“Victory belongs to the most persevering.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
So does losing, it turns out. It requires dedication, hard work and perseverance.
“If you’re going to play at all, you’re out to win,” Derek Jeter once said. He never met the NBA.
He never met tanking.
Tanking, as in NBA teams trying to lose so they can pick higher in the NBA draft.
Tanking because basketball is the one team sport in which one player can make a dramatic difference.
Tanking because the team with the most losses (sometimes) gets first dibs.
Ironic, isn’t it? Big-time sports go to so much trouble to prevent gamblers from fixing games when right under their noses it goes on every night, out in the open, with no pretext — coaches and front-office staff are manipulating games in an effort to lose.
What’s the difference?
Tanking is the biggest conundrum in sports. How do you stop teams from losing, on purpose?
This ought to tell you everything: NBA officials have spent decades trying to solve this problem and this is the best they can do — a lottery system with ping-pong balls.
This is the best idea they’ve been able to come up with.
Few if any teams are tanking with more gusto these days than the Utah Jazz. They’re in Year 4 of their tankathon. If you’re keeping score at home, the Jazz have gone from a league-leading 52 wins in 2020-21 to 49 wins a year later, to 37 wins, then 31 wins, then 17 wins — from best in the league to the worst.
Which was all by design, of course.
The Jazz are gambling everything on securing high draft picks. They’ve thrown away four years (maybe more in the future?) so they can succeed for, what, maybe four years or so, before they lose their players to free agency and they can start another cycle of tanking. That’s if their gambit actually pays off and they are able to draft a game-changing player — a big if.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the 2026 draft has five such players — North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson, Houston’s Kingston Flemings, Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, BYU’s AJ Dybantsa and Duke’s Cam Boozer. The 2027 draft, on the other hand, is much weaker, so teams are all-in to get one of those players now.
It’s a race to the bottom to get inside the bottom five.
The Jazz are doing everything they can to lose, short of putting Highland High School on the court, and they’re not even being sly about it. The NBA fined the Jazz $500,000 for conduct detrimental to the league after they removed their best players from the lineup in the late stages of competitive games.
The Jazz are in an awkward spot. They have committed themselves to tanking, but they have only the sixth-worst record in the league and are in a tight race with six to eight other teams to reach the bottom. It gets worse: If the Jazz finish outside the bottom eight, they must give their draft pick to OKC — one of the best teams in the league — as part of a years-old trade.
As you can see, there are a few flaws in this tanking plan.
There are more: The odds fall dramatically against them with every win they (accidentally) claim. The bottom three teams in the regular-season standings have 14% odds of winning the first pick. The odds are 12.5% for the fourth-worst, 10.5% for fifth worst, 9% for sixth and so on.
So far, since 2023, the best the Jazz’s tanking scheme has been able to net in the draft are picks No. 5, No. 9 and No. 10.
The whole tanking plan was a huge risk from the start. Since the lottery system was adopted in 1985, the team with the worst regular-season record has won the lottery only six times, the last time occurring in 2018, the year before the league flattened the odds from 25% to 14%.
Despite their best (or worst) efforts, the Jazz have already won 18 games — one more than all of last season. At this point, they are committed to losing — no turning back now — yet teams are under more scrutiny than ever now that the league is trying to stop tanking (ultimately, a futile effort). They have to give the appearance of trying to win. They play their best players for three quarters to maintain the illusion that fools nobody, but then bench them for the fourth quarter. They produce injury reports that hold players out of games or simply rest players under the guise of “load management.”
They’ve only got to maintain this act for another 25 more games.
