NBA Fixing the NBA

O_V said:
Let this be a lesson to every professional sports league to steer clear of any kind of rule that incentivizes a team not to put their best product on the field and to not try to win at all times.
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Pretty wild that they’ve all had the same rules for decades, but only in 2026 it became a problem in need in urgent fixing.
 
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I wish we would have never gotten David Robinson, Tim Duncan or Victor Wembanyama… it would have preserved the integrity of the game and the Nashville Spurs could exist in a more pure state of the NBA.
 
spursistan said:
By being so brazen and in-your-face with his tanking, that prick Danny Ainge is going to ruin it all for all small market teams by prompting the league to choke off their only real avenue to get elite talent. He could have traded his precious veterans and tanked organically and no one will blame him for it, but his self-importance and obsession to bleed dry his counterpart GMs in trades has led him down this disgraceful path of going about it, which has brought unnecessary extra scrutiny of the issue.. Genuinely can't wait for this overrated geezer to retire or get run out of front office.
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Congrats to that jabroni Ainge.. He did it, completely destroying the draft for lower & middle class class of the league..
 
scott said:
Pretty wild that they’ve all had the same rules for decades, but only in 2026 it became a problem in need in urgent fixing.
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It's only recently that you have towns whose fan bases are actively rooting for them to lose so that they can get a better pick. Dallas threw games a couple of years ago to keep from having to give up a pick to the Knicks with no punishment. Now they were gifted Cooper flag and are trying to find creative ways to lose so that they can get yet another high pick they don't deserve.

It's no secret that Adam Silver has been an absentee commissioner. Officiating is awful. Teams are paying players under the table. Nobody's doing what they're supposed to do. The player's association is partnering with draft kings. It's a fucking disaster.

Say what you want about David Stern, but none of this would be going on on his watch.
 
O_V said:
It's only recently that you have towns whose fan bases are actively rooting for them to lose so that they can get a better pick.
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Bruh, this is not a new development… one club even created a name for it 😂
 
scott said:
Bruh, this is not a new development… one club even created a name for it 😂
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Here's an interesting point I hadn't thought of when I replied to your post last, but Adam Silver is suddenly so concerned about tanking because the gambling companies are getting complaints from their clients that the outcomes are being changed by tanking teams.

Your were on to something wondering why is it so important now.
 
O_V said:
Here's an interesting point I hadn't thought of when I replied to your post last, but Adam Silver is suddenly so concerned about tanking because the gambling companies are getting complaints from their clients that the outcomes are being changed by tanking teams.

Your were on to something wondering why is it so important now.
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Oh yeah, Silver is definitely a coward and I 100% believe this is about satisfying the gambling sponsors. Ratings are up, attendance appears to be steady, interest in the league is up (driven by a new wave of Superstars led by Wemby). But gamblers aren’t happy, so there is a need for change. That’s what a few of us having been saying since the first pages of this thread.

As for your question about when this happened under Stern… if you’re talking about fans rooting for their team to lose to increase the odds for a better pick… no need to look any further than our own Spurs in 1996-97. Once DRob start missing lots of games, a lot of fans started rooting for the tank… I know, because I was one of them!

Whether or not the Spurs “hard tanked” or “ethically tanked” (whatever that means) is up for debate… but there were definitely fans who were rooting for the Ls that season.
 
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scott said:
Oh yeah, Silver is definitely a coward and I 100% believe this is about satisfying the gambling sponsors. Ratings are up, attendance appears to be steady, interest in the league is up (driven by a new wave of Superstars led by Wemby). But gamblers aren’t happy, so there is a need for change. That’s what a few of us having been saying since the first pages of this thread.

As for your question about when this happened under Stern… if you’re talking about fans rooting for their team to lose to increase the odds for a better pick… no need to look any further than our own Spurs in 1996-97. Once DRob start missing lots of games, a lot of fans started rooting for the tank… I know, because I was one of them!

Whether or not the Spurs “hard tanked” or “ethically tanked” (whatever that means) is up for debate… but there were definitely fans who were rooting for the Ls that season.
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I was in the minority, I guess. I knew the season was lost. I liked Bob Hill, I disagreed with Pop making himself coach, and I actively rooted for Dominique to pull us through, since I doubt anyone told him to stop trying to win.

After the season I hoped for a Spurs team with Chauncey Billups or Adonal Foyle. I figured Keith Van Horn was too much to hope for.

If they were tanking, it clearly wasn't as blatant as teams are doing now. David Robinson's injury that year was the back injury that changed his career. As evidenced by their playoff performance since 1990, none of his teammates were any good anyway.
 
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RC_Drunkford said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/2024619189630357835
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All of this stuff Sam is saying is obvious to anyone with even a basic surface level understanding of game theory… it will be hilarious years down the road when it’s like “wow I can’t believe totally predictable thing happened”… but this seems to be a pretty common thing with society at large these days so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
RC_Drunkford said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/2024619189630357835
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Agree with most of this list (the second point most of all), but not the first point. I think not allowing protections between top 4 and top 14 is a good idea.

The reason Dallas tanked to get Lively and Utah is tanking now is tanking did/does guarantee them keeping their pick. The Warriors did the same thing with Harrison Barnes. These are the kind of blatant late-season tanks the league wants to avoid.

If a pick is top 8 protected, a team can guarantee keeping it if they have a bottom 4 record, at most 4 teams can jump them. On the other hand, no team can ever guarantee keeping a top 4 protected pick because if 4 teams jump them, they are SOL. Even with a bottom 3 record they only have a 52.1% chance of a top 4 pick. 47.9% is a very high probability for tanking an entire season for a bottom 3 record only to end up having to give away a #5-7 pick.

To guarantee keeping a top 14 protected pick a team has to miss the playoffs. They can tank their way into that, but it requires deliberately giving up on a round of playoff revenue for a small handful of lottery combinations. While a couple of 10th-worst records have jumped into the top 4 recently, has a #13-14 team ever done so?

I do like the idea of not counting record beyond a certain number of wins, such as treating every team that finishes worse than 25-57 as if they had actually finished 25-57. This doesn't remove the incentive to tank entirely, but it prevents a race to the absolute bottom and should stop most of the March and April tanking. Tiebreakers would need to be totally random so that games between two tanking teams don't turn into an ultra tank-off to lose a head-to-head tiebreaker.

Some randomness is necessary. If there were no lottery I think at least one team would have legit tried to go 7-75, or worse, to guarantee Wemby.
 
scott said:
All of this stuff Sam is saying is obvious to anyone with even a basic surface level understanding of game theory… it will be hilarious years down the road when it’s like “wow I can’t believe totally predictable thing happened”… but this seems to be a pretty common thing with society at large these days so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Another guy without basic surface level understanding of game theory, apparently:


I'm hearing more and more traction for this idea. We might end up getting to know if it's a better system or not afterall, tbh.
 
scott said:
I wish we would have never gotten David Robinson, Tim Duncan or Victor Wembanyama… it would have preserved the integrity of the game and the Nashville Spurs could exist in a more pure state of the NBA.
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The issue some people have is the route teams have to take to have a chance to get those type of players. I don't think anyone said they never want their team to improve.
 
DAF86 said:
Another guy without basic surface level understanding of game theory, apparently:


I'm hearing more and more traction for this idea. We might end up getting to know if it's a better system or not afterall, tbh.
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Thanks for this link.

I listened to this... Jason acknowledges right off the top (around the 1:30 mark) that flattening the odds doesn't work... then turns around and says he wants to flatten the odds while fully acknowledging the biggest problem with completely flattened odds (it just shifts the tanking to a different range, it doesn't actually eliminate it) while dismissing the most obvious impact: the play-in games will become the biggest tankathon game of the season. Teams will be faced with a choice: do I want to have the same chance at getting the #1 pick as the worst team in the league... or do I want the honor of getting demolished in the first round? He understands the consequences, he's just thinks they are the best of all the imperfect solutions... which is a fine opinion for anyone to have, and people can agree or disagree.

I think your idea of adding financial incentives to mitigate this is the only way you can possibly make this work... but there are two practical limitations to this
  1. how do you establish the amount of money required to completely offset the incentive to get the pick? Take the example of a Wemby adding a low-end estimate of $500MM to the value of the Spurs. From a pure EV perspective, that means you'll need the teams to agree to transfer a collective $500MM from the lottery teams to the playoff teams. ($35.7MM/team). Obviously Wemby is a one of a kind, not every #1 pick is going to do that and there is no real way to estimate this a year in advance so that you could adjust this... so do you just live with undershooting it some years and overshooting it other years?
  2. How do you get teams to agree to this? Basketball Related-Income in 2024-25 was $10.25B. This gets (effectively) split 50/50 between the owners and players. So each team gets roughly $171MM in the revenue share. So, you need the league to agree to put 21% of the team's shared revenue at risk to flow from the worst teams to the best teams.
This is actually very similar to the idea I said I thought had some merit - taking 10% of both the Owner's and Player's share of BRI and making it "at-risk" based on wins and losses (but it would be redistributed based on a sliding scale - basically if BRI is $10B then each win would be worth $813k, half of which goes to the owners, half of which goes to the players and then gets distributed pro-rata to their contract. I think this is a good idea... it just has the problem that I seriously doubt owners or the players union would ever agree to this.

If you want to listen to more on this topic, Dunc'd On has a good discussion in a free episode:
- they address in depth each suggestion, the pros and cons of them, and the predictable outcomes. There isn't a single suggestion that has been thrown out that isn't easily gamed out... at the end of the day it's just a question of which of the unintended consequences you're willing to live with. There will always be a handful of people who want to pretend that those consequences don't exist... the world is full of a lot of delusional people.
 
Seventyniner said:
Agree with most of this list (the second point most of all), but not the first point. I think not allowing protections between top 4 and top 14 is a good idea.

The reason Dallas tanked to get Lively and Utah is tanking now is tanking did/does guarantee them keeping their pick. The Warriors did the same thing with Harrison Barnes. These are the kind of blatant late-season tanks the league wants to avoid.

If a pick is top 8 protected, a team can guarantee keeping it if they have a bottom 4 record, at most 4 teams can jump them. On the other hand, no team can ever guarantee keeping a top 4 protected pick because if 4 teams jump them, they are SOL. Even with a bottom 3 record they only have a 52.1% chance of a top 4 pick. 47.9% is a very high probability for tanking an entire season for a bottom 3 record only to end up having to give away a #5-7 pick.

To guarantee keeping a top 14 protected pick a team has to miss the playoffs. They can tank their way into that, but it requires deliberately giving up on a round of playoff revenue for a small handful of lottery combinations. While a couple of 10th-worst records have jumped into the top 4 recently, has a #13-14 team ever done so?

I do like the idea of not counting record beyond a certain number of wins, such as treating every team that finishes worse than 25-57 as if they had actually finished 25-57. This doesn't remove the incentive to tank entirely, but it prevents a race to the absolute bottom and should stop most of the March and April tanking. Tiebreakers would need to be totally random so that games between two tanking teams don't turn into an ultra tank-off to lose a head-to-head tiebreaker.

Some randomness is necessary. If there were no lottery I think at least one team would have legit tried to go 7-75, or worse, to guarantee Wemby.
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Yeah, I think the pick protections adjustment is fine. My only objections related to that proposal is not tanking-related, it's more that it de-fractionalizes trade currency, which makes valuation harder and thus possibly freezes up some of the trade market... with that said, that is short lived and markets will adjust over time and it will be fine.

Given that the protections might help with tanking, I think that's a fair trade off with the short-term trade off on the impact on the trade market.

Dunc'd on Pod suggested that maybe you still have the reverse pick protections allowed (similar to the pick that went to LAC for Zubac).

To your last bullet point about the lotto odds, maybe they could flatten odds within various tiers of the lottery. Like the 4 worst teams get the same odds, then the 5-10 teams get slightly lower odds, and then the 4 play-in teams get lower odds. I think this would result in some pretty clear delineations of the tiers, but it would eliminate the incentive to out-tank the other teams in your tier. Still not perfect, because teams would still manipulate their way into a tier, but it might lessen the overtness of the tanking.
 
Here is an in-depth dive on the "freeze records on a certain date and then count wins" proposal, that includes a retroactive look at how last year's draft would have turned out if put in place: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id...blem-ahead-draft-count-wins-record-picks-2026

Another idea I just came up with... keep the lotto odds, make them more lopsided, or even just do away with the lotto altogether... but instead of going by record, go by analytics. Basically, a formula would be established (that is transparent and known) that somehow accounts for roster quality, competitiveness, etc. so that we are truly rewarding the "worst" team - not the team that tanked their way to the worst record. I haven't spent time to pencil out what a formula could look like, but you could be "rewarded" for example if your net rating at full strength is really bad but you get punished if your net rating at full strength is significantly better than your overall net rating (because at that point, you are mostly getting worse via tanking or, in some cases, injury). You could have a consideration in place for games lost to injury as well if you think that is a valid reason to be bad (but maybe you don't... IDK).

Basically, you try to get to a way to "objectively" measure the quality of teams and therefor funnel the best talent to the worst teams without teams benefiting from tanking.
 
Here's a discussion of a bunch of different ideas. I do like how people are getting creative. It's fun just thinking through the ideas and the follow-on effects of them.

There is an interesting idea in here of having ping-pong balls carry over year over year and have them be tradeable... that's really fascinating to me, but only because I personally enjoy the trade market and the asset valuation part of the sport.

 
scott said:
Here's a discussion of a bunch of different ideas. I do like how people are getting creative. It's fun just thinking through the ideas and the follow-on effects of them.

There is an interesting idea in here of having ping-pong balls carry over year over year and have them be tradeable... that's really fascinating to me, but only because I personally enjoy the trade market and the asset valuation part of the sport.
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Being able to trade ping-pong balls fascinates me. It would allow for even more trades between teams looking to win now and win later. But the number of days in the trade window would be very small. I guess it would start on the night of the lottery and end when the Finals are over? And re-open for one night on the night of the draft?
 
Seventyniner said:
Being able to trade ping-pong balls fascinates me. It would allow for even more trades between teams looking to win now and win later. But the number of days in the trade window would be very small. I guess it would start on the night of the lottery and end when the Finals are over? And re-open for one night on the night of the draft?
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I think it would depend on whether or not you paired it with this idea of ping-pong balls carrying over from year-to-year and being durable assets, perhaps with an expiration date (say, 5 years just as an example). Then so long as you "own" a ping-ping ball (which would be award on lotto night and balls would expire on draft night... so there would be a window between lotto night and draft night where there are an extra quantity of total ping-pong balls before reverting to the typical quantity of supply) then it is a tradeable asset.

At the end of the day, I think this all becomes too confusing for most fans, but it's a lot of fun to think about because it essentially creates a micro-economy within the broader economy of the league... and as an economist, this is how I find joy :st-lol:
 
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