Tanking is a real problem in the NBA, even if the 76ers can beat the Heat once in a while.

The issue was never, to our knowledge, that players weren't playing hard. Nor, generally, is the concern that coaches -- whose salaries tend to hinge on wins -- are mailing it in.

The problem is that GMs and owners are rightly fixated on superstars, who are so very hard to get. And in the name of getting them via the draft, which requires the kind of high pick that comes with big numbers of losses, many a team many a year fields a roster that is nothing close to their best. Cap space goes unused. Winners are traded away in their primes. Strange rosters are deployed. Even injured players come with special value, for their ability to keep a team bad in the short term, while making them better in the long term.

In the name of addressing that, HoopIdea has enlisted the best thinking of all kinds of smart people, even dedicating a week of this past summer to tanking. The best of all that is in the inline box to your right.

And what, out of all that, really mattered? For me it boils down to three key ideas:

Ditch the draft entirely.

Keep the fairly hard cap.

Remove caps on max salaries, so superstars can make any amount.

But don't take my word for it. Consider the awesome insight of Stan Van Gundy, as co-host on The Dan Le Batard Show on Wednesday. You can listen right now here. He's for all of the exact same stuff, it turns out.

I’ve argued for a long time here ... that I think that one of the things that is absolutely killing parity is the individual maximum salary ... so you’re limiting LeBron James in what he can make ... that is the only reason that the Heat can have he, Bosh and Wade together ... if you still had the same luxury tax, the same salary cap set-up, but within that every individual can earn whatever they get in the market, there’s no way you could put three stars together. Yeah, will a guy sacrifice five or six hundred thousand dollars like some of the Heat guys did to come together? Yeah. Will they sacrifice 15 million a year? No they won’t.

This is not as radical as it sounds. It wouldn't cost owners extra -- total combined player compensation is fixed to a percentage of the league's income regardless. It would just mean more money for LeBron James and top producers. Which would, of course, mean James' team would have far less money to offer the likes of Andrew Wiggins. In other words, owners get essentially fixed costs, while Wiggins doesn't go to the team that best performs the strange dance of appearing terrible. Nor does he head straight to capped out teams in L.A., New York or Miami. He'd go to the team he wanted to go to, which would probably be similar to the team with the most money to offer him. The teams with the most cap space is a crude approximation of the league's worst teams.

This could work.