The annual N.B.A. draft lottery will be held on Sunday, giving the league’s worst teams a chance at the top pick in the draft and offering hope and optimism to their long-suffering fans. Yet for years, the N.B.A. has struggled with a problem that undermines the entire intention of the draft. It’s a problem the league can’t quite fix and can no longer ignore: tanking.
In the current system, the league’s worst teams have the best odds of getting a top draft pick. Tanking, simply put, is the practice of losing on purpose, in hopes of improving a team’s draft chances. Fans complain about it. Writers criticize it. In 2018, Mark Cuban, then the majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, was fined $600,000 by the league just for talking about the possibility of tanking — and he was fined $750,000 in 2023 for resting star players and violating league policy.
As a practice, tanking has no real parallel in other professions. No hospital deliberately provides bad health care for several years in the hope of attracting top doctors. No restaurant intentionally serves bad food today to earn better reviews tomorrow.
Adam Silver, the commissioner of the N.B.A., considers tanking such a pernicious problem that in April he unveiled a complicated system designed to discourage it. His proposed reform — the so-called 3-2-1 lottery — would expand the number of teams that are eligible for the lottery and flatten the odds among the teams, making it slightly less likely that the worst teams would get the No. 1 pick.
At first glance, that may look like progress, but the core issue remains unchanged: Teams would still be rewarded for losing.
Mr. Silver doesn’t need a more complicated lottery system. He needs a lottery system with a better incentive. No system that rewards losing will ever eliminate the motivation to lose. And no fans show up to games hoping their teams do anything but try their best to win.
There is a simpler, better solution. Stop giving the best draft lottery odds to the worst teams and give them instead to the best of the worst.
A best-of-the-worst approach would assign lottery odds based on success, not failure: The team with the best record among those teams that missed the playoffs would get the best odds at the No. 1 pick, and the rest would follow from there. The worst team? It would be assigned the worst chance at the top pick. So if you lost on purpose, you would hurt, not help, your odds.
N.B.A. teams pursue a tanking strategy because under the current system, it works. This perverse dynamic is especially pronounced in basketball, more so than in other sports that use a player draft, because in basketball a single player can have an outsize impact on a team’s fortunes, as happened when the Cleveland Cavaliers landed LeBron James as the first pick in the draft, the San Antonio Spurs drafted Tim Duncan after an unexpectedly poor season, and the Philadelphia 76ers openly embraced a multiyear strategy — called “the process” by team ownership — that involved accumulating top picks and targeting Joel Embiid, an eventual superstar, with the first pick overall.
An additional impediment to preventing tanking is that most teams don’t begin a season intending to lose — players don’t try to miss shots or turn the ball over on purpose — but as the season wears on and it becomes clear that a team is unlikely to make the playoffs, the incentives inevitably shift. This shift shows up in subtle decisions: A healthy veteran sits out in the fourth quarter of a close game. A minor injury becomes a two-week absence. Individually, the decisions might be defensible. Collectively, they amount to a strategy.
Tanking creates a strange dynamic — one that’s arguably unique to professional sports — in which, at certain moments, the fans want a team to win more than the players, coaches and front office do. Mr. Cuban was fined by the league in part because he openly spoke about telling his team, “Losing is our best option.”
As a 30-year season ticket holder for the New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets, I’ve seen plenty of bad teams. But there’s an indelible difference between a team that isn’t very good and one that is trying not to win. Whether it’s the first game of the season or the last, fans want their teams to compete to the best of their ability. A best-of-the-worst system would give every team a reason to play to win, right to the final buzzer of the season’s final game. Late-season games would matter. Fans would get a better experience.
The N.B.A. has long been one of the most innovative professional sports leagues in the world. It has an opportunity to address one of its most persistent structural problems with a solution that would be both straightforward and effective.
And the best incentive in sports has always been, as Adrian Pennino from the “Rocky” films reminded Rocky Balboa: “Win!”
David Moore is the chief executive of Moore Holdings and has a minority ownership stake in the Atlanta Hawks.
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