The 2024/2025 NBA regular season is about to end up soon, and some teams already know that they will not be able to get anything positive in the next following days: no playoffs, no play in tournament, and no perspective of trophy. While some squads keep on being tough and professional, some others completely assume their tanking strategy to get the best choices of draft in upcoming June. As an NBA fan, how would you react if your team was tanking?
For those who do not know the term, tanking (in NBA) consists in losing games on purpose to stand in the bottom of the ranking and thus get the first draft picks in the following year. This is a strategy that can enable a franchise to build a better team in the future, but it implies that your current season will not be significant any longer.
To a certain extent, that strategy can distort a championship, because the competitiveness of the tanking squad will be very low. This is good news when you play against them, but what if your contender plays a tanking team while you are fighting against an accurate squad?
The Sixers of Joel Embiid are tanking very peacefully in this end of regular season, following the absences of Paul George and their Cameroonian center for the rest of the season. Teams like Utah and Brooklyn decided to follow the same strategy, and the Jazz was even fined by the NBA because they did not use one of their best players Lauri Markkanen in the past few days. According to the NBA, the Jazz did not respect the Player Participation Policy. As a result, they had to pay a 100 000-dollar fine.
How comfortable are you with tanking? Would you accept seeing your squad act this way when you buy your ticket to see them? Do you think it is unfair for other squads? Is it worth it when you take the draft into account?
By Guillaume Mahot