Former Dallas Mavericks majority owner Mark Cuban, who still has a piece of the team, has an interesting take on tanking.
He thinks the NBA should embrace it.
Cuban’s theory is that fans don’t care about winning or losing. They care about experience.
“Few can remember the score from the last game they saw or went to,” Cuban wrote on Twitter. “They can’t remember the dunks or shots. What they remember is who they were with. Their family, friends, a date. That’s what makes the experience special.”
For most fans, the experience is undeniably more special if the preferred team wins. Cuban doesn’t see it that way.
“Fans know their team can’t win every game,” he said. “They know only one team can win a ring.”
His point is that long-term hope is more important than short-term success, and that tanking helps achieve the goal of building a consistent contender.
“We didn’t tank often,” Cuban said of his time in charge of the Mavericks. “Only a few times over 23 years, but when we did, our fans appreciated it. And it got us to where we could improve, trade up to get Luka [Dončić] and improve our team.”
Cuban’s bottom line? “The [NBA] should worry more about fan experience than tanking. It should worry more about pricing fans out of games than tanking. You know who cares the least about tanking? A parent who [can’t] afford to bring their 3 kids to a game and buy their kids a jersey of their fave player Tanking isn’t the issue. Affordability and quality of game presentation are.”
He may be right about experience and affordability, with one very important caveat. Sports leagues are currently cramming their pockets with gambling money. And gamblers definitely don’t wager for “the experience.”
They want to win. They need to assume both teams want to win the game as badly as the gambler wants to win the bet. And while a team’s “tank” rating could be factored into the betting analysis, no one knows when or where a team is going to decide to give the starting five the night off in the hopes of not winning a given game.
Legalized gambling places a premium on the integrity of sport. The integrity of the games, and the integrity of the wagers on the games.
Tanking games is a stone’s throw from fixing games. Would Cuban say fans don’t care about fixed games, they care about the experience?
The NBA isn’t the WWE or the Harlem Globetrotters. Tolerating anything that undermines the notion that, for both teams, “winning isn’t everything but it’s the only thing” invites a major scandal driven by bets gone bad because one of the teams wasn’t really trying to win.
The reality is that tanking is happening, and that the NBA isn’t doing enough to stop it. A major controversy, whether manifesting itself in legislation, regulation, prosecution, and/or litigation, is inevitable.
Read the full article here