I'm glad to see you write this article. I HATE that fans endorse tanking.
1. It *guarantees* miserable seasons, but it does NOT guarantee a championship. Did the 'process' bring the 76ers a Championship? Have the Nationals turned their post championship tank into a winning season yet? Does the future look bright for the Rockies?
2. Every team but 1 will not win the championship. It's a really, really dumb metric to only judge a season by whether you end up on top. As a baseball fan, I get 162 games to watch the STL Cardinals and every time they win, I'm happy. I would rather be happy 83 times than 61!
3. Making it to the playoffs means I get more chances to be happy when they win. The Cardinals got swept in the 2019 NLCS but the division series win over the braves had 3 great wins in it. That's 3 more times I was happy.
4. It's immoral. The purpose of games is to win. To do otherwise is wrong
5. It's undeniably connected to a financial component. The owner is telling the fans it's so they can win down the road, but in the meantime, please accept a WAY shittier product and (usually) we're not lowering ticket prices thanks for still attending.
Tanking (at least in an NBA context) is so ineffective, especially with the flattened odds. Especially now when it feels like prospects are so hard to evaluate. Jokic was a second round pick, Giannis was a super raw prospect picked late in the lottery, SGA was a late lottery pick (and OKC picked him up via a smart trade, not tanking), Luka was passed over for Marvin Bagley, etc etc. And for the corollary, surefire prospects like Zion or Wiggins or Fultz or Simmons ended up as varying types of disappointment (none of them franchise players.) You're basically pissing off your fanbase and wasting years of potential player and coaching development to MAYBE have a shot at a blind guess.
How many teams threw away their season a few years ago only for the .500 Hawks to luck into the number one pick in a draft that is looking like it will have 0 franchise-altering players? Meanwhile scrappy teams everywhere are actually trying to develop talent. At the end of the day, even if you win the (metaphorical) lottery and get the next Wemby, will your team be able to get good players around him or do you only know how to lose?
Completely. My area of expertise is MLB and it's just as hard there. You have the shining success story of the Astros who lost 105+ games three years in a row but then built a core that got them 7 straight LCS appearances, 4 World Series appearances, and 2 championships. And to some degree the Cubs, though they didn't tank as badly or for as long.
And then meanwhile you have the White Sox and Rockies with a combined 240 losses the last two years, putting an absolutely embarrassing product out on the field, and their farm systems are ranked 20th and 28th, respectively, out of 30. Way to go, tanking!
I think diminishing the division championships had something to do with this also. You could point to a relatively unimportant accomplishment but it was something. Spurs being Midwest Division champs used to be worth a small banner.
I don't know that the NBA is the most fertile territory for it, but the sports industry in general is forgetting the power of regionalism in a really perplexing way.
The way college sports conferences served as localized sub-quests that had their own hierarchies and passion and interest made that a much more competitively robust environment and they are actively, willfully destroying it.
Growing up the inter-conference Big 8 rivalries were wonderful to spectate, players and fans alike used to look forward to these match-ups with a lot more passion and spirit than any national bracket. And every game was within a day's drive.
Later on the Big 12 came along and watered the whole thing down, it was no longer a regional experience. Teams were all over the lower 48, travelling to games meant taking at least 3 days. Nowadays the "regional" conferences mean very little in terms of true rivalries, it's just for TV rights and maximizing profit.
The MU-KU "Border War" rivalry was one of the longest is NCAA history, it went continuously from 1891-2011: 120 years straight.. Then in 2011 MU did what every college does now and went somewhere else with a better TV deal (in this case the SEC). And while this old 'rivalry' is still there, it's lost much of its luster in the last 25 years.
Regional rivalries used to matter a lot more than they do now, it's a shame really.
Solution: the top draft picks are awarded in order of which team has the most WINS after losing the game which clinches them not having a top-4 record in their conference, calculated retroactively.
Deciding the marker that teams must pass in order to start counting their wins toward the top pick is finicky (if teams know it ahead of time there become mega-incentives to lose certain midseason games on purpose, if it's a total mystery it's hard for fans to follow), but the basic idea is that the worst teams will pass the marker first and get many more opportunities to amass wins than top teams that slip out of the playoff race late.
And where all other proposals to solve this just try to neuter or wish away the colossal, franchise-changing incentive to get these picks that are THE sole focus of these fanbases, this proposal accepts that and orients it toward teams competing hard and their fans rooting for them to win, creating a TV and attention spectacle at the bottom of the standings in a way only a soccer relegation battle otherwise manages.
They do this in the PWHL and it seems to work well. They also do other cool rules (the 3-2-1 points for OT stuff, a jailbreak rule, pretty much every "duh" rule change that's been suggested at the NHL level)
Of course the PWHL doesn't have multiple owners, so they can be agile.
Could not agree more about the soul-deadening effect of the championship-or-bust mindset, which is why I hate hate HATE what's happening with college football and the playoff--and I say this as a Michigan fan, a team that recently won the playoff and can reasonably expect to be a frequent playoff participant going forward. I'm old enough to remember when winning the Rose Bowl, or even just a high-profile bowl game against a good opponent, was an exciting and satisfying end to the season, and the team that finished on top of the polls was still called the "mythical national champion." That was much more fun than the mini-NFL monstrosity that's being constructed now.
I wonder if the emphasis on rings above all as the only measure of success in sports is relatively recent and explains the craziness around tanking. Like - were people raking Drexler and Barkley and Malone over the coals as much in the 90s as they presumably would today given the advent and popularity of the sports debate show?
I think broadly there may have been an intellectual shift here driven in part by sports commentators and pundits, and it isn’t surprising that GMs, coaches, etc have responded to it like they have. A 20 year career where you win 55-60 a season but never win a title is seen as lesser than a similar career where you average 40-45 but one deep playoff run gets you into Valhalla. As a fan, I am occasionally guilty of such thinking too. But I think this has to change if we’re ever going to make meaningful progress against tanking in the nba
As a Sixers fan, I totally get this. We had a GM who made no secret of tanking (Sam Hinkie and "The Process") and we had to endure some brutal basketball for multiple years. To make it all worse, all the assets gained from all that deliberate tanking ended gaining very little as the people running the team squandered the picks on mediocre to terrible players. We got Embiid, but he's never been really surrounded with enough talent other than to make the 76ers good, but not good enough. Which while I certainly prefer over several seasons of horrendous basketball, as fans we were told to be patient as all this losing was going to pay off with multiple championships. Embiid's prime years ended up being wasted as we drafted Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz to be the complementary guys around him, and now, like a lot of big men before him, the injuries have taken their toll and he has become more of a roll player. During those lean tanking years it wasn't like the team discounted tickets.
This is a wonderful article that feels like it was written for me. I too am a huge Chicago sports fan. I loved the Jordan Bulls, but they won their last title when I was in middle school. A few observations:
1. Easiest fix is to give all teams who miss the playoffs equal weight in the draft lottery. One ping pong ball each. Then show the balls being drawn live on TV. Yes, you may see some tanking on the margins (barely missing the playoffs gives you a 1/14 chance at the No. 1 pick, but getting in as the 8-seed gives you 0%), but that's much better than what we have today.
2. For all the reasons you lay out, I think Load Management is even worse than tanking. And how is it that the NBA is the only league with this issue? You don't see baseball or hockey players doing it. This league does not give even half a shit about its regular season.
3. It's too bad you're not a hockey fan, Freddie. Those 2010s Blackhawks teams were magical. Three titles from 2010-2015. I'll treasure those forever.
Yeah Mets were pretty bad. 1 complete game, only two starters who took the hill 30+ times. Though both of them did (Peterson/Holmes) did manage to get to 162 innings so they averaged 5+ innings per start
Baseball's decline in starting pitching has more to do with the "third time through the order penalty" (especially in the postseason) and the increased emphasis velocity and swing-and-miss. It's less about load management and more about varying the looks that hitters get.
"And how is it that the NBA is the only league with this issue? You don't see baseball or hockey players doing it."
I don't know much about baseball, but hockey players are constantly substituted in and out. You can rest your stars a little by playing your fourth line a bit more and your first line a bit less. But you can expect them all to see the ice; hockey shifts are generally less than a minute long.
The line system also makes load management more complex. You can't rest the left wing of your first line without resting the right wing as well.
I've long wondered if other sports would benefit from adopting hockey's ultra-short shifts.
Hockey players are sprinting, all the time. Soccer players spend a lot of the game jogging or just kinda standing there - and who can blame them? They're playing for 45 minutes straight. A soccer player who tried to play at hockey intensity would collapse.
Super-fast shift changes increase the pace of the play and, as you said, make load management into a normal part of the game.
MLB has issues with this now as well, with some teams completely destroying the roster and going through multiple 90-100 loss seasons to stack draft picks. It's rough to watch.
I don't really follow the NBA but your mention of Jay Williams caught my attention. His motorcycle crash and washing out of the NBA was a really sad story. I was at "the game" at University of Maryland in 2001 when Duke came back to tie in the final minute after being down 10 points. Williams drained improbable threes like it was nothing and Duke went on to win. Maryland fans were crying, throwing things, and generally acting like pathetic losers (I was a grad student and could get free tickets, but the undergrads were really horrible until the university cracked down after the riots that broke out when Maryland lost to Duke in the final 4 just weeks later).
There is a whole other story about how horrible college basketball has become with the transfer portal, NIL, and all that. It makes a lot of it unwatchable now and you never really know who is on the team unless they are a top 10 kind of player.
Baseball teams don't "tank" in the sense that they try to get higher draft picks. MLB drafts are much more random than the NBA or NFL, plus you can't trade draft picks in baseball. They'll trade established players for prospects, which is a bit similar but the goal is never to lose games intentionally for a higher draft pick. Plus there's a lottery.
In 2024, the Guardians "won" the lottery and the first pick despite a relatively respectable 76-86 record in 2023. The guy they drafted, Bazzana, is a good prospect but has been lapped by the 4th pick (2025 AL Rookie of the Year Nick Kurtz) and the 9th pick (consensus number one prospect Konnor Griffin).
MLB teams tank by trading away all of their higher-paid good players for prospects, and then fielding a team of prospects at a low total salary that is likely to finish last or near last in their division. The terrible W-L record leads to better draft picks and is a definite benefit of this approach. The idea is the same except the prospects are more of a numbers game (e.g. many will fail). The Cubs did this successfully - they tanked for a few seasons and then drafted Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, and Kyle Schwarber all with top 10 picks and they were all big contributors to their championship team. The Astros did this to some extent as did the Orioles.The Cardinals are trying to do this now. But you are right that it is harder to tank with the expectation of getting a #1 pick that will make a huge impact immediately. Just a difference between baseball and basketball, but it can suck for the fans in the same way.
I'm a hockey fan and this is a controversial topic in the nhl too (though teams haven't started openly throwing games at least…)
One suggestion to fix the situation is something called the “gold plan” to determine draft picks that incentivizes competition, instead of a lottery based on standings.
There are 3 common articulations:
1.) Once you are mathematically eliminated from playoffs, your wins start collecting “gold points”. Teams that are really bad get a head start, but still need to win games once eliminated. May still incentive losing earlier though, soo…
2.) At a certain point in the season, maybe after 50 games, teams start collecting gold points for wins. For teams that eventually make the playoffs, they become irrelevant. For teams that eventually miss, the team with the best record from game 51-82 gets first overall.
3.) All the teams that miss the playoffs play in an end of season tournament for draft seeding.
All of these options have pros and cons but would eliminate most of the bad incentives associated with the lottery system. There would no longer be any reason to be intentionally dreadful. You would need to ice a competitive-ish roster to have any chance at those transcendent talents at the top of the draft.
For whatever reason, the NHL so far has not even entertained the thought, but hopefully they do, before teams commit to tanking as hard as NBA teams (and this is coming from a Canucks fan, currently 32/32 in the league - well positioned by the current thinking…)
The incentives are definitely there in the NHL as well. The Penguins basically saved their franchise twice by tanking, first with Lemieux in 84 and then with Crosby in '05. Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I mostly just got to enjoy the benefits of the deal by watching hockey in the 90s, but I hate that throwing games like that is the logical strategy.
I'm not sure what effects it has, but I feel like there must be some difference in tanking between a hockey game with a 3-1 score and a basketball game that's 95-92. I would guess that it's easier to tank subtly in hockey as a missed save or a wild shot on goal once or twice a game would be enough to swing a game, whereas a basketball player has to be persistently lousy throughout the whole game to do worse than expected. But it could well be the other way around - anyone have any thoughts?
The incentives are certainly there in hockey, which is why it's become controversial, going all the way back to the devils and penguins tanking for Lemieux in '84. Thankfully in hockey tanking has so far been limited to roster construction (trading away good players) and teams generally seem to try to win games (though you raise an interesting point about subtle tanking, potentially). But analytics are an increasing presence in hockey, so it is possible it will get to NBA levels of throwing games, and load management, etc. Which would suck.
Big NHL fan here, and I think there are at least two reasons why we won't see this as much in the NHL.
1. Having the best player is no guarantee of making the playoffs, much less a Cup. Witness the Oilers for the first 5 McDavid years, and Toronto now. Colorado had probably the best forward AND the best defensemen last year and lost in the first round.
2. NHL teams are much more reliant upon ticket revenue. Missing out on the very long postseason will cost the team millions, and bad teams will clear out arenas, putting serious financial pressure on ownership. My beloved Sharks were so damn bad for two years, and the Tank was empty. Basically zero nationally-televised games, and not a windfall from regional sports networks either.
I do think load management is coming a little bit, but I think the NHL is much more insulated against tanking than the NBA.
Both washington and utah are part of an under-discussed phenomena which is that of lottery protected draft pick trades. If either finishes 9th or better they lose the pick. So this is not as simple as "I'd like to improve my draft position". It is life or death. The league obviously should ban lottery protected picks.
Fascinating topic in that there are so many angles.
No doubt the point of sports is “winning”. But just as there’s “winning the battle but losing the war”, how do you prioritize winning “that night” vs winning the championship? I think that’s where the seediness of load management and tanking seeps in, as well as discussions about “can he be #1 option on a championship team” vs “is he a fun to watch fan favourite who is not all NBA but still really good at basketball”.
Don’t know if there’s a solution. But it would objectively suck to have paid full freight on a night where they were resting Luka and LBJ. Maybe they’ll give partial refunds on load management nights 😂 and yes please send me invoice on that bridge you’re selling.
I’m not defending tanking or overdoing load management by any means. And I’d be happy to have fewer games in basically every sport.
But being a fan of a team that loses in the first round of the playoffs every year sucks! And teams should do what they can to get out of that zone of complacency. It’s why I was quietly happy Alonso left the Mets — he was good but not great and I figured it was time to roll the dice on something new.
Agreed - I think there's a difference between saying "we're going to make some roster moves that will probably make us worse in the short term but that's ok because we're trying to develop new talent on our team" versus "we're going to intentionally lose games and gut our team to get better draft odds"
There’s some subtlety for sure. I was a wizards fan for Gilbert Arenas / John Wall years… it’s easy to get wrapped up in a fun team and spend ten years going nowhere. So I guess I don’t totally agree with Freddie’s take here. But also, like, there’s a difference between saying “we had a couple fun years but we’re not leveling up so we’re making some risky changes” and not giving a team a chance to improve
I am a wolves fan. The Anthony Edwards era has been truly golden for a lot of the reasons you list here. I also think that going for the playoffs has ancillary benefits in the development of young players. That's why the Rudy Gobert trade actually worked for the wolves. It gave Edwards serious reps in deep playoff runs all before age 24.
I also think teams and the league need to walk a fine line. I want the wolves to win with THIS team, with Edwards, Jaden McDaniels, and Naz Reid. If they have a 10% chance to win it all over the next 5 years, I don't want to blow up this group to get Giannis and maybe have a 15% chance.
The league needs to incentivize teams to develop players (which yes, can be flipped as assets for better players). I think the same way the supermax helps teams keep their drafted players, there should be cap relief for teams keeping role players that have developed in their system. It does seem like depth is more important these days; there have been no repeat champs for 7 years. I think there is more incentive to keep a team together to get as many bites at the apple as possible. The league should encourage this. Minnesota has strong rivalries with the Thunder and the Nuggets because of these playoff runs.
I also think the league has a bright future, given the aesthetically pleasing way the game is played now. It's fast, it's relentless, and highly skilled. They need to smooth the rough edges like tanking, load management, and endless timeouts and fouls in the 4th quarter. But the playoffs last year, especially the pacers run, was insanely fun basketball.
It feels kind of good to read about a big problem I could not care less about. Thanks for the break from my regular routine.
I'm glad to see you write this article. I HATE that fans endorse tanking.
1. It *guarantees* miserable seasons, but it does NOT guarantee a championship. Did the 'process' bring the 76ers a Championship? Have the Nationals turned their post championship tank into a winning season yet? Does the future look bright for the Rockies?
2. Every team but 1 will not win the championship. It's a really, really dumb metric to only judge a season by whether you end up on top. As a baseball fan, I get 162 games to watch the STL Cardinals and every time they win, I'm happy. I would rather be happy 83 times than 61!
3. Making it to the playoffs means I get more chances to be happy when they win. The Cardinals got swept in the 2019 NLCS but the division series win over the braves had 3 great wins in it. That's 3 more times I was happy.
4. It's immoral. The purpose of games is to win. To do otherwise is wrong
5. It's undeniably connected to a financial component. The owner is telling the fans it's so they can win down the road, but in the meantime, please accept a WAY shittier product and (usually) we're not lowering ticket prices thanks for still attending.
Tanking (at least in an NBA context) is so ineffective, especially with the flattened odds. Especially now when it feels like prospects are so hard to evaluate. Jokic was a second round pick, Giannis was a super raw prospect picked late in the lottery, SGA was a late lottery pick (and OKC picked him up via a smart trade, not tanking), Luka was passed over for Marvin Bagley, etc etc. And for the corollary, surefire prospects like Zion or Wiggins or Fultz or Simmons ended up as varying types of disappointment (none of them franchise players.) You're basically pissing off your fanbase and wasting years of potential player and coaching development to MAYBE have a shot at a blind guess.
How many teams threw away their season a few years ago only for the .500 Hawks to luck into the number one pick in a draft that is looking like it will have 0 franchise-altering players? Meanwhile scrappy teams everywhere are actually trying to develop talent. At the end of the day, even if you win the (metaphorical) lottery and get the next Wemby, will your team be able to get good players around him or do you only know how to lose?
Completely. My area of expertise is MLB and it's just as hard there. You have the shining success story of the Astros who lost 105+ games three years in a row but then built a core that got them 7 straight LCS appearances, 4 World Series appearances, and 2 championships. And to some degree the Cubs, though they didn't tank as badly or for as long.
And then meanwhile you have the White Sox and Rockies with a combined 240 losses the last two years, putting an absolutely embarrassing product out on the field, and their farm systems are ranked 20th and 28th, respectively, out of 30. Way to go, tanking!
I think diminishing the division championships had something to do with this also. You could point to a relatively unimportant accomplishment but it was something. Spurs being Midwest Division champs used to be worth a small banner.
I don't know that the NBA is the most fertile territory for it, but the sports industry in general is forgetting the power of regionalism in a really perplexing way.
The way college sports conferences served as localized sub-quests that had their own hierarchies and passion and interest made that a much more competitively robust environment and they are actively, willfully destroying it.
Can't say this enough.
Growing up the inter-conference Big 8 rivalries were wonderful to spectate, players and fans alike used to look forward to these match-ups with a lot more passion and spirit than any national bracket. And every game was within a day's drive.
Later on the Big 12 came along and watered the whole thing down, it was no longer a regional experience. Teams were all over the lower 48, travelling to games meant taking at least 3 days. Nowadays the "regional" conferences mean very little in terms of true rivalries, it's just for TV rights and maximizing profit.
The MU-KU "Border War" rivalry was one of the longest is NCAA history, it went continuously from 1891-2011: 120 years straight.. Then in 2011 MU did what every college does now and went somewhere else with a better TV deal (in this case the SEC). And while this old 'rivalry' is still there, it's lost much of its luster in the last 25 years.
Regional rivalries used to matter a lot more than they do now, it's a shame really.
Solution: the top draft picks are awarded in order of which team has the most WINS after losing the game which clinches them not having a top-4 record in their conference, calculated retroactively.
Deciding the marker that teams must pass in order to start counting their wins toward the top pick is finicky (if teams know it ahead of time there become mega-incentives to lose certain midseason games on purpose, if it's a total mystery it's hard for fans to follow), but the basic idea is that the worst teams will pass the marker first and get many more opportunities to amass wins than top teams that slip out of the playoff race late.
And where all other proposals to solve this just try to neuter or wish away the colossal, franchise-changing incentive to get these picks that are THE sole focus of these fanbases, this proposal accepts that and orients it toward teams competing hard and their fans rooting for them to win, creating a TV and attention spectacle at the bottom of the standings in a way only a soccer relegation battle otherwise manages.
They do this in the PWHL and it seems to work well. They also do other cool rules (the 3-2-1 points for OT stuff, a jailbreak rule, pretty much every "duh" rule change that's been suggested at the NHL level)
Of course the PWHL doesn't have multiple owners, so they can be agile.
Could not agree more about the soul-deadening effect of the championship-or-bust mindset, which is why I hate hate HATE what's happening with college football and the playoff--and I say this as a Michigan fan, a team that recently won the playoff and can reasonably expect to be a frequent playoff participant going forward. I'm old enough to remember when winning the Rose Bowl, or even just a high-profile bowl game against a good opponent, was an exciting and satisfying end to the season, and the team that finished on top of the polls was still called the "mythical national champion." That was much more fun than the mini-NFL monstrosity that's being constructed now.
I wonder if the emphasis on rings above all as the only measure of success in sports is relatively recent and explains the craziness around tanking. Like - were people raking Drexler and Barkley and Malone over the coals as much in the 90s as they presumably would today given the advent and popularity of the sports debate show?
I think broadly there may have been an intellectual shift here driven in part by sports commentators and pundits, and it isn’t surprising that GMs, coaches, etc have responded to it like they have. A 20 year career where you win 55-60 a season but never win a title is seen as lesser than a similar career where you average 40-45 but one deep playoff run gets you into Valhalla. As a fan, I am occasionally guilty of such thinking too. But I think this has to change if we’re ever going to make meaningful progress against tanking in the nba
Seems like the perverse incentives of sports betting might have unfortunate interactions with the tanking phenomenon as well.
As a Sixers fan, I totally get this. We had a GM who made no secret of tanking (Sam Hinkie and "The Process") and we had to endure some brutal basketball for multiple years. To make it all worse, all the assets gained from all that deliberate tanking ended gaining very little as the people running the team squandered the picks on mediocre to terrible players. We got Embiid, but he's never been really surrounded with enough talent other than to make the 76ers good, but not good enough. Which while I certainly prefer over several seasons of horrendous basketball, as fans we were told to be patient as all this losing was going to pay off with multiple championships. Embiid's prime years ended up being wasted as we drafted Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz to be the complementary guys around him, and now, like a lot of big men before him, the injuries have taken their toll and he has become more of a roll player. During those lean tanking years it wasn't like the team discounted tickets.
Bryce Drew! Corey Benjamin! Ron Mercer! Rusty LaRue!
This is a wonderful article that feels like it was written for me. I too am a huge Chicago sports fan. I loved the Jordan Bulls, but they won their last title when I was in middle school. A few observations:
1. Easiest fix is to give all teams who miss the playoffs equal weight in the draft lottery. One ping pong ball each. Then show the balls being drawn live on TV. Yes, you may see some tanking on the margins (barely missing the playoffs gives you a 1/14 chance at the No. 1 pick, but getting in as the 8-seed gives you 0%), but that's much better than what we have today.
2. For all the reasons you lay out, I think Load Management is even worse than tanking. And how is it that the NBA is the only league with this issue? You don't see baseball or hockey players doing it. This league does not give even half a shit about its regular season.
3. It's too bad you're not a hockey fan, Freddie. Those 2010s Blackhawks teams were magical. Three titles from 2010-2015. I'll treasure those forever.
In baseball, you have starting pitchers going 4 innings — functionally similar to load management
Eh, Paul Skenes threw 187 innings last year. Sure in the past it would have been 215 or whatever, but it's not comparable.
Some teams are better than others. The Mets couldn’t seem to get a pitcher out longer than 5 innings.
Yeah Mets were pretty bad. 1 complete game, only two starters who took the hill 30+ times. Though both of them did (Peterson/Holmes) did manage to get to 162 innings so they averaged 5+ innings per start
Baseball's decline in starting pitching has more to do with the "third time through the order penalty" (especially in the postseason) and the increased emphasis velocity and swing-and-miss. It's less about load management and more about varying the looks that hitters get.
Interesting. Why is it that Yamamoto and seemingly some of these other Japanese pitchers can go for longer? Less specialized in a single pitch?
"And how is it that the NBA is the only league with this issue? You don't see baseball or hockey players doing it."
I don't know much about baseball, but hockey players are constantly substituted in and out. You can rest your stars a little by playing your fourth line a bit more and your first line a bit less. But you can expect them all to see the ice; hockey shifts are generally less than a minute long.
The line system also makes load management more complex. You can't rest the left wing of your first line without resting the right wing as well.
That's fine. It's built into the game. Everyone expects it. No player averages even 30 min of ice time in a 60 min game. Depth is important.
The NBA's issue of teams sitting healthy star players out of entire games and screwing over paying customers is exponentially worse.
I've long wondered if other sports would benefit from adopting hockey's ultra-short shifts.
Hockey players are sprinting, all the time. Soccer players spend a lot of the game jogging or just kinda standing there - and who can blame them? They're playing for 45 minutes straight. A soccer player who tried to play at hockey intensity would collapse.
Super-fast shift changes increase the pace of the play and, as you said, make load management into a normal part of the game.
ugh I've wanted infinite subs in soccer forever. The game would be so much more exciting if players could take breaks!
MLB has issues with this now as well, with some teams completely destroying the roster and going through multiple 90-100 loss seasons to stack draft picks. It's rough to watch.
I don't really follow the NBA but your mention of Jay Williams caught my attention. His motorcycle crash and washing out of the NBA was a really sad story. I was at "the game" at University of Maryland in 2001 when Duke came back to tie in the final minute after being down 10 points. Williams drained improbable threes like it was nothing and Duke went on to win. Maryland fans were crying, throwing things, and generally acting like pathetic losers (I was a grad student and could get free tickets, but the undergrads were really horrible until the university cracked down after the riots that broke out when Maryland lost to Duke in the final 4 just weeks later).
There is a whole other story about how horrible college basketball has become with the transfer portal, NIL, and all that. It makes a lot of it unwatchable now and you never really know who is on the team unless they are a top 10 kind of player.
Baseball teams don't "tank" in the sense that they try to get higher draft picks. MLB drafts are much more random than the NBA or NFL, plus you can't trade draft picks in baseball. They'll trade established players for prospects, which is a bit similar but the goal is never to lose games intentionally for a higher draft pick. Plus there's a lottery.
In 2024, the Guardians "won" the lottery and the first pick despite a relatively respectable 76-86 record in 2023. The guy they drafted, Bazzana, is a good prospect but has been lapped by the 4th pick (2025 AL Rookie of the Year Nick Kurtz) and the 9th pick (consensus number one prospect Konnor Griffin).
MLB teams tank by trading away all of their higher-paid good players for prospects, and then fielding a team of prospects at a low total salary that is likely to finish last or near last in their division. The terrible W-L record leads to better draft picks and is a definite benefit of this approach. The idea is the same except the prospects are more of a numbers game (e.g. many will fail). The Cubs did this successfully - they tanked for a few seasons and then drafted Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, and Kyle Schwarber all with top 10 picks and they were all big contributors to their championship team. The Astros did this to some extent as did the Orioles.The Cardinals are trying to do this now. But you are right that it is harder to tank with the expectation of getting a #1 pick that will make a huge impact immediately. Just a difference between baseball and basketball, but it can suck for the fans in the same way.
I'm a hockey fan and this is a controversial topic in the nhl too (though teams haven't started openly throwing games at least…)
One suggestion to fix the situation is something called the “gold plan” to determine draft picks that incentivizes competition, instead of a lottery based on standings.
There are 3 common articulations:
1.) Once you are mathematically eliminated from playoffs, your wins start collecting “gold points”. Teams that are really bad get a head start, but still need to win games once eliminated. May still incentive losing earlier though, soo…
2.) At a certain point in the season, maybe after 50 games, teams start collecting gold points for wins. For teams that eventually make the playoffs, they become irrelevant. For teams that eventually miss, the team with the best record from game 51-82 gets first overall.
3.) All the teams that miss the playoffs play in an end of season tournament for draft seeding.
All of these options have pros and cons but would eliminate most of the bad incentives associated with the lottery system. There would no longer be any reason to be intentionally dreadful. You would need to ice a competitive-ish roster to have any chance at those transcendent talents at the top of the draft.
For whatever reason, the NHL so far has not even entertained the thought, but hopefully they do, before teams commit to tanking as hard as NBA teams (and this is coming from a Canucks fan, currently 32/32 in the league - well positioned by the current thinking…)
The incentives are definitely there in the NHL as well. The Penguins basically saved their franchise twice by tanking, first with Lemieux in 84 and then with Crosby in '05. Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I mostly just got to enjoy the benefits of the deal by watching hockey in the 90s, but I hate that throwing games like that is the logical strategy.
I'm not sure what effects it has, but I feel like there must be some difference in tanking between a hockey game with a 3-1 score and a basketball game that's 95-92. I would guess that it's easier to tank subtly in hockey as a missed save or a wild shot on goal once or twice a game would be enough to swing a game, whereas a basketball player has to be persistently lousy throughout the whole game to do worse than expected. But it could well be the other way around - anyone have any thoughts?
The incentives are certainly there in hockey, which is why it's become controversial, going all the way back to the devils and penguins tanking for Lemieux in '84. Thankfully in hockey tanking has so far been limited to roster construction (trading away good players) and teams generally seem to try to win games (though you raise an interesting point about subtle tanking, potentially). But analytics are an increasing presence in hockey, so it is possible it will get to NBA levels of throwing games, and load management, etc. Which would suck.
Big NHL fan here, and I think there are at least two reasons why we won't see this as much in the NHL.
1. Having the best player is no guarantee of making the playoffs, much less a Cup. Witness the Oilers for the first 5 McDavid years, and Toronto now. Colorado had probably the best forward AND the best defensemen last year and lost in the first round.
2. NHL teams are much more reliant upon ticket revenue. Missing out on the very long postseason will cost the team millions, and bad teams will clear out arenas, putting serious financial pressure on ownership. My beloved Sharks were so damn bad for two years, and the Tank was empty. Basically zero nationally-televised games, and not a windfall from regional sports networks either.
I do think load management is coming a little bit, but I think the NHL is much more insulated against tanking than the NBA.
Both washington and utah are part of an under-discussed phenomena which is that of lottery protected draft pick trades. If either finishes 9th or better they lose the pick. So this is not as simple as "I'd like to improve my draft position". It is life or death. The league obviously should ban lottery protected picks.
Fascinating topic in that there are so many angles.
No doubt the point of sports is “winning”. But just as there’s “winning the battle but losing the war”, how do you prioritize winning “that night” vs winning the championship? I think that’s where the seediness of load management and tanking seeps in, as well as discussions about “can he be #1 option on a championship team” vs “is he a fun to watch fan favourite who is not all NBA but still really good at basketball”.
Don’t know if there’s a solution. But it would objectively suck to have paid full freight on a night where they were resting Luka and LBJ. Maybe they’ll give partial refunds on load management nights 😂 and yes please send me invoice on that bridge you’re selling.
I’m not defending tanking or overdoing load management by any means. And I’d be happy to have fewer games in basically every sport.
But being a fan of a team that loses in the first round of the playoffs every year sucks! And teams should do what they can to get out of that zone of complacency. It’s why I was quietly happy Alonso left the Mets — he was good but not great and I figured it was time to roll the dice on something new.
Agreed - I think there's a difference between saying "we're going to make some roster moves that will probably make us worse in the short term but that's ok because we're trying to develop new talent on our team" versus "we're going to intentionally lose games and gut our team to get better draft odds"
There’s some subtlety for sure. I was a wizards fan for Gilbert Arenas / John Wall years… it’s easy to get wrapped up in a fun team and spend ten years going nowhere. So I guess I don’t totally agree with Freddie’s take here. But also, like, there’s a difference between saying “we had a couple fun years but we’re not leveling up so we’re making some risky changes” and not giving a team a chance to improve
I am a wolves fan. The Anthony Edwards era has been truly golden for a lot of the reasons you list here. I also think that going for the playoffs has ancillary benefits in the development of young players. That's why the Rudy Gobert trade actually worked for the wolves. It gave Edwards serious reps in deep playoff runs all before age 24.
I also think teams and the league need to walk a fine line. I want the wolves to win with THIS team, with Edwards, Jaden McDaniels, and Naz Reid. If they have a 10% chance to win it all over the next 5 years, I don't want to blow up this group to get Giannis and maybe have a 15% chance.
The league needs to incentivize teams to develop players (which yes, can be flipped as assets for better players). I think the same way the supermax helps teams keep their drafted players, there should be cap relief for teams keeping role players that have developed in their system. It does seem like depth is more important these days; there have been no repeat champs for 7 years. I think there is more incentive to keep a team together to get as many bites at the apple as possible. The league should encourage this. Minnesota has strong rivalries with the Thunder and the Nuggets because of these playoff runs.
I also think the league has a bright future, given the aesthetically pleasing way the game is played now. It's fast, it's relentless, and highly skilled. They need to smooth the rough edges like tanking, load management, and endless timeouts and fouls in the 4th quarter. But the playoffs last year, especially the pacers run, was insanely fun basketball.