Tanking is eroding faith in the NBA product

The National Basketball Association (NBA) has always sold hope as part and parcel of its principal product. Hope is in the nightly drama of competition. Hope also lies in the promise that even the worst of the worst of the league, given time and no small measure of lottery fortune, can rise and rub elbows with the established elite. What it did not intend to sell hope on, however, was the deliberate absence of effort. And yet, in recent months, the latter has become harder to ignore, with no less than Commissioner Adam Silver acknowledging a full-blown “tanking” problem. And he insists it will be addressed “full stop.”

As Silver himself admits, there is a need to distinguish between what he terms a “rebuild with integrity” and the calculated, corrosive strategy of deliberately taking one step backward in an effort to move two steps ahead. Once upon a time, tanking revealed itself late in the season, when the standings were largely settled and a playoff berth loomed farther than an opportunity to move up in the coming rookie draft.

These days, tanking arrives much earlier, sometimes as early as the turn of the year, and thus hollowing out the middle months of the calendar. Veterans have begun to feel it most acutely: benched not for poor performance, but for organizational intent, their competitive prime subordinated to meet long-term objectives.

The consequences are no longer abstract. They are most definitely visible, even jarring. Blowouts have proliferated, not merely as statistical anomalies but as symptoms of imbalance. Games are effectively decided before they begin. Contests are stripped of tension. Set-tos become ho-hum endeavors. And as conventional wisdom has aptly noted, the cost of tanking is increasingly borne by the product itself: lopsided scores, diminished urgency, and a viewing experience that irrationally expects fans to invest time in outcomes already preordained. In a league that thrives on narrative, this is the greater danger. Matches are losing meaning.

There is, to be sure, a temptation to view the problem as behavioral in nature, and one that can be corrected through fines, policies, or even moral suasion. Unfortunately, the incentives to the supposedly abhorrent tactic are structural; the draft, by design, rewards failure. And because a single transcendent player can alter the trajectory of erstwhile also-rans, losing becomes both rational and strategic. Which is why the conversation has shifted towards more radical solutions; among those being bandied about are flattened lottery odds, expanded pools that include play-in protagonists, and mechanisms that reward late-campaign victories. None of these options is perfect. All, in their own way, attempt to reconcile two competing truths: that parity requires assistance, and that competition demands sincerity.

The turn of events brings the league to an uncomfortable but necessary reckoning. Tanking is not an aberration; it is a feature of the system working as designed. To eliminate it is to alter the design, and to disturb the balance between hope and honesty, between future promise and present effort. There is, therefore, no easy fix; nor is there one that can be legislated away overnight.

All the same, the urgency is real. If the NBA sticks to the status quo, it gambles with much more than a few forgettable games in March. It risks eroding the very compact it has long held with its audience: that every night, regardless of circumstance, the battle is genuine and will be hard-fought. And once belief begins to fray, no lottery reform, however well-intentioned, will be enough to restore it.

Anthony L. Cuaycong has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994. He is a consultant on strategic planning, operations and human resources management, corporate communications, and business development.