A Look at the Peculiar Case of Tanking
The natural expectation is that every team in every sport is doing the best it can to win every game. Despite that, there often comes a point in a season where fans conclude that the home team is going nowhere. This can be when mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, or even earlier, as inevitability sets in. At that point, the fan might be less than heartbroken by losses in the remaining games if that means improved positioning in the next draft. It’s a weird feeling for some, but others have no trouble rooting for the team to lose a few “meaningless” games.
Where this gets really dicey is when teams see the advantage of losing. The more top-heavy an upcoming draft is considered to be – with just one, two, or three special talents available – the more tempting it is to vie for position. Teams that appear disinterested in winning games on their schedule are said to be “tanking”.
While seen at times in all sports, this is a special problem in basketball. Why? With only five players on the court at a time, any one special talent has a chance to be more dominant than in sports fielding teams of nine (baseball) or twenty two (football) starters. (Hockey, with six starters, and constant line changes, is somewhere in between.) The team drafting a Tim Duncan or a LeBron James is likely to contend for championships yearly. Teams too good to draft high but not good enough to contend can get stuck in competitive Limbo. That is, they find themselves drafting good, but not great, players in the middle of drafts – over and over. For those who know they can’t win anything significant, there can be incentive to lose.
The Expression
I can’t prove it, but I suspect the term “tanking” was borrowed by the sports world from slang used in finance. Going back years, I remember hearing stock pundits talking about the market being “in the tank” during bear markets. Poor performance was the defining characteristic; the term’s use as a transitive verb in sports unfortunately reflects the deliberate action involved.
Two Ways to Tank
There are two ways to tank, and the difference matters, at least to me. The first method is simply to lose games deliberately when it is considered beneficial long-term. That is to say, coaches and/or players are either trying to lose or at least not trying hard to win.
Tanking method #2 is much subtler. Here the coaches coach, and the players play, to win. Management’s personnel decisions for that season, however, have been geared to losing now and winning later. For a current example, see the Miami Dolphins. Most famously, Sam Hinke raised this method to an art form while GM of the 76ers. Among the techniques for stockpiling “assets”: drafting players at bargain spots because of injury or foreign players with commitments to play elsewhere in coming years; trading solid, pretty good veterans for draft picks; endlessly searching for diamonds in the rough; and relentlessly seeking to maximize value.
Hinke made no bones about what he was doing; the entreaty to “Trust the Process!” became a rallying cry. It also drew harsh criticism from NBA fans, commentators, and squirming league executives. Controversy even raged among the team’s fans.
Some Thoughts on Purposeful Losing – Tanking Games
Tanking method #1 is, to me, despicable and indefensible. Even as Hinke’s Process (method #2) drew condemnation, teams with all-stars on the roster should have been excoriated for having records nearly as bad as, and occasionally even worse than, the 76ers over these years.
The NBA’s concern about this is very real. At the approach of any season only a half-dozen or so teams have any real likelihood of contending for a title – some years only two or three. In a league where the Have-nots greatly outnumber the Haves, most games (any other than Have vs. Have) become meaningless without genuine competition. Throwing games for future competitive advantage may not be quite as bad as for Black Sox-style payoffs. It’s still consumer fraud, however, and tickets aren’t cheap.
Some Thoughts on Talent Deprivation – Tanking a Roster
Tanking method #2 is more complicated. (It should not be confused, by the way, with ruining rosters through sheer ineptitude. See Chip Kelly’s brief reign running the whole show for the Philadelphia Eagles, for example.) As a general approach to running a team, I’m not a fan. There are some nuances worth considering here, though.
Sam Hinke’s foregoing of current assets for superior future ones was “successful” in making the 76ers’ record truly lousy for years:
2013-14: 19-63 2014-15: 18-64 2015-16: 10-72
So the team was 47-199 in the three years. It isn’t easy to win 19% of your games for that long in the NBA. It takes drafting injured players and considering many maladies season-ending; drafting foreign players and “stashing” them overseas; and dealing veterans for draft picks.
Taking one transaction at a time, however, Hinke did make some excellent moves. Who’s to say there’s only one way to rebuild a team? A floundering team doesn’t owe it to anyone to keep journeymen who might otherwise yield a good or great draft pick from a contending team having a specific need. Taking it a step further, there is no need to acquire a solid older player who will make a team only marginally better and not be around when the team contends.
This really is not method #1. To a man, the 76ers almost always played hard for Brett Brown those years, even in games where they had to know they had no chance. Brown tried everything he could imagine to keep his team competitive and wring every bit of ability out of his rapidly changing roster. He could not have been feigning his anguish over all the losing.
Going on memory, a typical game throughout this period saw the 76ers take a lead, however briefly, at some point in the first half. The better team would have to get serious at halftime, play hard, and step up their defense in order to take over the game in the second half. For a while, I watched more of these games than I probably should have. In addition to simply loving the sport, I admired the grit and hoped to see the blossoming of some unheralded talent.
Denouement
As the 2016 76ers closed in on their historic (second worst ever) 10-72, some were beginning to wonder whether the winning part of the Process would be deferred forever. More importantly, influential heads were getting ready to explode. Undoubtedly encouraged by the NBA, the team hired Jerry Colangelo to be a senior advisor above Hinke in the organizational structure. Hinke resigned soon thereafter with a 13-page manifesto.
In the three seasons since, the 76ers have been 28-54, 52-30, and 51-31. They are considered serious contenders for the upcoming season. If health holds up and Brett Brown can coach loaded teams as well as he coached bereft ones, nobody will want to play them in May. Debates among Philly hoops-heads rage to this day on whether Sam Hinke was a genius or a charlatan.
Summing Up
How does a Houston Rockets team that takes Ralph Sampson with the first pick in the 1983 NBA Draft manage to be in position to take Hakeem Olajuwon with the first pick in the very next year’s draft? It’s no coincidence that the league responded with its first lottery system the following year. They’ve been seeking an effective solution ever since.
Perhaps the entire first round of some drafts should be subject to lottery, with less weighting toward badly-performing teams. But then, the problem is no one but Golden State Warrior fans want to see the Warriors draft a Zion Williamson. Theoretically, we all want to see the worst teams have a chance to better themselves, as long as they act with integrity.
Discussion about “upholding the integrity of the game” is not meaningless blather. Why? As much as we enjoy sports, there is little intrinsic value in advancing a ball into something, through something, or beyond a certain point in space. The value comes from the speed, strength and skill necessary to accomplish the feats we enjoy watching.
Something I got from my father is the joy of watching someone very good do something very well, almost no matter what it is. Team sports provide the cauldron of competition in which skill, athleticism, effort and determination are taken to the highest levels. The more incapable I am of doing something, the more exhilarating I find it to watch. As a result, I’m not sure what I admire and enjoy more: baseball and basketball, because I know how hard they are to play well, or hockey, because I can’t conceive of skating well enough to play it at all.
I do know that disinterest in playing as well as one can reduces the exercise to foolishness. Hard, honest competition is the goose laying the golden eggs in the lucrative world of sports.
Assume the only games worth watching in the NBA are those between two Have teams, with all other games involving at least one of the Have-not teams active in the race to the bottom. If there are 12 out of the 30 teams (40%) with any chance of contending for a title, that means 16% of the games will be watchable. If only 6 teams really have a chance (a possibility some years) and everyone knows it, 94% of the games will be unwatchable.
We’re not there yet, but reserve point guards cannot make millions if that assumption prevails. If pride, integrity, and love of the game are not enough to motivate coaches, players and management to try like mad to win, perhaps economic self-interest will do the trick. Ultimately, we fans will vote with our wallets.
Finally, there’s this: the more teams tank, the less likely it is that any given team benefit from tanking.
Ken Bossong
© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong