Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Tankamania

Whee! We’re going to the lottery!

 THESE final six weeks of the NBA season should be rife with good storylines. In both the East and the West, there are tight, 2-team battles to see who will finish with the best overall record and secure home court advantage throughout the playoffs. Both the East and the West also have insanely competitive playoff races shaping up, with teams Nos. 3-8 bunched up close together in the standings, and a few teams on the fringe knocking on the door. A bad week and your team could go from possibly hosting a 1st round playoff series to being out of the playoffs entirely. Complicating matters for the playoff contenders is the fact that many of them have been severely impacted by the rash of serious injuries to stars and key players which has run rampant through the NBA this season – an unfortunate and rather shitty development, since far too many of the best players in the world are sitting on the sidelines in suits, but also something of an intriguing one, because teams have had to figure out on the fly how to win games, often deviating wildly from their usual styles of play. Two teams – New Orleans and Washington – actually seem to be thriving in their times of adversity, having completely reconfigured how they’re going about playing in the absence of Boogie Cousins and John Wall, respectively. With all of these playoff races so right, with every game mattering down the stretch, it should make for some wonderful, competitive basketball.

But all of that threatens to be undermined by the shenanigans going on at the bottom of the standings, where all of the bad teams are in a full-on race to the bottom in hopes of having the best odds in this year’s draft lottery. It’s a perfect storm of awfulness: cynical business practices, perverse incentives, incompetence and just flat-out horrible basketball. Welcome to Tankamania 2018!

Official vehicle of the NBA

In general, The Lose is not impressed by tanking. Losing is the default, and you have to do everything within your power to avoid it. The whole point of any competitive endeavor is to try to actually succeed at it. 

In the NBA, however, they don’t necessarily share that view. The common wisdom in the NBA is that the only way you can win is if you have star players, the best way to acquire star players is through the draft, and the best way within the draft to acquire star-level talent is to pick towards the top. As such, you’re better off being truly terrible, and having a shot at the top picks, than you are by being run-of-the-mill bad. Drafts always create this sort of perverse incentive to begin with, but in response to the Houston Rockets repeatedly dogging it in the early 1980s in order to draft Ralph Sampson and then Hakeem Olajuwon in successive years, the NBA created a lottery to allocate draft slots. This was intended to dissuade teams from tanking, but has instead had the inverse effect. In the original lottery, among the seven teams who missed the playoffs, each had a 1/7 chance in landing the top spot. It doesn’t take a genius to find the flaw in this system – if you’re a middling team battling for the last playoff spot, you had a 14.3% chance of winning the lottery and basically a 0% chance of winning a first-round playoff series. So obviously, in the interest of the long-term, you’re better off slipping out of the playoffs and into the lottery. 

The NBA then changed the bell curve after some near-miss playoff teams wound up with high picks, since ultimately the whole point of a draft is to create competitive balance by giving the worst teams a chance to improve. But changing the curve still doesn’t dissuade a team from giving up on the season and hoping to strike it rich. Instead of there being disincentive to tank, there is actually more. The low percentage play – having a 1% chance of winning the lottery and striking it rich, which has now happened multiple times – is still better than the no-percentage play – being an 8 seed and getting stepped on by Golden State.

So teams are dogging it at this point of every season, trying to game the system in the hopes that the magic ping pong ball will bounce their way. It’s reached a point of complete absurdity in recent years, what with Sam Hinkie and Fuck the Trust the Process in Philadelphia basically throwing away three whole seasons, along with the complete travesty of last season when the Lakers and Suns were  shutting down healthy players for the last two months of the year because they were winning too often with those guys on the floor. As a result, the NBA has announced they are going to yet again smooth out the curve starting in 2019 in an effort to further dissuade tankers. I suspect this won’t have near the effect the league is hoping for – the 11th and 12th worst teams still won’t have ample incentive to try and make the playoffs – but given that the odds are going to change, and truly awful teams won’t have quite as many bites at the apple starting in 2019, 2018 is the last best chance to reap the most benefit from being truly terrible.

Combine this with the fact that so many teams are hamstrung thanks to the summer of 2016, when a spike in the salary cap meant enormous sums of money in the system which bad teams handed out in the form of bad contracts to mediocre players, and the fact that the Warriors basically broke the goddamn league – being so good, and so young, that many teams simply realized they aren’t going to compete in the near future. Not only has there never been a better time in the NBA to be bad, but a whole lot of teams are, at this point, actually willing to be terrible. And I mean terrible. I’m hard pressed to think of a time when the NBA, or any other league in North America, has had as many truly terrible teams as there are right now. 

But I’m not actually sure how you truly disincentivize losing. I used to think that the problem was that, in these North American leagues with set number of franchises, there is no incentive to win whereas in, say, European soccer leagues, being terrible winds up seeing you relegated and sent to the depths that are the second division. The thing is though, is that if you look at, say, the EPL, you see far more bad teams than you see in any American sports venture. 13 of the 20 teams in the EPL have sub-.500 records. The 7th place team, Burnley, has held onto that position in spite of not winning a game since early December. In a league like the EPL, there is zero incentive to actually be good and the only incentive is to be just good enough to avoid the axe at the end of the season. And who cares about cup competitions? It’s a waste of resources to put your best guys out there for those and risk having them injured, when the only thing that actually matters is not getting relegated. It you finish 17th, and keep those £200 million of TV revenue coming in, it’s as good as if you finished 7th.

Sports all over the globe have now been infected with the belief that making efforts to win are foolish. Like I say, this seems to run counter to the whole bloody point of the endeavor. Basketball is the easiest game in which to tank, simply because it has the fewest moving parts. The more players you have on a team, the more chances to undermine your attempt at failing by actually doing something good or even brilliant. While the NBA isn’t alone in this phenomenon by any means,  given the ramifications of the jerryrigged salary cap that’s part of the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, it’s definitely the strangest. Teams will routinely trade players they might want to keep for players they would never want to keep, sign players to contracts they know are bad in the hopes of one day trading those players for something else which might be good, and generally resort to a whole series of measures designed to make themselves worse in the present as they go about chasing the rainbow that is the NBA lottery in hopes of striking the pot o’gold – that #1 overall pick.

So due to circumstances, we have a group of NBA teams this year all clamoring like hell to be as bad as possible. And I should be clear about something here – tanking is entirely a management-driven endeavor. Players don’t play to lose. They HATE losing. They have something to play for at all times. They play for their next contract, they play in hopes of getting more minutes or getting bigger roles. Players are not trying to tank. The idea of continuing to be terrible, in the hopes of being good down the road, is entirely a management construct – which is precisely why you should immediately be skeptical of any team that goes about tanking, because management, ultimately, wants your money but does not necessarily care about the best interests of the fans. When it comes to sports, The Lose is a pure Marxist, believing that if I’m going to pony up $150 to watch a Warriors game, I ain’t going to see Joe Lacob. I’m going to see Steph and Klay and Dray and KD. I want to see great players do great things. I fundamentally consider tanking to be an act of bad faith, and I don’t want to see some extenuation of a math problem constructed by management out there on the floor. Players play to win, but when it comes to tanking, management does what it can to put those players in a position to fail.

The Lose doesn’t appreciate teams that deliberately go about losing, but as a curator of all things done badly, a tank race like we have this year in the NBA is truly remarkable and impossible to ignore. Given that about 20 teams are still vying for good playoff positions, there promises to be some truly great basketball in the next few weeks, but given that there are also eight godfuckingterrible teams in the NBA engaging in a mad scramble towards the bottom, there is also going to be some of the worst basketball that the NBA has ever seen.

Oh, no, wait, we’d better make it nine teams, because here come the Knicks!

Hey guys! Wait for us!

But the Knicks missed out on the opportunity. They won too many games back before Kristaps Porziņģis tore his ACL. Without Porziņģis in the line-up, there is zero incentive for the Knicks to try to win any games, but the Knicks were on the fringes of playoff contention earlier this season – a fun-bad team that was overachieving, thus bringing irrational optimism to the Knicks faithful at Madison Square Garden – and now they’re just bad. They’re bad but they are also too good. They’ve won too many games already, although they’ll sure as hell try to blow the rest of them if need be.

And talking about Tankamania is completely unavoidable, because you have almost a third of the league trying to do it. Recently, Mark Cuban – the only owner in the NBA who will say what everyone else is thinking – got fined $650,000 by the league for out-and-out-saying, on a podcast, that the Dallas Mavericks are setting themselves up to fail. (Amazingly, being fined $650,000 was only the second-worst thing that happened to the Dallas Mavericks last week.) This was followed up with some harsh words in a memo from NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Harsh words, but ultimately empty words, because this is the order of business in the league right now. What, exactly, would the NBA do if they were somehow to try to punish a tanking team? Revoke their draft pick? Ban them from the lottery? I mean, I guess you could theoretically do that, but you’d have to do it to everybody, at this point. Some teams are more opaque about it, of course, but all you have to do is look at the current standings to see that everyone at the bottom is trying to lose games:

All of these teams are terrible

Woof.

And we should point out here that there is a faux tanker in our midsts, a wolf in sheep’s clothing – albeit a toothless, scrawny wolf that would get ganged up on and pulverized by the flock. That would be Brooklyn, who don’t actually have their draft pick this summer:



Brooklyn are still paying the price for the worst trade in NBA history, and Cleveland now owns that pick after acquiring it from Boston in the Kyrie Irving trade this past summer  – and the Cavs’ decision not to peddle that pick in some hasty win-now trade looks better and better with every Nets loss. Absent their pick, Brooklyn has no incentive to lose. They really are just that bad. Although if you saw this opening salvo from the Swamp Dragons game against Chicago earlier this week, you might have thought they were actively trying to fail:

Words fail.

The Bulls, meanwhile, were out front of the Tankamania race right from the start, as they started the season 3-20:

Whee! Look at us! We suck!


But a confluence of events, owing entirely to some actual good players, have threatened to derail the Bulls’ quest for tanking glory. It turns out that the three guys who wound up in red-and-black after the Jimmy Butler trade – Kris Dunn, Zach LaVine, and 2017 first-round pick Lauri Markkanen – are actually not bad. Add in Nikola Mirotić, who returned mid-season after teammate Bobby Portis broke his face in a fight at practice, and all of a sudden the Bulls had a competent line-up and started winning games. A lot of games, in fact. Gasp!   

Now, of course, there is some upside for the beleaguered Bulls front office to having a young core coalesce and win some games, in that it makes it look like they know what they are doing after several years of incompetent decision-making, so it buys some time and buys a little cred for GarPax and for coach Fred Hoiberg, but even so, the Bulls actually playing well put the tank job in severe jeopardy. So the Bulls quickly made one of those classic NBA trades where you dump a guy who is good for someone you wholly know is bad – jettisoning Mirotić to New Orleans for the corpse that is Omer Asik – and have now taken to doing stuff like scratching healthy players, keeping previously injured players out longer than need be, and going so far as to tell Markkanen 36 hours before a game in Sacramento not to bother trying to reschedule when his original flight from Chicago got cancelled. The Bulls are desperate to make up that 2½ game gap, but no one below them in the standings seems particularly inclined to let them, because doing so would require actual efforts to win games.

So the Bulls ran out to a huge lead in the Tankamania race. “Hold my beer,” said the Orlando Magic:



The Magic came to the Bay Area back in November, when they were 8-5, and I was impressed with what I saw of them at the time. Well-coached, good scheme, clear in their objectives. The Magic acquitted themselves well that night in a 110:100 loss to Golden State. 

But notice how, at no point in that last paragraph, did I mention anything about the talent on the roster – because there isn’t any. The Magic got off to that good start by shooting unsustainably well, and once that predictably tailed off, and the schemes were sussed out, the losses started to mount, and they’ve been both unwilling and incapable of stopping the slide. After an 8-5 start, the Magic are 10-37 since. The Magic haven’t made the playoffs since 2012, are 142-315 during that stretch, and have contrived to have not a single viable player on their roster in spite of drafting in the lottery for five straight years. Oh, I suppose Aaron Gordon has some upside, but it’s not clear the Magic want to pay him $20 million a year going forward. No one in Orlando had any expectations of this team being any good to begin with, given the mismatched roster, but the Magic have managed to underachieve even still.

The Magic are used to being this bad by now, whereas the Bulls are still working on it, so when the two teams met recently in Chicago, the Magic showed the right way to throw away a game, blowing a huge 2nd half lead and then doing something idiotic in crunch time:


See, that right there is a classic tanking loss. A good, close game where you then put the ball in the hands of someone incompetent – in this case, Bismack Biyombo – and trust them to screw up the game for you. You can almost hear the cynical Chicago Bulls group of fans shouting out “NOOOOO!” as LaVine is going in for this game-winning dunk, seeing their chances for landing the #1 pick getting worse right before their very eyes.

Four months of truly terrible play, interspersed with come-from-ahead losses such as this one against the Bulls, have allowed the Orlando Magic to catch up, and then pass, the Bulls in the great 2018 Tankamania derby, and also catch up to the third Eastern conference tank commander, the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks are sort of the quintessential mediocre franchise – they have actually been to the playoffs 11 straight years, but have achieved so little ultimately that you don’t even realize it. New Hawks GM Travis Schlenk has traded in for a new model:



This is of great disappointment to a lot of the hipster NBA basketball media, who’d adopted the Hawks as their charming darlings for most of the past decade, and now have to find another team to dote their admiration upon as they go about achieving little in a unique, contrarian way. But enough about the Utah Jazz. Let’s go back to the Hawks … uh, no, I don’t want to talk about the Hawks, because they’ve verged on being unwatchable.

But at least the Hawks came into this season with a plan: push the reset button and start all over. And the Hawks have stuck to this plan. There can be some value to doing what Chicago did – acquiring bad salary in exchange for draft picks – but one of the problems with doing this is that you now have bad salary to deal with in the future. Wisely, Atlanta held firm and are just going to ride out a lousy season. This would give me some hope were I a fan of the Hawks. At least there seems to be some idea of what to do going forward.

This as opposed to Memphis, losers of 10 in a row and showing no real idea that they know that they’re doing. I sort of touched on the problems befalling Memphis in my Lose of the Year post for 2017, because Memphis is in a really bad spot right now and they don’t really know which way they are going:


Memphis are in a bad spot, in that they remember back to when Mike Conley and Marc Gasol were healthy earlier this season and they remember how they beat Golden State and beat Houston twice and think that all they need are these slow, old guys – who can still be quite good – and they will continue to be a good team. Not a great team, mind you, because those guys are over 30 and injury-prone and on the down sides of their careers, but good enough to remain relevant and maybe make the playoffs and keep the asses in seats. It’s this sort of thinking which, at the trade deadline, made them not trade their best asset, Tyreke Evans, who is having a helluva year but whom they aren’t well positioned to re-sign when his contract expires this summer. See, Conley will be back from the Achilles injury which caused him to miss 69 games, and Gasol will be here and they can re-sign Evans because no one has any money to spend, so then they can put the band back together and be competitive once again.  

But in the here and now, this team is horrible – but probably not horrible enough to lose enough games to have the worst record in the league, and thus the best odds in the draft. Griz culture is “Grit & Grind,” it’s all about playing hard and playing your ass off and fighting against adversity. The Griz emobdy that. They play hard, they just don’t play very well. This team has drafted atrociously, cobbled together a misfit lineup and instilled an “Us Against the World” mentality which they’ve been living off of for years in lieu of restocking the cupboards. I have no idea how GM Chris Wallace still has a job in Memphis, given that he’s not managed to draft a guy worth giving a second contract to for more than a decade, and given out a $92 million contract to Chandler Parsons, who is physically unable to play and still has two years left on one of the worst contracts in the NBA. You can fool yourself into thinking that everything is going to go right – Conley will be healthy again, and Parsons will be able to move, and Gasol won’t continue to age less than gracefully – but no one in Memphis has any idea what to do if that plan doesn’t work which, given the injury history of everyone that I just mentioned, seems quite likely to be the case.

Memphis doesn’t know where they are going, and, as we mentioned previously, neither does the Phoenix Suns:


Shout out to the Suns for coming fresh off the All-Star break, starting out with a home game against the Clippers, who’d played a close game at Golden State the night before, and promptly falling behind 35-8 in the first quarter. 

The Suns would be my go-to choice for ultimately landing the bottom spot, simply because they seem incapable of winning a game unless Devin Booker goes nuts and goes off for 40 points – and not even that worked the other night against the Pelicans. The Suns are so bad that playing badly doesn’t even make a difference – whereas someone like the battlin’ Memphis Grizzles are likely to win a few games simply by playing harder than their opponents, which is what they still go about doing, the Suns are repeatedly going supernova and losing by these preposterously large sums. This is because Phoenix’s roster is composed almost entirely of really bad draft picks and the relics of terrible trades, and no one in the organization wants to admit they made a mistake, which creates a definitely unnecessary sense of job security among those on the floor, while Memphis is composed of a bunch of fringe guys fighting for their future. Even their interim coach, J.B. Bickerstaff, has been overly combative, ranking among the leaders in technical fouls and going so far as to threaten to fight referee Marc Davis after getting thrown out of a game. (An understandable sentiment, if you’ve ever seen Davis officiate a game.) 

The other team that’s almost certainly going to play too hard and too smartly over the next six weeks are the aforementioned Dallas Mavericks, who are stumbling and skidding all over the place at the moment, both off the court and on it:



Dallas really should be better than their 19-42 record, simply because they’ve been in a lot of close games this season and managed to lose almost all of them. Mavs games have always been fascinating to watch simply to see what they do against the other team. Most teams just run their sets and run their stuff as the season goes along, but the Mavs have always game-planned heavily. Usually, you can get a good idea for what to do in the future against a team by watching how Dallas plans to go about attacking them.

But, of course, all of that preparation and planning by Head Coach Rick Carlisle may put you in position to win, but the Mavs then fall short because they don’t have enough talent on the roster to seal the deal – which is what’s happened again and again this season. And now that Cuban has as much as said that the Mavericks are tanking, reports have circulated that speak to the meticulous nature by which Dallas is going about doing it, using the same sorts of analytics and data which you would use to figure out what the best line-ups might be to go about trying to figure out which would be the worst. Suddenly, the Mavs are throwing out these weird line-ups in crunch time with guys who’ve scarcely played together and who’d seem to be a terrible fit in the interests of developing young players, and you can always throw rookie Dennis Smith Jr. out there to run the point, since he’s a rookie and will make all the sorts of awful mistakes that rookies are inclined to make, and justify blowing close games by saying that you’re letting your young players go through the growing pains.

Which is precisely what Sacramento have done for most of the season. The Kings have won 18 games this year almost entirely due to simply having a whole bunch of young guys who play harder than the opponents. They’re actually above .500 in close games for the season, which is why they have 18 wins instead of about 10. This game last week with OKC was sort of a classic example of Kings basketball. Having come back from a 20-point deficit, they then tie the game late through a combination of idiotic decision making and sheer tenacity:

But the Kings then remembered their prime objective, which is to lose games, and lost to OKC at the buzzer by basically not bothering to closely guard some guy named Russell Westrbook, who I’ve heard is kinda good. Classic tank loss right there. Play hard, play well, keep it close, and screw it up at the end.

And you could say “but wait, the Kings hustled their ass off to rally on that penultimate play, so how is tanking?” and the reason for that, of course, is that ultimately losing is losing, and with a team like Sacramento, you reach a point where it’s almost impossible to discern between them trying to lose and trying not to. In some ways, the Kings have been tanking for most of the past 67 years, a gold standard of poor play and even poorer decision making:


What’s instructive here is not to focus upon what’s taking place on the floor in the here and now for all of these teams – which amounts to little more than game film in need of being burned – but how exactly they all reached this place. In the case of Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago, and Dallas, being this bad is something of a consequence of riding out a core of veteran players for too long and not adjusting on the fly. All four of those teams have had sustained success, but those good runs came to an end, they were slow to adapt, and are now paying the price for that. In the case of Brooklyn, clearly they had a severe lack of judgment on the talent front when they made that awful trade with the Celtics and set themselves up for continued misery, but the Nets were at least trying to make a big splash at the time, and it backfired spectacularly. But you can at least appreciate the ambition, even if it was misguided.

But then you have the basket cases like the Suns and the Kings and Orlando, who constantly draft high and constantly misfire, make terrible trades, and who are plagued with terrible ownership and management. Given how Vivek Ranadivé has foolishly inserted himself into the draft process in the past, who is to say he won’t do it again if, somehow, the Kings wind up landing the first overall pick? Seriously, Sac fans, do you trust the President of the Sauce Castillo Fan Club to know what to do?


And see, tanking won’t have helped you at that point. It isn’t the end of your problems. The Pelicans have made the playoffs once in the Anthony Davis era, in spite of having had the good fortune of landing one of the game’s most potentially transcendent talents in the draft. Hell, the Timberwolves have consecutive first overall picks in their squad, and didn’t start winning until they imported Butler from the Bulls to tell both KAT and Wiggins where the hell they’re supposed to be on the floor. A budding star is only the starting point. You have to be smart enough to know what to do from there.

And as we’ve seen, time and again, finding star players can prove to be tricky, because stars often seem to come from nowhere. Butler, the undisputed alpha dog in Minnesota ahead of the young #1s, was the 30th pick in the draft. Steph Curry went #7, Klay Thompson #11, Giannis #15, Kawhi Leonard #16. It’s very strange to me when I point these sorts of things out to tanking advocates, who then say, “oh, but they’re exceptions to the rule.” Well, guess what? Everyone who is a star in the NBA is, by definition, an exception to the rule! Some guy you draft with the first overall pick is going to turn out to be a star is also, as it turns out, an exception to the rule. I’ll point this out once more: in the history of the NBA draft lottery, a total of four, yes, four guys taken first overall won an NBA title with the team that drafted them: David Robinson and Tim Duncan in San Antonio, LeBron and Kyrie Irving in Cleveland. That’s it. It’s been shown statistically that guys picked 10th are more likely to turn out to be NBA all-stars then guys picked 2nd, which is most likely due to the fact that the teams picking second are likely to be run by dodo birds. This is all inexact science here, and it’s a process fraught with the perils of guys getting hurt and maybe getting stuck in bad situations. And sure, picking towards the top gives you wider latitude – the hope being that you find a guy good enough to overcome your organizational incompetence – but when you squander such opportunities, it simply becomes more galling over time.

Drafting high means hoping for the best in the future, but in the present, your team is garbage. I can laugh at what’s going on in the NBA right now, look at these nine tankers and struggle to find a dozen good players on their rosters that I’d actually want on my team, giggle at goofy gifs of bad plays and the like, but the fact of the matter is that this is A BAD PRODUCT that the NBA is putting out on the floor in a third of their markets – and also an expensive one. One of the things I’ve found to be true, when it comes to people who advocate tanking, particularly in the media, is that it’s people who aren’t actually paying any money to go to the games. These are businesses, in the end, and businesses depend on customers, be they television eyes or asses in seats. This is not just a math problem. Were I living in Atlanta or Phoenix right now, why on earth would I want to bother to pony up to go to one game, much less an entire season’s worth of games? What is the point?

Remember, the reason that Sam Hinkie and Fuck the Trust the Process ultimately got in deep trouble with the NBA, and run out of Philadelphia, was that as much as a few diehard Hinkie fanatics want to trumpet what he was doing, far more 76ers fans stayed home and what should’ve been an élite cash cow of a franchise, in one of the biggest markets, had actually become a drain on the league’s revenue sharing system. Sometimes in a basketball business, decisions have to be made for non-basketball reasons. To Hinkie, it was all a math problem: let’s game the system and play all of the percentages and maybe we’ll wind up with a star. Okay, then what? How do you stay competitive if, through some miracle, you wind up with said star. Do you know how to find secondary and complimentary talent? Do you have the rapport with agents and players to coax others to join your team, or maybe take a haircut so as to free up some more money? Because at some point, you are no longer going to be handed talent by a lucky ping-pong ball. You have to find it in other ways, and I have no confidence in a teardown artist like Hinkie to be able to do that. His track record in Philadelphia – during which he amassed three centers, with the hopes of trading two of them some day, while not anticipating how useless the center position would become in the donut that the contemporary NBA has become – makes me leery of his supposed visionary qualities. Oh, sure, I get it, Hinkie never got the chance to see it through in Philly. But he was never going to get that chance, because there is only so much losing and pain that anyone is going to put up with.

 But tanking has become hip and it’s all the rage in the NBA and also in Major League Baseball, owing to the fact that first the Astros, and the Cubs, appear to have tanked before rebuilding and winning World Series titles. That makes for the most convenient sort of excuse from clubs like the two Florida teams in MLB, who’ve all gone full-on sink-to-the-bottom this offseason, but it also masks the fact that both Houston and the Cubs were already bad to begin with, so tearing down wasn’t quite as hard at the start, and are enormously wealthy franchises located in enormous cities, and could thus to afford to withstand a full-on rebuild. Clowns like the Marlins and the Rays and the Pirates and the A’s can use Houston and Chicago’s successes as cover, when all they are really doing is simply shedding payroll and using revenue sharing funds to prop up their bottom lines. (Both Pittsburgh and the Marlins have been caught doing this before.) If it seems like a cynical ploy being put forth by franchise management, it more than likely is a cynical ploy, and should be treated as such.

 And maybe 4-5 years from now, some of these kids at the top of this year’s NBA draft class will turn out to be stars, but in the here and now, the optics of having a third of your franchises trying to lose are really bad for the league. Any game between two of these dogs is going to an atrocious train wreck of an affair. Orlando has got a 6-game stretch that starts in late March against the Suns, Nets, Bulls, Hawks, Knicks, and Mavericks. Watching all six of those games may, in fact, cause people to go insane. And all of these dogs are also going to affect the actual playoff races. The Warriors, for instance, who are only a ½-game behind the Rockets for the best record in the NBA, still have three games with the Suns, two with the Kings, two with the Hawks, and a visit from the Swamp Dragons in their remaining 21 games. That’s basically 40% of the schedule remaining where the other team is most likely only going to barely try to compete, and more likely not even to have a pulse. Several of the tank commanders have a double-whammy remaining on their schedule where, over the course of three days, they play both Golden State and Houston, which will likely result in two losses by a total of about 65 points and a whole lot of wasted time for all involved.

 I have no idea how the league deals with this, in the end. So long as there is a draft lottery, there is a reason to want to be a part of it. The NBA has sort of skirted the issue over the years, making the case that smoothing out the draft odds is, in fact, a way to punish the incompetent teams and encourage better management, instead of saying they’re trying to deter the tankers, and while I can see that you don’t want your commissioner coming out and saying teams aren’t trying, maybe the reason is that they know they simply can’t put a stop to it. It’ll be interesting if/when sports gambling is legalized across the country and the NBA is getting a piece of that action. The fear of legalized gambling has always been that games will wind up being fixed, but it’s already apparent that franchises are fixing them on their own as it is. They’re all gambling on the future and playing the lottery, but in the present, it doesn’t really seem any more like it’s much of a game.

And I have given this subject far too much ink, at this point, because I think tanking is incredibly lame and a disrespect to the game, but it certainly makes for content, and it is certainly amusing. In the moment, I can certainly enjoy seeing basketball played extremely badly, which is what is going to happen for the next few weeks. But I am still not watching any more Phoenix Suns games though. You could not pay me to watch that team. Even I have my limits.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me atinplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.
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