With the 2016-17 season under wraps, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke about the issue of rest and teams tanking after the halfway mark of the season.

“We are gonna have to react and change incentives a bit. I do think it's frustrating,” said Silver in an interview with ESPN's Mike & Mike on Friday morning. “I was talking to my European soccer men a few minutes ago, I'm not saying we are gonna do it in the NBA, but they have the best incentives of all because teams actually get relegated from the league. Think of the consequences there, they lose their television money, they lose their big ticket revenue by not playing the top teams. So teams have every incentive not to fall to the bottom.”

Despite the NBA and soccer being two completely different sports, Silver is spot on with this analogy because the best incentive isn't money itself, but actual consequences.

If a player gets a raise or a bonus for finishing the season or playing a number of games, with the league reaching salary and revenue highs with new TV network deals and partnerships with big brands, that money will start to look like pocket change in a matter of years, making it just not worth it anymore.

Having a relegation system in place will put everyone in high alert, from the owner, to the general manager, coaching staff, and the players. But as long as the NBA Draft keeps rewarding the worst teams as a way of balancing the scales, this issue will prevail.

Silver went on to make the comparison between the Philadelphia 76ers actually being praised for this so-called ‘process' while Phil Jackson should have just blown up the New York Knicks and taken the same road as the Sixers did.

The commissioner explained that if a GM is put in a position to start from absolute scratch and tank in order to rebuild his team, then the league absolutely has to do something to encourage a strategy to help change that mentality.

A relegation system, per se to the D-League (or the G-League, as it will soon be called), would be the utmost humiliation for an NBA team, but it could also set a system in place that rewards D-League teams for winning a championship, while discouraging NBA teams from tanking and potentially getting a shot at the some of the best college and international talent available in that year.