That loss—the Wizards’ twentieth in their past twenty-one games—counted as a success, I guess. As in that April Fools’ stunt, everyone was aware of the scheme. This time, though, not even the fans were misled. The reasoning was obvious: The Wizards can only keep their first-round pick in the 2026 draft if the team secures one of the top-eight picks; otherwise, owing to a complex series of prior trades, the pick would go to the New York Knicks. And, because of how the draft lottery is currently structured, the best way to guarantee a top-eight pick is to finish the season as one of the league’s four worst teams.
That’s been the plan, recently, for a number of teams: draft a promising young player as a shortcut to changing the team’s trajectory. The real appeal is that those stars are cheap; a player’s first two contracts are capped by the so-called Rookie Scale, which lets teams employ great players before they have to pay them what they’re worth. The draft is designed to increase parity by sending the best new players to the worst teams in the league. The problem is that this incentivizes losing on purpose—tanking, in N.B.A. parlance.
For many years, the top pick was determined by a coin flip between the worst teams in the Western and Eastern Conferences. But teams recognized the value of high draft picks: it was better to be really bad than merely mediocre. So, over time, the N.B.A. introduced four significant rounds of changes to the draft system to combat tanking and to make sure that picks went to the “right” teams. Teams that didn’t make the playoffs were entered into a lottery and given a chance to secure the top pick, with the worst team receiving the best odds. Then came choosing the second pick, and so on. But, during the regular season, teams without a hope of making the playoffs started scrambling to detonate their records to get a shot at a future star player—and some teams, most notably the 76ers of the twenty-tens, engaged in a long process of strategic losing in order to stockpile picks. In 2019, the odds for the three worst teams were flattened, as a way to discourage teams from racing to the bottom. But that change, like every one before it, not only failed to reduce tanking but may have made it worse. In practice, spreading the odds meant that even teams who were just bad in general had a chance at landing the top pick. That motivated more teams to tank, not fewer.
An exceptionally strong draft class this season, in combination with the complicated math around protected picks—which are included in trades but don’t always convey if they land in certain spots—has increased teams’ incentives to do well in the lottery. Even the third or fourth pick this year might net a franchise player. Even before the All-Star break, many teams were sitting their best players in close games, trading for banged-up players, or constructing nonsensical rosters. (The Chicago Bulls have an absurd number of guards.) Now on any given night, around a third of all N.B.A. teams are trying to lose.
Of all the challenges plaguing the N.B.A. this season (a rash of severe leg injuries, the arrest of an active N.B.A. head coach during an F.B.I. gambling investigation, the shuttering of regional television networks carrying local N.B.A. games, and so on), nothing has seemed to excite the league office quite so much as the problem of tanking. On some level, this makes sense: professional basketball is an entertainment product, and no one thinks that a team like the Wizards is particularly entertaining. There are issues, too, if the integrity of the game can’t be trusted. So the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, has publicly vowed several times that the league intends to curb the practice of bottoming out, if not eliminate it outright. In February, he levied six-figure fines on the Utah Jazz and the Indiana Pacers for not playing healthy stars, and he’s talked about “substantial” changes to the draft-selection process. Some of the ideas under consideration have been floating around for a while, but last month a list of proposals was leaked to ESPN. None of the ideas, despite the spin, are all that radical, and some of them work against one another. There are suggestions to increase the lottery pool and place win-floors for teams to get the best chances. There are double lotteries and protections that would put a safety net beneath the very worst teams. What they all have in common is the prospect for unintended consequences, because they don’t address the real problem: teams are still rewarded for trying to be bad.