Why the NBA could be headed for ‘worst tanking stretch we’ve ever seen’

When the Utah Jazz hosted the Toronto Raptors on March 14, it should have been an opportunity to end a seven-game losing streak at home against a below-.500 team. And after missing six of those seven games, Jazz leading scorer Lauri Markkanen was in the starting lineup.

Instead of a matchup between All-Star forwards Markkanen and Scottie Barnes, fans watched a fourth quarter filled with rookies and reserves from both teams. Markkanen did not return for the second half, while Barnes and Toronto’s other veteran starters (RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley) played only the first two minutes of the final period before leaving for good.

With the game on the line, the teams finished with a combined five rookies on the court and just one player (Utah forward Brice Sensabaugh) averaging double-figure scoring this season. The Raptors won and pushed the Jazz’s losing streak to eight. Utah also took a step closer to securing one of the league’s three worst records — which provides the best odds at securing the No. 1 pick in the draft.

Over the final few weeks of nearly every season, there are two races in the NBA standings: one to secure playoff positioning, and another for the best draft lottery odds.

But this season — with the combination of Duke star Cooper Flagg — a generational prospect — and the usual rebuilding teams (including the Jazz, Raptors and Washington Wizards) joined by several others (the Philadelphia 76ers, San Antonio Spurs and New Orleans Pelicans) that have had their seasons cut short because of a series of injuries — the race to the bottom is breaking new ground.

Despite recent rules to prevent star players from sitting out too many games, the issue of tanking won’t go away. And though NBA insiders mull new ways to curtail the practice, the league’s worst teams are finding new ways to rack up late-season losses.

“These next few weeks,” one NBA executive said, “could be the worst tanking stretch we’ve ever seen.”

Why do NBA teams tank?

Anyone involved in the league’s annual race to the bottom will tell you it’s a miserable process. Trying to finish with as few wins as possible isn’t something franchises normally aspire to do.

But those involved will also say securing a high draft pick is the surest path to winning at the highest level. And no one expects that to change soon.

“Philosophically, I’m not aware of anyone making a serious push to eliminate our current philosophy of the draft, which is to award top picks to teams that are most in need of talent,” Evan Wasch, the NBA’s executive vice president of strategy and analytics, told ESPN. “That is a fundamental tenet of our current draft system.”

That system, which the NBA last changed in 2019, rewards teams with a sliding scale of odds to land one of the top four spots in the draft based on its annual lottery in May. The three teams with the worst records each receive a 14% chance of landing the top pick in the draft and a 52.1% chance of getting one of the top four. (Those odds slide down to the lottery team with the best record, which has a 0.5% chance of winning the top pick in the draft and a 2.1% chance of landing a top-four selection.)

The lottery exists for a reason. Getting a high lottery pick is the more direct way to land a franchise-changing talent that is required, at least historically:

Over the past 45 years, five title-winning teams weren’t led by a player who would win, or had won, the NBA’s MVP award: last year’s Celtics, the 2019 Toronto Raptors and the Detroit Pistons in 1989, 1990 and 2004.

Among those remaining 40 teams, one of the following 14 players was a member of at least one of them: Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Julius Erving, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo or Nikola Jokic.

Five of those 14 players — Johnson, Olajuwon, O’Neal, Duncan and James — were taken first overall. And only two — Antetokounmpo, the 15th pick in the 2013 draft, and Jokic, taken 41st overall in 2015 — were picked outside the top seven spots.

Even among those five outlier teams, only the Kawhi Leonard-led Raptors featured a player who was taken outside the top three. The 2004 NBA Finals MVP was Chauncey Billups, selected third overall in 1997, the same spot that current Celtics stars Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum were selected in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Meanwhile, Isiah Thomas, the talisman of those 1989 and 1990 champion Pistons, was taken second overall in 1981.

Over the past 45 years, three NBA champions were led by a player taken outside the top seven spots in the draft.

That’s why NBA teams tank. And this year is no exception.

How have teams tanked this season?

When the NBA enacted the “player participation policy” before the 2023-24 season, tanking teams were not the target. The league’s goal was to ensure healthy stars weren’t sitting out games. However, the rules also require lottery-bound teams not to shut down their star players without a legitimate injury.

The Jazz ran afoul of the policy earlier this month and were fined $100,000 for not making Markkanen available for a game March 5 against the Washington Wizards “and other games.”

A small price to pay for a top pick, but with escalating fines — the next violation would cost the Jazz $250,000 — the team took an alternative strategy in the March 14 loss to Toronto.

Markkanen’s usage in that game was an extreme version of what the Raptors have done since the All-Star break: benching their key players in clutch time.

Over that span, Toronto has played 37.5 “clutch” minutes by the definition of NBA Advanced Stats (the margin within five points in the last five minutes of regulation, or in overtime). The Raptors have given more of those minutes to players signed midseason or on two-way contracts (a combined 46) than leading scorers Barnes and Barrett (43).

Meanwhile, the Jazz have limited Markkanen to four of their 25 clutch minutes since the All-Star break. Notably, Utah has been careful about playing Markkanen against other lottery-bound teams. The games Markkanen has missed this season have come against opponents with a combined .450 winning percentage, compared with .545 for the teams he has faced.

Starting Jazz center Walker Kessler has continued to sit out games, including Utah’s loss to Toronto. That game was listed as a “DNP-CD” — did not play, coach’s decision — after Kessler was previously listed as out due to rest in six games, including the one missed by Markkanen that resulted in a fine.

Wasch said the NBA will continue to monitor player availability, particularly qualifying stars like Markkanen, but expressed no issue with teams leaving starters on the bench in key moments.

“We are not in the business of policing rotations in that way,” Wasch said. “For the league to step in and say that a team chose to play one player over another player and that was the wrong decision, I think that’s a bit of a slippery slope. …

“And oh, by the way, some of those [younger] guys actually go win the game.”

Flagg seen as a generational prospect worth tanking for

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From the moment he stepped foot on the court at Duke, Cooper Flagg has been in the spotlight of the college basketball world.

Entering the college season, there was still some question whether Flagg was the best prospect eligible for the 2025 draft. The Rutgers’ duo of Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper was in the mix, along with Baylor guard V.J. Edgecombe, who had starred internationally with the Bahamas in FIBA Olympic qualifiers last summer.

With Flagg in contention for National Player of the Year despite being one of the youngest players in college basketball, that debate has been settled. NBA scouts on teams racing to the bottom are instead pondering just how high Flagg ranks among recent No. 1 overall prospects.

“What makes him unique is the combination of the fact that, even by freshman standards, he’s young,” a scout said of Flagg, who won’t even turn 19 until December. “And, in spite of that, he’s been productive in every phase of the game against elite competition.”

The consensus among analytics experts at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference earlier this month placed Flagg around the 85th percentile of No. 1 picks — that is, better than 85% of those players selected.

Since 2005, the first draft with the NBA’s current age limit, Flagg’s 5.2 projected wins above replacement player (WARP) rank third among top picks, behind only Anthony Davis (2012) and fellow star Duke prospect Zion Williamson (2019). Like Flagg, both Davis and Williamson inspired intense races to the bottom of the standings.

Any stats-based projection will heavily emphasize a prospect’s production relative to his age, and that’s where Flagg stands out. His main competition for National Player of the Year, Auburn fifth-year senior forward Johni Broome, is more than four years older.

As the scout noted, most players Flagg’s age are still finishing their prep careers as seniors in high school. Because Flagg reclassified in summer 2023, going into his last year at Montverde Academy in Florida, he would be the second-youngest player at the time they were drafted No. 1, behind only LeBron James. (And younger, in fact, than high school draftees Kwame Brown and Dwight Howard.)

Although Flagg’s age and production don’t guarantee he’ll join the list of No. 1 picks who have produced championships, they explain why teams are chasing new ways to ensure they can draft him.

What solutions are being discussed around the league?

The NBA has been willing to make changes, but they usually take time to manifest.

What could be the next anti-tanking measure? We canvassed sources around the league for ideas as to what, if anything, could be done to improve the closing months of the season:

1. Flatten the lottery odds even more

The NBA draft used to have a lottery where all nonplayoff teams had the same chance to move up. That ended after the Orlando Magic won the top spot in 1992 and 1993. In the latter season, when No. 1 pick Shaquille O’Neal was a rookie, the Magic had the best record of any lottery team at 41-41. One executive suggested a further flattening of the odds from where they’re currently are following the 2019 adjustment.

This comes with a clear downside: give too many teams the same odds at the top pick, a few might weigh whether pushing for the postseason is better than a chance at a franchise-altering prospect.

2. Count wins instead of losses after the All-Star break

Under the current system, teams at the bottom are rewarded for losing as many games as possible during the final two months of the season. What if that concept was turned on its head?

By making a portion of the second-half schedule (post-All-Star break or the final 20 games, for example) work in the opposite fashion — the most wins during that stretch would determine the lottery odds — it would obviously create a system where bad teams would have every reason to play hard and play their stars.

For example, last season’s San Antonio Spurs had an 11-44 record (.200) before the All-Star break, but then went 11-16 (.407) afterward. By adding their pre-break wins and post-break losses (and vice versa), the Spurs’ “lottery record” of 27-55 — despite an actual record of 22-60 — would get rewarded with better lottery odds for remaining competitive during that final stretch.

“It would incentivize everyone to compete to the end,” an executive said.

Here is how last season’s lottery standings would have changed if this rule had been in place for games after the All-Star break:

The big winners are two teams that pushed hard to make the postseason (Houston and Golden State) and the San Antonio Spurs, who were competitive through the end of the regular season. The Raptors and Jazz, meanwhile, each lost a ton of games in the closing weeks of the regular season in attempts to keep their protected first-round picks. (Utah succeeded, Toronto did not.)

That leads us to another proposal from coaches, scouts and executives:

3. Rework (or remove) pick protections

The most flagrant cases of tanking are from teams hoping to keep their lottery draft pick. The Dallas Mavericks tanking their final couple of games in 2023 to keep a top-10 protected pick is the most egregious recent example. (The decision to tank cost the Mavericks $750,000 but netted them starting center Dereck Lively II, who was a key contributor to the team that reached the 2024 Finals.) The Philadelphia 76ers hope to keep their top-6 protected selection after injuries derailed their season.

Multiple sources told ESPN a simple way to reduce tanking would be removing mid-lottery pick protections. Either have the pick be top-4 protected — meaning the team jumps in the lottery — lottery protected, or unprotected. That tweak would remove the most egregious examples of tanking.

“One of the goals of lottery reform was really to smooth out outcomes within the lottery so that no team would look at it and say there’s a significant benefit to me being the third lottery team as opposed to the fourth, or the eighth lottery team as opposed to the ninth,” Wasch said. “That’s something we had focused heavily on.

“Of course, the pick-protection issue kind of cut the other way on that. If a team has a top-10-protected pick, it actually matters a lot whether they finish with the 10th-worst record or the 11th-worst record. That is a dynamic that we’re seeing.”

4. Have lottery odds determined by how those teams fare against each other

An idea floated by an executive was to have the 14 lottery teams ordered by how they fare against one another during the regular season. Teams have a reason to compete in every game, and especially against these other lottery-bound teams.

This one, though, comes with an obvious problem: The teams on the fringes of the play-in games, and in it, could potentially be pushed to play for a top pick in the draft instead of competing for the playoffs.

5. Enforce the current rules

Some people around the league believe the current system is fine. Bad teams exist, and fighting for lottery positioning is just part of the sport.

But with the onset of teams trying to sink to the bottom of the standings, some sources argued that cutting down on the influx of teams sitting healthy players would fix many of the current complaints, rather than tweaking the system any further. “Let’s start there,” one executive said.

Ultimately, getting a top pick remains the surest path to landing a franchise-changing player. But the NBA has already tried to curtail tanking, from flattening the lottery odds to creating the play-in games to give more teams reason to play through the end of the regular season. “I think there have been a lot of positive trends that we’ve seen,” Wasch said.

But Wasch also indicated that tanking, and ways to address it, could come up with the NBA’s competition committee.

“Coming off this season, it would be reasonable to expect that we would re-engage with our competition committee,” Wasch said. “And see if there’s anything they might want to explore to tackle the issue.”