The NBA competition committee is taking steps towards discouraging teams from blatantly tanking, or at least holding players out for the most minor of injuries just so they could keep their protected first-round picks.
This season, the likes of the Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards have been the guiltiest of this, while the likes of the Indiana Pacers, Memphis Grizzlies, and Brooklyn Nets, just to name a few, have very little incentive to win to boost their lottery odds and are acting accordingly.
To that end, the NBA presented three potential solutions, including expanding the lottery to 18 teams with flattened odds, 22 teams using a two-year record system, or an 18-team format drawn in a 5 by 5 lottery. These proposed solutions have been met with disdain from most NBA fans and even pundits, with insider Marc Stein raising a red flag on the league's potential countermeasures to tanking.
“If your theory is correct and they wanted this out there and they wanted to gauge public reaction. Public reaction was almost unanimously, ‘No, this ain’t it.' First of all, at least two of the three concepts are so hard to explain,” Stein said on the ALL NBA podcast.
“We thought the new All-Star Game format was tough, none of these concepts are being explained in a sentence or two, which right there is a red flag because you kind of need the public to understand what you’re doing here.”
There is no perfect solution to NBA's tanking “problem”
The Oklahoma City Thunder built their dynasty-caliber roster through the NBA Draft. So have the San Antonio Spurs. The Boston Celtics drafted both Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum. Even the Detroit Pistons are relying on homegrown stars Cade Cunningham and Jalen Duren.
As such, there is never going to be a solution to the NBA's tanking problem. As long as there is an NBA Draft and the league is set up in a way where bad teams need all the help they can get to improve, there is always going to be incentive for bad teams to bottom out and hit gold in the draft.
