Fix the NBA’s Tanking Crisis With this One Neat Trick

The NBA is in crisis. No not that crisis. No not that other crisis either. The tanking crisis. The NBA-centric crisis that doesn’t have anything to do with illegal poker games, Jontay Porter’s FanDuel account, or bankrupt carbon credit companies under federal investigation who used to sponsor the Los Angeles Clippers and think Kawhi Leonard is an exponentially bigger celebrity than Leonardo DiCaprio. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver has pledged to finally get to the bottom of one of the NBA’s biggest problems entirely under their control: intentionally losing, or tanking.

Tanking happens in every sport to varying degrees, because the draft system incentivizes bad teams out of the playoff chase to lose more in order to get good players. A veteran player who could play if the game was important sits and rests instead, and simply putting out an inferior team on the floor can help hopeless teams attain the only thing that can turn them around: elite talent. Aside from my hometown’s basketball savant who was drafted during a Taco Bell commercial, the best way to get elite talent in the NBA is either to pick high in the draft or be a big city on the water with cap space at the same time a superstar is grumpy. Losing is logical. Winning when you’re already a loser is the worst thing you can do, and by golly, the Memphis Grizzlies understood the mission this past week in one of the most shameless games in NBA history against the also tanking Utah Jazz, as Molly Morrison so expertly detailed here.

recapped the most stunning tank-off in NBA history

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— Molly Morrison (@mollyhannahm.bsky.social) April 11, 2026 at 12:27 PM

The NBA’s tanking problem is far more acute than the other leagues’, mainly because it has too many games and so it creates a lot of opportunities for pure cynicism in basketball form to arise like the video above. They tried to solve for this by expanding the playoffs to two thirds of the league, yet tanking is worse than ever. The logic behind tanking is very simple: alleged humans who are shaped like Victor Wembanyama don’t fall further than #1 in the draft, and so if you want to get the thing you need to win an NBA title, a superstar, you need to suck—a lot. The top five picks in the NBA draft are some of the scarcest assets on the planet, and teams will destroy their franchises in order to make it into this range where they can draft a player who can save them.

The NBA has near-constantly been tweaking a lottery system that is supposed to flatten the odds and make the more extreme tanking cases unnecessary, but that clearly didn’t work, because the issue isn’t proper incentives, it’s the system they operate in and how precious those top five picks are independent of the odds that you can attain one. Now the NBA wants to build an anti-tanking Rube Goldberg machine on top of this other lottery Rube Goldberg machine and hit 15 bank shots in a row to try to stop bad teams from doing the most logical thing for them. I’m going to guess it will work out as well as all the other anti-tanking measures the NBA has tried and failed that has led them to this moment.

All the NBA’s major problems stem from greed. Star players take games off all the time because there are too many games to keep them all healthy for the playoffs, and the new 65-game minimum to qualify for awards led to a last week of the regular season that had the vibe of second semester seniors showing up to class hungover to claim their last AP credit. The draft as a concept is pure greed, as it rewards bad teams with unilateral control over top prospects. Imagine if you graduated from college with your computer science degree and someone immediately calls to tell you that you have to move to Sacramento. The draft is anti-labor. It is anti-American. Any fantasy football nerd can tell you that drafts are not the best way to build a team: an auction is. An auction gives everyone a chance at every player if they are willing to spend enough money.

Abolish the draft, establish a separate part of the salary cap for rookie contracts, and instead of the draft going in whatever order totally not frozen envelopes and ping pong balls determine they go in, these billionaire-owned teams can take their own dollars into the marketplace and pay rookies what they think they are worth. Give everyone in the draft a chance at every player in the draft pool, and give players the right to refuse offers. Some teams are perpetual cellar dwellers, hopeless by greedy design, and the Sacramentos of the world shouldn’t keep getting opportunities to ruin elite talent’s careers just because their ownership can’t or won’t get its shit together. Allowing players to say “no, I won’t play for your basketcase of a franchise” would create a scintilla of accountability for billionaire owners, about a quadrillion percent more accountability than they currently have in America.

Of course, the bad teams will still need this format tilted in their direction to make sure that small market teams whose calls to LeBron James do not get returned can stay alive and get great players. The NBA is better when Giannis Antetokounmpo is trying to make Milwaukee into a free agent destination as hot as Miami (although it seems likely that has failed and he may be traded to Miami this offseason). Teams shouldn’t get a monopoly on drafting a generational talent like Victor Wembanyama just because they signed the most random guys to 10-day contracts and bastardized the sport just before they won a lottery sponsored by DraftKings.

So give the bad teams more money to bid in the rookie auction with. Give the NBA Champion the least money. Create a whole scale for this that ensures the bad teams still have an advantage in the auction. You guys are the NBA—the people who created a salary cap somehow more convoluted than the NFL’s where money isn’t real and contracts aren’t guaranteed—I’m  sure you can figure out an equitable system to distribute money so the NBA champ can’t just max bid on the #1 pick and splash all the minnows out of the pool.

But it’s bullshit that a generational talent like Victor Wembanyama makes as much money as any other #1 pick, all while he has helped establish the Spurs as a serious NBA Finals contender in part because his contract is so cheap relative to his production. One core issue in all of sports right now centers around the exploitation of young athletes, and the NBA’s tanking problems stem from this default sports mode to exploit the youth. The NCAA’s “plantation mentality” (not me saying that, that’s the former president of the NCAA saying it) getting blown up into a Wild West of ungoverned NIL chaos is warping college sports to Indiana-sized degrees, and the entire concept of contending in the NFL centers around maximizing your roster when your QB is wildly underpaid on his rookie contract. Roughly only a third of MLB owners are actively trying to win, while the rest of the league is pocketing higher percentages of revenues as they take advantage of MLB’s immensely unfair salary structure that ensures players won’t be paid what they’re worth until they’re almost all the way through their 20s.

So many bad outcomes in sports stem from the organizing principle from leagues and owners that young players should have little to no agency and they all should be underpaid as a rule. 

Bad teams will still try to lose under any system that incentivizes losing, but when monopolization of one of the scarcest resources in sports is no longer at stake, I think you’ll see teams chill out a bit on tanking. If the eighth worst team has enough money to bid with the worst team in the league for the top five talent in the draft, maybe they’ll care more about developing an actual team to put that top talent on, instead of going to the local YMCA and asking who’s got next and throwing them into an NBA game so they can upgrade their lottery odds by 5%.

But that will never happen, because that crosses an explicit red line for American capital: labor can never be empowered. The draft is a hazing ritual of sorts, an explicit message to players entering this billion-dollar business about who controls who and what you will be paid for your services before you ever have a say. Victor Wembanyama, literally called an alien, makes the same amount of money as the previous year’s number one overall pick, Paolo Banchero of the 8th seeded Orlando Magic (who also is probably underpaid at this point). Sports are a meritocracy on the field, and anything but off of it. Give all the bad teams the opportunity to spend serious money for top talent and let them duke it out in the marketplace instead of dooming some poor talented sap to try to dig Sacramento out of the cellar every year.