NBA realizing it’s not easy to stop tanking teams

NEW YORK» After 20 years in the NBA, Dallas Mavericks star Dirk Nowitzki can’t be fooled.

He knows when NBA teams aren’t giving an honest effort, when they are out there playing but not playing to win.

“It’s pretty obvious,” Nowitzki said.

While easy to spot, tanking is not so easy to stop, the NBA is finding.

It’s a problem for league headquarters, which has fined owners, chastised teams and issued leaguewide memos on the topic. And with big brother watching, teams are abiding by the letter of the law — but arguably not the spirit of its intent.

Tanking is viewed as a solution — sometimes the only one — for some teams and their fans, hoping something good can come from being bad if they cash in at the lottery and land a top draft pick.

Nearly a third of the 30 NBA teams are brutally bad this season, and it’s hard to believe some aren’t losing on purpose. Phoenix, Memphis, Atlanta, Orlando, Dallas, Sacramento, Brooklyn, Chicago and New York are all on track to lose 50 or more games, and only the Nets aren’t motivated to lose — they don’t own their first-round draft pick.

Everyone else comes under suspicion when something strange happens:

• What was leading scorer Dennis Schroder doing on the bench for the entire fourth quarter of Atlanta’s one-point victory over Phoenix on March 4?

• New York hosted its own version of March Badness over the past week, with the Knicks and Nets both playing Nowitzki’s Mavericks, before Memphis and Chicago came to the city on the same sad Monday. That’s five of the nine bottom teams — including the only two known to have been contacted by league headquarters because of their tactics.

Here’s how it looks where currently winning really doesn’t seem to be everything:

Tanking is a discussion for fans and the media. Nobody from a team ever dares talk about losing on purpose.

Except Mark Cuban. When the Dallas owner went on Hall of Famer Julius Erving’s podcast in February and said he told his players that “losing is our best option,” the league fined him $600,000 for “public statements detrimental to the NBA.”

That put a spotlight on the Mavericks. So if they were planning on packing it in and trying to add more young legs in the draft this summer for Nowitzki’s expected swan song, they had to change plans.

“Well, I think Mark messed that up for us,” Nowitzki said, with a straight face.

The Mavericks went on a recent stretch of three wins in four games — two were against the Grizzlies and Knicks — and Nowitzki insists that teams are still tanking despite the league’s mandate.

“There’s obviously some teams that are going for some losses now, and we’re one of the teams that still wants to win and we’ll see where we end up at the end in the draft,” he said. “But we’re still playing. We want to have a winning culture for our young guys.”