NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s proposed crackdown on tanking is taking shape after his conference call with team general managers about league plans to stop the practice.
Tanking, as it is known in American sports, involves teams intentionally losing games to improve their position in each league’s respective first-year player draft.
Although the NBA, much like Major League Baseball and the NHL, uses a lottery to randomize draft order, those lotteries are weighted by record, with the worst teams having the best odds at the top picks.
As first reported by ESPN, the NBA is considering a number of tweaks to its lottery format. One strategy could involve flattening the lottery odds for each team, while another centered around freezing the odds during the season.
Silver, who said last weekend at the league’s All-Star events that ‘every possible remedy … to stop this behavior’ is on the table, detailed several possible options to the league’s general managers on a call Thursday, said the people who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the league has not publicly announced any specific plans.
Silver, who said last weekend at the league’s All-Star events that ‘every possible remedy … to stop this behavior’ is on the table, detailed options to the league’s GMs on a call Thursday
Nothing is finalized and one of the people who spoke with the AP said many ideas are already on the table. Among some of the notions: locking in lottery odds by a certain date, therefore giving teams no reason to not try to win in the final weeks of a season.
The issue will likely be addressed further at a Board of Governors meeting next month.
Tanking has been a major talking point across the NBA in recent weeks, with the Utah Jazz getting fined $500,000 ‘for conduct detrimental to the league’ — specifically, sitting Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. for the fourth quarters of two games. The league said the Jazz did so ‘even though these players were otherwise able to continue to play and the outcomes of the games were thereafter in doubt.’
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The NBA also fined the Indiana Pacers $100,000 for violating the Player Participation Policy by not using certain players — including Pascal Siakam, who meets ‘star’ definition under that policy — against Utah earlier this month.
The league has addressed it many times over the years, including tinkering with the lottery format, adding the Player Participation Policy and handing down heavy fines — like the $750,000 one given to the Dallas Mavericks in 2023, when they sat out most of their key players in a late-season game despite still having a chance to reach the postseason.
‘I think we’re coming at it in two ways. One is, again, focusing on the here and now, the behavior we’re seeing from our teams and doing whatever we can to remind them of what their obligation is to the fans and to their partner teams,’ Silver said at All-Star weekend. ‘But number two … the competition committee started earlier this year reexamining the whole approach to how the draft lottery works.
‘We want to have fair competition, we want to have fair systems and to keep an eye on the fans, most importantly, and their expectation that we’re going to be putting the best product forward,’ he said.
