Amid the comments by Mark Cuban in which he said he advocated tanking to his Dallas Mavericks, some previous comments from Stan Van Gundy regarding the issue have resurfaced.

Some time ago, before Van Gundy became the head coach of the Orlando Magic, he proposed a fix to tanking by addressing the various issues that contribute to teams purposely losing games, per Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinel.

“If we reformed the draft, took away the individual maximum salary and had a hard cap,” Van Gundy said, “you'd literally have 30 teams that would have a legitimate chance to win the championship, they'd have no incentive for losing and you'd see much better games on a nightly basis.”

Bianchi further explained Van Gundy's ideas.

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The Stan Plan started with eliminating the incentive to lose by doing away with the draft lottery altogether and instituting a plan called “The Wheel” in which every 30 years a franchise would get the first pick, the second pick, the seventh pick and on down the line.

He then said he would attempt to implement a hard salary cap like the NFL has. To get this accomplished, Stan said, he would give the players a greater percentage of revenue to make up for them agreeing to a hard cap.

Finally, he said he would eliminate the individual maximum salary limit and allow teams to pay superstars like LeBron whatever the market would bear. This would eliminate teams being able to fit three superstars under the hard cap because competing teams would bid exorbitant amounts to land one of these franchise-altering players. Thus, the stars would be dispersed throughout the league.

These are a lot of fixes and some of them are quite radical, such as the draft wheel, which has been discussed by Bill Simmons before as well. Any changes like this would have to through collective bargaining and be approved by a supermajority of the NBA owners.

But discussions like this that try to figure out a way to de-incentivize tanking are important, and the league must look at every possible alternative.