Can the NBA truly solve the most egregious tanks? And how incredible is Nikola Jokić?
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:John Hollinger
As the league reportedly looks at ways to reduce tanking, one potential change is long overdue.
On March 25, with just two weeks left in the NBA regular season, the Washington Wizards play the Utah Jazz. Depending on the standings at that point, the game may be significant enough for one or both teams to encourage some unusual, um, “strategy.”
In this case, it’s not just a typical instance of two rivals for the top pick trying to out-tank each other; there’s more at stake. Both the Wizards and Jazz owe top-eight-protected first-round picks to other teams in the 2026 draft, and if they don’t finish with one of the four-worst records, they have at least some chance of losing their first-round pick entirely once the lottery is drawn.
Those picks also come with a double-whammy, because the obligations extinguish after this season. If Washington doesn’t convey its first to New York this season, it turns into a second-rounder in 2026, plus another second-rounder in 2027. If the Jazz don’t convey their first to Oklahoma City in the upcoming draft, the pick vanishes entirely, and the Thunder get bubkes.
• Limiting pick protections on traded picks to either top-four or top-14 and beyond, which would eliminate the situation I enumerated above.
• Not allowing a team to draft in the top four two years in a row.
• Locking lottery positions after March 1.
I’ll speak briefly on the last two, because they seem a bit more like solutions in search of a problem and could have unintended consequences.
I’m lukewarm on the March 1 lottery lock, which may have limited utility. We have seen a few instances of egregious late-season tanking to improve draft position (most notably by the Portland Trail Blazers in 2022 and Jazz in 2024), but the flattened lottery odds of recent seasons have made this much less of an issue. Additionally, variance in schedules before and after March 1 may make it harder to set this up fairly.
Finally, it seems obvious that this might merely shift the timing of tanking more than the occurrence of it; teams might be encouraged to take some extraordinary measures between the trade deadline and March 1 to lock in their record before they resume competing March 2.
As for not allowing a team to draft in the top four two years in a row, this is the typical NBA move of shutting the barn door after the horses left — yes, the San Antonio Spurs landed in the top four three years in a row, and that can’t be undone. But it also took incredible luck. Moreover, changing the rule sounds fair until you realize that finishing with one of the worst three records normally comes with a 52.1 percent chance of picking in the top four. If you’re bad for multiple seasons, you should be picking in the top four more than once.
Here’s the other part nobody talks about: Once you wipe four teams out of the lottery, all of this probability transfers to the other teams in the lottery. That in itself negatively alters everyone’s tanking incentives.
For instance, can you imagine how the end of the 2023-24 season would have played out if teams knew the Spurs, Hornets and Blazers couldn’t pick in the top four when they had three of the five worst records? It would have nearly doubled the probability for every other lottery team to land in the top four, with the best odds weighted toward the worst teams, of course. As a result, middle-bad teams that year, such as the Brooklyn Nets and Memphis Grizzlies, who both had fairly ethical finishes to their seasons, would have instead pulled the rip cord … and quite possibly done it rather early.
But let’s go back to the first bullet in the list above, because that one is a slam dunk. It’s a case that hasn’t been talked about enough and, per my example at the top, is very relevant to the current season.
Most people think the most egregious form of tanking is the Philadelphia 76ers Process-era stuff, and while that was bad, it’s become less blatant in the current era of flattened lottery odds. It also hasn’t involved teams overtly conspiring to lose individual games.
To wit, teams are always going to make a conscious choice to be bad in certain years as part of a rebuilding plan, much as the Nets and Wizards are this year, for instance. But that playbook has always been much more a case of “we’re not all that worried about winning” rather than “we’re doing whatever it takes to lose.”
Protected draft picks, on the other hand, fall into another case entirely. Virtually every example of egregious tanking in league history involves a team losing on purpose to protect a draft pick. (There are also one or two legendary tank games that involved playoff seeding, which is both rarer and more difficult to fix.)
This isn’t a speculative tank to possibly improve lottery odds. Teams engaging in this tankcraft know exactly what they’re getting: a free lottery pick. Moreover, the history of this grift says that crime pays:
• The 2006 “Mark Madsen game” remains the gold standard for protected pick tanking, when the Minnesota Timberwolves needed to lose their final game to Memphis to prevent themselves from catching the Houston Rockets and Golden State Warriors in the standings and, depending on lottery results, possibly losing a protected draft pick as a result. Madsen launched five 3-pointers in the second overtime to lock up a loss to Memphis that landed Minnesota the sixth pick; the Wolves grabbed Brandon Roy with that choice, but alas traded him to Portland minutes later for Randy Foye.
• The Warriors set their season on fire in 2012 to keep a top-seven protected pick that otherwise would have gone to Utah. It was arguably the most ambitious draft-pick tank ever, as the Warriors shut down key players (including Steph Curry) and glided from playoff contention to the league’s seventh-worst record. The tank had added oomph due to a lockout-shortened 66-game schedule, but still: Golden State’s 3-17 blitz to the finish only assured it a tie with Toronto for the seventh-worst record. However, the Warriors won a coin toss to keep the seventh position and stayed in that spot after the lottery. The Warriors picked Harrison Barnes, a key starter on their 2015 championship team.
• The 2023 Dallas Mavericks were fined $750,000 by the league after blatantly tanking their final two games to protect a top-10 protected pick that would have gone to New York. Dallas ended up selecting 10th and, after a draft-day trade, picked center Dereck Lively II, who was a key cog in their run to the NBA Finals the next season.
Last season’s Sixers owed a top-six protected pick to the Thunder and ended up with the fifth-worst record after going 4-28 in the 32 games after the trade deadline. Merely landing fifth-worst was an amazing feat considering that, by the trade deadline, they had already won too many games to finish in any of the bottom three spots. The freefall gave the Sixers a 64.1 percent chance of keeping their pick, which they did when it landed third, and they selected VJ Edgecombe.
Nobody is anxious to see more episodes like this, and putting a constraint on protections in draft-pick trades shouldn’t be so cumbersome as to prevent trades from happening. In fact, some execs I talked to thought they might be easier: Sometimes trade talks get bogged down in haggling over protection minutiae — top eight versus top 10 and the like — and the clean line between top four and top 14 takes that out of play.
It’s a good time to put this rule in play, too. After Washington and Utah this season, we have only a couple of outstanding future picks with similar mid-lottery protection situations — the most notable is a top-eight protected pick owed by the Sixers to Brooklyn in 2027. They’d be grandfathered in, obviously, but after that, we could be done with pick-protection tanking forever.
Good riddance. This rule change would be long overdue.
Once again, Nikola Jokić is making history on a regular basis. (Sam Navarro / Imagn Images)
Stat Geekery: The ridiculous Joker
The Nuggets announced Tuesday that Nikola Jokić hyperextended his left knee Monday and will be re-evaluated in four weeks, putting a season for the ages on pause.
After his unreal 56-point, 16-rebound, 15-assist performance against Minnesota on Christmas, he is no longer on pace to merely break his single-season PER record; he is now on pace to shatter it. Jokić’s PER of 35.5 would blow away the 32.8 mark he set in the 2021-22 season; he’s been so good that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of Oklahoma City is posting the third-highest PER of all time (32.4) and still eating his dust.
Other advanced stats agree. Jokić’s 16.5 BPM is also from another planet; his previous record was 13.7 in the 2021-22 season. He, LeBron James and Michael Jordan are the only players to record a single-season mark above 12, and Jokić is blowing away the standards from the rest of his career. (Poor SGA, again, is putting up historic numbers that still pale next to the Joker.)
The key stat to explain his dominance in the metrics is that Jokić just does not miss. His 71.4 true shooting percentage leads the league, despite the fact that most of his shots are fairly difficult 2s. Jokić shoots 66.7 percent on 2s, 44 percent on 3s and 85.5 percent from the line; the most absurd piece of this is that he’s over 60 percent on 2s outside the charge circle, which is usually a shooting death zone.
And, as ever, the impact stats sum it up: Even with an improved bench, the Denver Nuggets’ net rating is plus-12.6 with Jokić on the floor and minus-4.0 without him, a 16.6-point gap per 100 possessions.
At age 30 and already in the inner circle of all-time greats, Jokić is somehow putting together his greatest season yet, though it will be at least a month before it can continue.
Cap Geekery: The Raptors’ new big man
Toronto signed center Mo Bamba to a new contract Sunday, which might seem odd for a team that was already over the luxury tax and is now $1.39 million further into it; the signing also put the Raptors over the first-apron payroll threshold.
However, this is largely monopoly money. Bamba signed a non-guaranteed contract and likely will be waived just before the contract guarantee date Jan. 7; at that point, he would be eligible to sign a 10-day contract (those cannot be signed until Jan. 5) if the Raptors still need him and would carry a much smaller cap hit.
As a result, Bamba will only be on this contract for about 10 days, which would add $131,970 to Toronto’s cap, and each additional 10-day deal (he could sign two more) would add another $131,970.
Once he downshifts to a 10-day, the Raptors would also be back under the first apron; they were not hard-capped at the first apron in the first place since they never used their nontaxpayer midlevel exception. In other words, it only mildly impacted Toronto’s tax position (the Raptors will need to make one small move to get below the tax regardless) and shouldn’t impact their first apron after Jan. 7.
It does offer an example, however, of how contract incentives can mess up teams’ apron planning. The Raptors have $6.3 million in unlikely incentives in the contracts of Jakob Poeltl, Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett, and those count against the first apron even if they don’t trigger. It likely doesn’t matter for the next two weeks, but Toronto is at least temporarily handcuffed trade-wise while it’s over the first apron.
