Tanking Is Good

Fans despise it. Teams and their players deny it. The NBA doesn’t know what to do about it. But what if the conventional wisdom is all wrong?

I n today’s NBA, we are told that tanking is bad. That it’s damaging to the product. That it’s an affront to fans and sponsors. Even players take offense to the mere suggestion that tanking is a “thing.”

In a vacuum, the point of sport is to win. Tanking teams clearly aren’t trying to win, and some might even say that those teams are actively trying to lose. Spin it however you like, of course; maybe those teams are making subtle efforts to avoid winning games, maybe they are making little effort to win games. Either way, these teams are shitting on the sacred spirit of competition, and therefore, tanking is bad. Or so we are told, anyway.

Not everyone feels this way, though.

Some fans are indifferent — mostly those that realize and understand that every single season, there are going to be teams that are awful. There’s nothing to be done about it, it just is. It’s simple math, really; for one team to be good, another team has to be bad. That’s the nature of competition. Should it matter, therefore, if the bad teams are bad on purpose or just bad because of ineptitude, bad luck or otherwise? The Milwaukee Bucks were trying to win games last year, they just failed miserably, ending up with a worse record than the Philadelphia 76ers, who by nearly all accounts were trying to lose games like it was going out of style. The results were the same despite the (presumed) intent.

The current NBA draft lottery system rewards bad teams with high draft picks. Naturally, teams that tank — excuse me, teams that allegedly tank — are simply working within the league’s operative framework to acquire high-value assets. They aren’t breaking any rules, they’re playing by them.

So that’s where things stand on tanking; you’re either against it or indifferent. Unless you’re me. I’m here to be the NBA’s version of Gordon Gekko.

Tanking, for lack of a better word, is good.