On Saturday, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged the NBA’s longstanding tanking problem. He candidly admitted that, when it comes to winning games and securing dibs on the best incoming players, the incentives are misaligned.
The only way to ensure full integrity of the games in an age of legalized gambling, with every team trying its best to win every single game, is to fully align the incentives. And the only way to do that is to revolutionize the way the draft order is determined.
It’s that simple. Any effort to tie draft order to performance, or lack thereof, will incentivize a business decision to not try to win, or to actively try to lose.
While the phenomenon is more common in the NBA, it still happens in the NFL. And it’s not about players trying to lose. It’s about teams shelving their best players, before or during games, in the hopes that the lesser players will achieve the desired result.
The Raiders seemingly greased the skids toward the No. 1 overall pick in the final weeks of the 2025 season by shutting down their best two players — defensive end Maxx Crosby and tight end Brock Bowers. And while the Raiders emerged with the top pick, they may have lost Crosby, for good.
The approach flows directly from the benefits of landing a higher spot in the draft. Who cares if a bad team finishes 3-14 or 4-14? Once a season is lost, why not try to turn it into a win?
That won’t change unless and until the pro sports leagues come up with a different way to assign incoming players to teams. The simplest and cleanest outcome would be to make the whole thing a lottery, with no team having more chances than another. It’s the luck of the draw, every year. And it’s the most fair way to accomplish the goal of removing any incentive to tank.
The other possibility would be to enhance the incentive to succeed. The first overall pick becomes one of the spoils of winning the Super Bowl. The team that loses the Super Bowl picks second, and so on.
Some would insist that this would keep bad teams bad. But plenty of bad teams stay bad even when they get the best incoming players.
Or they could just get rid of the draft entirely, and allow the incoming players to pick their first NFL teams. Unfortunately, the NFL’s ultimate traveling reality show about nothing has become way too big to ever be disbanded.
Regardless, tanking is a problem. For the NBA, it’s teetering toward a crisis. The NFL has managed to keep that from happening. One of these days, it will.
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