The Toronto Raptors are no strangers to losing. They are, however, unaware of this. After taking over as president of basketball operations for the Raptors in 2013, Masai Ujiri decided to build from the middle up. Sam Hinkie and the Philadelphia 76ers’ “process” were busy making blatant tanking popular simultaneously. Ujiri stated, “I’m not sure the karma is great when you do things like that” regarding tanking. “We’re not doing that here,” he continued. In 2019, the Raptors became the first team in NBA history to win the championship without using a single lottery pick. Ujiri finally decided to join the long list of NBA teams that are taking advantage of the incentive structure. This means that bad teams have a better chance of getting the top pick in the draft. However, Toronto was rewarded with only one pick in the top 10 draft and missed the playoffs in three of the previous four seasons. The humiliating and unwatchable multi-team tank-off that the Raptors are currently engaged in has come to define the NBA season 2024–25. “As a purist of the league, a purist of basketball, we play every game to win,” says Garrett Temple, a 15-year veteran and vice president of the National Basketball Players Association. On the other hand, the rules make it advantageous to have the worst record in the league. I don’t think it’s a good look for the NBA. Additionally, the Raptors have offended this season. Immanuel Quickley, Scottie Barnes, Jakob Poeltl, and RJ Barrett, who had led the playoff-bound Orlando Magic by double digits in the fourth quarter on March 4, were terminated by Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic. As a result, the salary pool for rookies and two-way players on the floor was less than $10 million, while the salary pool for the bench was approximately $100 million. “All I could do was laugh,” Barrett said. Even though Rajakovic said, “For us, it’s very, very important now to take a look at different players and young guys and to develop those guys, to give them important minutes,” the Raptors were only a few points away from making the playoffs and at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings. Even though there was still about a third of the regular season to play, the team had already decided to prioritize managing its lottery odds over trying to make the playoffs. In addition, they are not the only ones. A league executive informed ESPN that “Right now nine teams are tanking.” Additionally, the draft may select a greater number of franchise players next year than it did this year. A year from now, nine teams may still be struggling. That amounts to almost a third of the league, which alternates between being content with mediocrity and devising ever-increasing new strategies for losing games. Teams are sitting their best players and quiet-quitting by pulling starters late in games as a result of “rest.” More than 20-star players wear street clothes every night in March and April, making the quality of basketball in the late season worse than ever. “Teams can put whatever they want on their injury report, and the league has not policed injury reports,” said NBA writer Brian Windhorst on the Hoop Collective podcast. As a result, men occasionally sustain serious injuries but are still listed as out. In addition, there are other situations in which stars are listed as out rather than hurt. As a consequence of this, the credibility is in disarray, and the league has permitted that to spread across the street and around the corner; it is simply a mess.” Even though it makes sense for teams to take advantage of the NBA’s incentive system as long as they can get away with it, the rise of tanking has resulted in a win-win situation for the league. These fans pay a lot to watch games live or on television, the players who aren’t getting important developmental reps, and most importantly, the NBA’s TV partners, who recently agreed to an 11-year agreement worth $76 billion. Ingenious solutions to the NBA’s tanking problem have been proposed for more than a decade. Some of these solutions include replacing the draft with rookie free agency, establishing a “play-out” tournament in which the worst teams compete for better draft odds at the end of the season, and flattening the odds of the draft lottery so that every non-playoff team has an equal chance of getting the No. 1 overall pick. But each so-called solution has unintended consequences, like teams on the verge of making the playoffs losing out on the chance to win if the odds are even or there is a play-out tournament, or the best rookies losing out on parity by signing in big markets during free agency. We are aware that tanking is against the rules given that the NBA has long criticized it. The league pressed the Philadelphia 76ers to fire Hinkie in 2016 and fined Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban $600,000 in 2018 for admitting to tanking. So, how can the NBA keep the same incentive structure while preventing the outright, unethical tanking that has become popular in recent years? To begin, the obvious response is to impose severe penalties on anything that compromises the integrity of the game. By the 50th game, we typically know who the worst teams are due to the league’s division into contenders, playoff teams, and bottom-dwellers. However, to improve their chances in the lottery, some teams stop playing their veterans or sit them out. The other residents at the bottom are forced to follow suit, and boom! Tanking that is unethical is rife. “I don’t remember this happening as much when I first came in the league,” says Temple, who has been a member of the NBA since 2009. “People are trying to make the best of the situation to make their team the best it can be,” In the end, no team is engaging in this behavior to have a subpar team. They are trying to make their team better.” However, what if there was a means by which teams could be compelled to play the first fifty games the same way throughout the entire season? That way, the lottery order would change naturally, and the worst teams would never have to lose intentionally to have the best odds. In the National Hockey League (NHL), teams are discouraged from resting players to intentionally lose, even though this may sound extreme. This is due to a culture of competitiveness and power held by head coaches. In contrast, the NHL employs a different, more ethical strategy for tanking, in which the worst teams trade away veteran players at the trade deadline and lose out. The NBA cannot expect the culture to change naturally because teams have learned how to take advantage of the system; however, the league can make the system much harder to game. The NBA would need to get serious about preventing tanking, penalizing teams that are found guilty of resting healthy players with significant fines or removing future draft picks to guarantee that the best players continue to play throughout the season. In March, the NBA fined the Utah Jazz $100,000 for violating the league’s player participation policy by sitting star Lauri Markkanen for nine games in a row. Even though Markkanen appeared to be free of significant injuries, the Jazz were forced to sit Markkanen. However, the standard $100,000 fine that the league imposed on the Jazz this year, the 76ers last year, and the Mavericks the year before is nothing compared to the magnitude of the situation for team owners like Ryan Smith, whose estimated net worth is $2.6 billion. In addition, Markkanen sat out the entire second half and only played 19 minutes in the subsequent game, indicating how seriously the organization took the penalty. An NBA executive informed ESPN that “these next few weeks.” “Could be,” “could be,” “could be the worst tanking stretch we’ve ever seen.” The NBA needs a “Shame Doctrine” that clearly outlines a series of increasingly severe penalties that will be imposed on teams for tanking. Each violation will cost them millions of dollars and future draft picks. It can be challenging to keep track of injuries when almost every player has been injured by the end of the season. However, enforcing this policy would be comparable to what the NFL (and the NFL’s betting partners) do to uphold football’s integrity. The league already employs its medical professionals to determine whether a player is fit enough to play. Additionally, common sense ought to be used in this situation. When a team pulls its starters in the fourth quarter, as the Raptors did, it should be punished. If the Jazz don’t spread Markkanen’s minutes out so that he only plays in the first half, they should do the same. The solution is not to create a different incentive structure aside from the lottery because they all have flaws. Instead, the NBA needs to act quickly and seriously against tanking offenses. If this is not done, the product will continue to suffer as teams come up with novel ways to get around the system.
