How NBA franchises spend hundreds of millions of dollars to carefully, strategically, and professionally stink
Every year, highly paid NBA executives gather in their war rooms, pour themselves artisanal coffees, and ask the eternal question: “How do we lose MORE games?” This strategy is called “tanking,” and it is completely legal, widely practiced, and treated with the utmost seriousness by people earning $50 million a year to manage basketball teams.
The idea is: lose as many games as possible to earn a better draft pick, which gives you a shot at selecting a promising 19-year-old with a 40% chance of becoming a star, a 40% chance of being mediocre, and a 20% chance of “developing a chronic hamstring issue.”
“In any other industry, this is called ‘failing.’ In the NBA, it’s called ‘the rebuild.'”
The process is subtle. You can’t tell players to lose — they have massive competitive egos and object to this. So instead, teams simply don’t acquire good players, play the ones they have anyway, and call it a “youth movement.” Any veterans who might accidentally WIN games are quietly traded to contenders for “future assets,” which are imaginary draft picks that may never materialize, like a financial instrument but with worse uniforms.
At season’s end, all the losing teams enter the NBA Draft Lottery, conducted live on television using actual ping pong balls — perhaps the most dignified technology in American sports governance. The worst team gets the best odds, but NOT the guaranteed first pick. No. That would be too simple. Instead, after three years of dismantling your roster, you get a 14% chance that might go to a team that finished 11th. This is called “lottery reform.” It was designed to discourage tanking. It has not discouraged tanking.
Fans will build elaborate spreadsheets proving their team must lose exactly 58 games to maximize draft position. They are deeply passionate. They have also calculated the optimal number of defeats for the team they love.
The apex of tanking was Philadelphia’s “The Process” — when the Sixers were so committed to losing they gave it an official branded name. It eventually worked! They got Joel Embiid, became contenders, and then traded him. Anyway, The Process is now discussed in hushed, reverent tones, as if it were the moon landing, rather than what it technically was: an elaborate scheme to be as bad at basketball as humanly possible for as long as possible.
Somewhere tonight, a general manager is watching his team get blown out by 40 points, and he is smiling. He has a vision. A plan. A beautifully constructed strategy ensuring his franchise will someday — possibly — be great.
Or they’ll land the fifth pick and a point guard with a torn ACL.
It really could go either way.
The author has no actual knowledge of NBA strategy or ping pong ball aerodynamics. This column should not inform real franchise decisions, though it probably couldn’t do worse.