Magic lose to win? If you do the math, tanking doesn’t pay
The Orlando Magic began their 25th anniversary season Tuesday night in much the same way they began their inaugural season way back in 1988.
This silver-anniversary edition of the Magic is expected to win very few games, and yet the entire city is OK with it. There is a common belief among fans and media that the more the team loses, the better it is for the future.
Earlier this week, my Sentinel colleague George Diaz called the Magic’s strategy “a sustainable business plan.” Full disclosure: I have had a similar opinion to George’s in the past.
But I no longer endorse this supposed sound business strategy. It goes against everything we’ve ever been taught about sports. We know Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” As far as I know, he never said, “Losing in order to get a good draft pick isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
“I don’t understand why we incentivize losing in our league and give teams that try to lose the chance to get the best players,” ESPN analyst Jeff Van Gundy says. “And I don’t understand why fans who actually spend their money to go to games actually celebrate being bad. It would be like me paying full price to see a Broadway show and celebrating getting eighth-string, B-level actors as long as there’s a chance I might get to see a good show in three years.”
Van Gundy’s point is well-taken, but the main reason I’ve changed my stance is a conversation I had Tuesday with David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University and one of the biggest critics of the NBA’s ever-popular tanking tactics. Berri says losing to win is a mathematical long shot and points out that only twice since the lottery was instituted in 1985 has a team that had the No. 1 overall pick gone on to win the championship. Both times, it was the San Antonio Spurs.
Berri has worked the numbers since the lottery was instituted and has figured out that only 10 percent of the teams who win 25 games or less in a season are contenders within five years.
In contrast, 20 percent of “mediocre” teams – those teams that record between 34 and 49 wins – are contenders five years later. In his blog at Freakonomics.com, Berri defines a contending team as any team that wins 66 percent of its games.
“From a mathematical standpoint tanking doesn’t work, and any GMwho sells ownership on this strategy should be fired,” Berri said. “Tanking would be like a newspaper columnist turning in a completely horrible column that makes no sense and is terribly written. And then you explain it by telling your readers, ‘I purposely made the column horrible so we can be a better newspaper in three years.’ ”
It is hard to imagine any other sport where losing becomes an acceptable winning strategy. Can you picture University of Florida Athletic Director Jeremy Foley instructing football coach Will Muschamp to lose as many games as possible because it increase the team’s chances of signing a great recruiting class?
Even Jacksonville Jaguars fans, before this miserable season began, had hope that their team might be like the Kansas City Chiefs and go from worst to first in one fortuitous season. This is not the case in the NBA, where tanking is becoming an epidemic.
One NBA general manager recently told ESPN The Magazine: “Our team isn’t good enough to win, and we know it. So this season we want to develop and evaluate our young players, let them learn from their mistakes and get us in position to grab a great player. The best way for us to do that is to lose a lot of games. This draft is loaded. There are potential All-Stars at the top, maybe even franchise changers. Sometimes my job is to understand the value of losing.
“… We’re not alone. … A bunch of us realize that our teams aren’t good enough talent-wise to do anything. You’re going to be bad. There’s no way around it. And even if you finish 0-82, there’s still a 75 percent chance you don’t get the No. 1 pick. We’re just going to take our lumps and hope our number gets called.” This is a sustainable business plan? Thanks but no tanks.