams with little or no chance to compete for a championship or even a playoff spot under the current system. Instead of rewarding teams that finish with worse records with somewhat better draft lottery odds, our proposal would encourage teams to win, and put them in situations where that goal is realistically achievable even for teams not ready to make a long playoff run.
The first and most visible change would be to the format of the regular season and playoff qualification. Instead of the current 82 game season, where the top 6 teams in each conference make the playoffs, and the next 4 get to play for the final spot in each conference’s bracket (the top seed gets a first round bye), we break the season into up to 3 phases, and then regroup teams between each phase.
In the first phase, each team would play 2 home and 2 away games against every other team in its conference, making 56 games total. The top 7 teams in each conference would be put into a “Champions League, with just one more regular season phase. They would play each of the other 13 Champions League twice each, a total of 26 more games, giving them 82 games before the usual playoffs. The Champions League would start with fresh standings, and the top 12 teams would qualify for the playoffs, seeded by ranking in that league. Counting just this 26 game phase for playoff seeding (or, for the bottom two teams, elimination) both raises the stakes in that phase of the season and also is fairer than using full regular season record, as if one conference happens to be much weaker than the other its top team could have a better overall record because they played weaker competition, not because they’re the better team. So we only count the 26 games where Champions League teams play equally among themselves.
The 16 teams not qualifying for the Champions League have two more phases to their regular season. First comes League 1, where the 8 teams from each conference play their conference foes twice each, for a total of 14 games. The top four from these two divisions move into the Playoff League, again 8 teams playing each other twice each for 14 more games. But the top two teams in the Playoff League get the 13th and 14th seeds in the NBA playoffs. As with the Champions League, this qualification is based on record in Phase 2. The other 6 Playoff League teams will get their own postseason: a revamped NBA Cup.
The bottom four teams in each conference of League 1 finish the regular season in the Last Chance League, where they play 14 games with the top 2 from the Last Chance League also qualifying for the NBA Cup, which now becomes an 8 team knockout tournament of series like the Championship Playoffs. So to summarize, the 16 teams not making the Champions League have two more phases, with the top 8 competing to get into the NBA playoffs, or higher seeds for the NBA Cup, and the lower 8 competing for the last two spots in the NBA Cup.
Segmenting the season like this, and then grouping and playing more against teams closer to your own level, both gives weaker teams achievable goals – maybe they scrape back into the Championship Playoffs, or at least compete in the NBA Cup – but it also has them playing the rest of the regular season against teams closer to their own level. So the later phase games will tend to be more competitive as there would be fewer lopsided matchups.
So that’s how the NBA regular season would look, and it would then be followed by two sets of playoffs: the familiar Championship Playoffs, and a revamped NBA Cup. Not only do teams have goals, but even if a team’s season has been going very badly, well into the final phase it still retains hope and a plausible chance at postseason play, as nabbing an NBA Cup slot from the Last Chance league requires playing well against other weaker teams for just a 14 game span.
By now you may be thinking, sounds sort of interesting, but where are the big incentives to avoid tanking? That’s where our other two major proposals come in. The first and most universal incentive is money. Presently NBA teams share national broadcast revenue evenly, but we propose making much of the revenue from postseason broadcast rights, the current Championship Playoffs, and the revised NBA Cup, be distributed among those teams who qualify, prorated for how far they go in the competition. Like a pro tennis tournament gives increasing prize money for each extra round you reach, the playoff awards pool would give teams financial incentive not only to make the Championship Playoffs, or at least the NBA Cup, but to go as far as they can. And the phased structure of the regular season gives teams a path to do so even if their first 56 games go terribly.
Okay, so money can be a motivator. But why should anyone care about the NBA Cup, especially now that the best teams in the league no longer play in it? Here’s where our second change comes in. We’d split the NBA draft lottery into three groups, and give the top 4 picks to the semifinalists in the NBA Cup. The Cup winner would have 50% of the ping pong balls, the runner-up 25%, and the two teams that lost in the semifinals 12.5% each. This gives the NBA Cup extra meaning, as teams would be playing to guarantee a top-4 draft pick, and it would give teams not making the Championship Playoffs strong incentive to at least make the NBA Cup, and to improve their seeding there as much as they can. The second NBA draft lottery would be basically for teams who didn’t make the Championship Playoffs or the NBA Cup semifinals. This would be for picks 5-18*, but the wrinkle here is that your lottery odds would go up the more games you won in the full regular season, rather than down. So teams have no reason to tank, even if they’ve dropped out of the top two of the Last Chance League. Intentionally losing would just lower your draft lottery odds, not improve them. While it might seem like this would doom *very* bad teams to staying awful for a long time, because their lottery odds get worse when they finish at the bottom, their near-term goal now would be only getting into the NBA Cup and winning one round, which would guarantee them a top-4 pick, with at least a decent chance at #1. It is be much more achievable to improve to win in the revamped NBA Cup than to turn a perennial doormat into a genuine title contender under the current system.
The third draft lottery would be for the Championship Playoffs teams for picks 19-30*. Here we’d give each team equal odds, so a team never has incentive to lose. The last wrinkle with the draft is that the two top League 1 teams, those who didn’t make the Champions League, but got into the Championship Playoffs as 13/14 seeds by being at the top of League 1, will be in this third lottery only if they pull an upset of a 3/4 seed in the first round of the Championship Playoffs. Otherwise they’ll be in the lottery with the teams that didn’t make the playoffs at all or lost in the NBA Cup first round. If they pull off that upset, their share of the Playoff revenue pool goes up, and they must be a pretty strong team to knock off a much higher seed in a 7 game series.
This proposal removes incentives teams currently have to tank. Losing more games means missing out on playoff bonus money and also lower draft odds. But the second chances built into the phased season, and grouping teams by relative ability, also means that even very weak teams can have a plausible shot to win something meaningful: not only a postseason series or two, but a shot at the top draft pick. Injury to a franchise player may not mean a lost season, as if you get back to full strength for phase 2 or phase 3 you may still make the Championship Playoffs or at least the NBA Cup.
The NBA this year has clearly split into two distinct halves, with no teams in the middle. All the teams above .500 will make at least the play-in games for the playoffs, but just one team is between .400 and .500. That team, Golden State, has a solid lock on 10th in the conference and the last postseason slot. The teams under .400 have no realistic path to a championship any time soon. Under this proposal, weaker teams would fight to get into the NBA Cup, and to improve their draft odds. It would reward competition and winning, not give teams incentive to lose.