"Tanking" — the process of creating a team that is designed to lose a lot of games with the hopes of gaining a valuable draft pick — reared its ugly head again when Buffalo Sabres fans cheered a game-winning goal by the opposing team.

When he was a Ph.D. candidate in statistics at the University of Missouri in 2012, Adam Gold presented a solution to tanking at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Gold's "Reverse Standings" method attempts to reward the teams that need draft picks the most while at the same time discouraging teams from intentionally losing games.

The proposal is rather brilliant in its simplicity, something that will appeal to most sports fans, and is better than the system currently in place for most major sports.

Here is how the "Reverse Standings" method would work:

Teams that do not make the playoffs are ranked based on the number of games they win (or points they accumulate in the NHL) after they are eliminated from playoff contention. The team with the most wins (or points) is then given the top pick in the draft. The team with second-most wins (or points) receives the second pick and so on.

The important point here is that only games played after being eliminated from playoff contention are used to determine the draft order.

In theory, the worst teams are eliminated earlier in the season and those teams have the most chances to accumulate wins or points. For example, an NBA team eliminated from playoff contention with 30 games to go will have 30 chances to rack up wins and will have a much better chance to get the top pick than a team eliminated with one week to go.

What this system would cure is the systematic losing that takes place once teams know they are no longer a playoff contender. Gold showed that the winning percentages for teams in all four major North American sports leagues decline after they are eliminated from the playoffs, with the difference being quite dramatic in the NBA and NHL.

Instead of a system that has teams losing games to jockey for draft position or ping pong balls in a lottery, teams will actually be rewarded for winning games, creating a scenario where all teams will want to win games down the stretch.

Gold used the 2010 NHL draft as an example and posted the number of points each team acquired after they were eliminated from playoff contention. While the Edmonton Oilers were the first team eliminated and easily would have "won" the first pick overall, there were nine teams with 3-6 points where one win in the final week could have been the difference between picking third or 11th.

Of course, like any potential solution, this has some problems. There are two big ones.

1. It won't eliminate tanking completely.

Instead of tanking at the end of the season, teams would now tank early in the season.

Teams that have decided before the season that they are going to tank are not going to stop tanking games. Under this system, they will just race faster to get eliminated from playoff contention so that they can start picking up wins and points for the draft.

The counter-argument to this is that tanking for the first half of the season is better than tanking all season. So there is still a net improvement.

The Sabres have been accused of lying down on the ice. Getty Images

2. Players don't tank, front offices do.

The problem with using a tanking plan, even under the current lottery systems, is that the players themselves have no incentive to tank. Unlike front offices, players aren't motivated to improve a team's draft position. In fact, they have an incentive to win and try to avoid acquiring a younger player that could take their job.

So while a front office may put an inferior product on the court, those lesser players are still currently playing to win games. It's not like Gold's plan is going to suddenly make players more motivated to win games. In fact, they might have less motivation because getting a higher draft pick hurts their job security. In other words, it's hard to see players saying, "Let's win this game for the first pick!"

The counter-argument here is that both scenarios are bad and the other benefits of Gold's plan outweigh this flaw.

In the end, Gold's proposal is not perfect. In all likelihood there will never be a perfect solution. Tanking is probably a problem that is here to stay.

But the Reverse Standings method does add some interesting wrinkles to what is currently a broken system and would add meaning to games that currently don't have much.