Nobody wants to promote tanking.

And with the new lottery format, the benefits of purposely losing have dwindled significantly. Sure, last season’s Pelicans got rewarded with Zion Williamson after benching their best player in the fourth quarter for the last two and a half months, but they also finished tied for the seventh-worst record. Meaning, there were six teams who lost more games then New Orleans and two others that lost just as many and did not get Zion Williamson.

Long story short, the lottery is a bigger crap shoot than ever and it has created way less incentive to tanking.

But there are some teams out there in positions that make you think they have more hope in beating the odds, landing a top pick in the lottery and reshaping in the offseason than banking on their current roster to compete for the postseason.

Add in the opportunity to find a diamond in the rough à la Robert Covington by giving more G Leaguers a shot on the roster to see what possible Top 100 players got overlooked in the draft, and there is still some benefit to be made when tanking is done appropriately.

It’s not just about losing games, but also about committing to your roster reconstruction throughout the entire season as a way to lose games.

And even with the race to the Finals so wide open this year, there are still some teams that need to start planning for 2020-21 as soon as possible. And maybe in that process they can land their own Zion Williamson.

When you have the opportunity to at least try and re-sign your best player and don’t even offer the supermax, you don’t deserve to ever have nice things.

But, if you are the Hornets and you still want what you don’t deserve, this is probably the only way to make that happen now.

Charlotte is not about to suddenly become some sort of free agent haven, but with the bit of cap space they have next summer, they might be able to overpay a solid role player or two to come and potentially help in a turnaround. But unless Terry Rozier is even better than he was during the 2018 playoffs, the Hornets are going to need to get a top pick.

And in addition to going for a top pick, they could try to see if they could use all their expiring deals through the season to facilitate trades to either load up on more picks or find some other young guys or role players that will be needed in getting this team back into the playoffs.

They landed Kemba Walker with the No. 9 pick back in 2011, so they could get their next franchise player in the middle of the lottery once again. But you can’t bank on that. And they need to make some moves to create a better team for the possible future franchise star waiting to be drafted and not just spend time losing games and not re-signing players.

After the free agency the Knicks had, did you really expect them to not make this list?

New York has some pieces that could very well be important in the team’s eventual return to glory assuming that happens at the latest while R.J. Barrett is on his rookie contract. Julius Randle, Kevin Knox, Frank Ntilikina, Mitchell Robinson and Dennis Smith Jr. could grow up together and become a solid group along Barrett. But with all the vets the Knicks have on short deals, it seems like the goal is to either trade those players to contenders down the line for either draft capital or more young players, or maybe take advantage of all their players besides Barrett to shoot for the stars with some sort of megadeal.

The point is, this roster won’t be the same by mid-December most likely. January at the latest.

Once again, losing in hopes of getting a 14% chance at the top pick versus a 12.5% chance or 10% chance is not the wave. They learned that the hard way. But doing so much roster reconstruction during the season that you naturally lose games while finding players that you want to commit to long-term is a solid way to go about things.

The Knicks are looking to shape the culture around this team before the new front office and new coach don’t feel new anymore and instead are referred to as the former front office and former coach. Spending time hoping for a good pick isn’t worth it when you already have a bunch of former top picks on the roster that could gel and become a good basketball team together. The Knicks have no reason to get younger and bank on another 19-year-old to save the team, but they also don’t have any reason to win a lot of games this year. Just be competitive and provide hope. But Knicks fans will always hope when the Knicks are involved, so the team only has to worry about being competitive.

Story continues