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Tanking has become the white whale of the NBA league office.
Stamping out tanking has become Adam Silver’s quest, but that obsessive effort has the league missing the big picture. Silver runs a multi-billion-dollar business, and he has business reasons to focus on tanking. While many fans in Utah or Sacramento or Washington — or the other six cities where tanking is going on this season — will say they want their team to tank for draft potential, the reality is that there is a steep drop-off in attendance and viewership for those teams’ games, according to league sources. Fans say they are okay with tanking, but they stop tuning in when the product is that bad.
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The problem is that the league’s obsessive quest to deal with tanking is moving it further away from the point of having a draft in the first place. It’s making it harder for smaller and mid-market teams to land the players they need to get or stay good.
And, ultimately, not one of the league’s new ideas will end tanking. Full stop.
NBA’s latest anti-tanking ideas
This week, the NBA presented its Board of Governors — made up of the 30 team owners — with three different conceptual ideas that drastically change the NBA Draft Lottery process. In a nutshell those are:
1) Expand the lottery to 18 teams (10 teams that miss the postseason and 10 teams in the play-in), then flatten the odds and give all 10 teams that miss the playoffs an 8% chance at the top pick. Only the top four or five draft spots would be determined by lottery, then it would fall in reverse record order.
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2) Expand the lottery to 22 teams (the 18 above plus the four eliminated in the first round of the playoffs), then have those teams’ lottery odds determined by their record over the past two seasons. Also, there would be a minimum win total for each team in relation to the lottery (hypothetically, if that win number is set at 22, and a team only wins 19 games that season, for the lottery it would have a 22-60 record). All 22 teams would be in the lottery, but only the top four slots would be selected, and then there might be a second lottery for the remaining…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/nba-moves-further-away-point-234423710.html
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Publish date : 2026-03-27 23:44:00
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