Stopping teams from tanking is hard
7 NBA teams trying to improve draft order
Last weekend was a typical one for the teams near the bottom of the NBA standings as the season approached its threequarters pole. Over the course of 48 hours Feb. 23 and 24, seven woeful teams holding first-round draft picks and jockeying for position to claim one of the coveted first few slots played a total of 10 games — and lost them all by an average of nearly 15 points.
If it wasn’t clear already — and to people paying attention, it certainly was — “tanking” season had arrived in the NBA. The race to the bottom — the contestants being the Dallas Mavericks, Sacramento Kings, Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns, Memphis Grizzlies, Chicago Bulls and Atlanta Hawks, seven bottomfeeders all bunched within two games of each other — was on. (An eighth team, the Brooklyn Nets, is also in contention for the league’s worst record but has no incentive to lose after trading this year’s first-round pick.)
A few days later, it was revealed that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had sent a memo to all 30 teams the week before, warning he was prepared to bring down the “swiftest and harshest response possible” on teams caught purposely trying to lose games.
Silver’s memo was triggered at least in part by recent comments made by Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who was fined $600,000 after admitting he told some of his players, “Look, losing is our best option.”
But the NBA is not alone. To varying degrees, the NHL and Major League Baseball — and to a lesser extent the NFL — are also dealing with controversies involving the practice known as tanking, loosely defined as the systematic writing-off of entire seasons by franchises hoping to rebuild for future success through the draft.
Though few would accuse any players or coaches of purposely losing through their ingame actions, the steady rise of tanking as a franchise-building model has called into question the binary nature and ethical foundation of sports — that each game is, at its most basic level, a contest between two teams trying their best to win — and has presented fans with a difficult choice between supporting their favorite team’s long-term mission in hopes of a big future payoff, or getting fed up with the short-term misery and bailing out.
Although the competitive and economic models mean the practice has a difference look in each league — in the NBA, for example, it is easiest to transform an entire franchise’s fortunes through the acquisition of one transcendent player — the fundamental incentive is the same in all: The worst teams generally get the top draft picks.
That tie-in has been present for decades. What has changed, and perhaps fueled the rampant spread of tanking as the preferred strategy for mediocre teams, is the wave of analyticsdriven executives taking over the front offices of pro sports teams, at least as conversant in cost-benefit analysis and risk management as in points, assists and strikeouts.
It has created a sort of groupthink in which it has become accepted wisdom that finishing at the bottom is, on average, better than finishing in the middle of the pack.
One or two teams tanking each season might be an unobtrusive, acceptable reality, but with analytics now fueling its spread, leagues are seeing scenarios where one-third or more of their teams are writing off entire seasons at the same time. Scott Boras, baseball’s most powerful agent, has taken to calling it “twelve teams a-tanking.”
A “team can say, ‘We don’t particularly want to win for a threeor four-year period, because we can go get draft picks,’ ” Boras said. “That is not a reason to come to the ballpark. That’s not major-league-standard baseball. It’s something different now. … We [should] never want to reward non-competitiveness. It’s a cancer. It damages the brand of baseball.”
Easier in baseball
In the NBA and NHL, which have hard salary caps and floors that force teams to spend a defined minimum on payroll, tanking is little more than a case of bad optics.
But in baseball, which has no payroll floor, the spread of tanking as a business model — and the bare-bones payrolls that some teams field as a result — has helped fuel a growing labor crisis, with relations between the league and its union at their most rancorous in years.
The offseason’s slow-moving free-agent market had players and agents questioning whether teams were colluding the tamp down salaries, and this week, the MLB Players Association filed a grievance with the league accusing four teams — the Oakland Athletics, Miami Marlins, Pittsburgh Pirates and Tampa Bay Rays — of failing to spend revenue-sharing funds on building their big-league rosters.
The league has said the claim, which will be heard by a panel of arbitrators, is “without merit,” and Commissioner Rob Manfred has defended the practice of “rebuilding” — for obvious reasons, he cringes at the term “tanking” — as being a proven model for building and sustaining a successful franchise.
Like many, Manfred points to the examples of the 2016 Chicago Cubs and 2017 Houston Astros, both of which bottomed out with 100-loss seasons a few years before winning their World Series titles.
As Billy Beane, the Athletics’ executive vice president of baseball operations, put it when asked about the Cubs’ and Astros’ tank-jobs, “The criticism needs to be wrapped around the idea of, well, it did work. It was also executed by some really smart guys.”
Because baseball’s draft is historically less reliable in producing impactful players, and because even the best players exert a smaller influence on game outcomes than their counterparts in basketball and hockey, rebuilds in baseball often take longer.
Teams spend years accumulating enough young players and draft picks to construct the foundation of a future champion.
The cost of tanking can be severe in terms of eroding your fan base, but the payoff can be euphoric.
Between 2011 and 2013, the Astros lost an average of 108 games and nearly half its annual attendance at Minute Maid Park. At one point, their games on local television drew ratings of 0.0 — meaning, essentially, no one was watching.
“Our goal was and always will be to build a championship team and sustain it for as long as possible,” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said. “And the best path to get there was by focusing on young players and the draft and acquiring as many of those [young players and draft picks] as we could. And to do that, we had to trade away some veterans who frankly weren’t helping us win that much anyway.”
But by 2017, the Astros’ enviable collection of young talent, largely acquired during that awful stretch of 2011-13, was ready to win, and the franchise spent aggressively in payroll and trade-chips to acquire the complementary veteran pieces necessary to round out a championship roster.
In November, the Astros won the franchise’s first World Series title.