BY ALEJANDRO LOPEZ
‘Tanking’ is no longer any secret in the NBA. It exists and it has been a particular point of contention around the league in the 2025-26 season.
“In terms of the tanking, there’s no question that what we saw this season was unprecedented,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said on the “Stephen A Smith Show” on Wednesday. “You talked a lot about it. Your colleagues have talked a lot about it. Again, I think a bit of a group think there, obviously by definition it can’t be successful for all the teams that were engaging in that strategy. But on the other hand, the analytics, which all the sports are using today, suggest that it’s potentially a winning strategy, and that is to race to the bottom in order to get higher draft picks.”
The NBA saw eight teams win under 30 games this season, with multiple teams sitting players in the second half of the season in an effort to increase their lottery odds.
“I think there’s a bit of a perfect storm this year. You have a perception of a very deep draft class, which it appears to be, great players coming into the league,” Silver said. “And then even fans in particular cities and even media in those cities to a certain degree were rooting for their teams to tank and saying, ‘how well can your team be managed if you’re sort of just in the middle? You either gotta be great or you gotta let yourself get bad.’ And I think we had to respond not just to the narrative, but to a misalignment of incentives.”
To combat tanking, the league has proposed multiple new rules made to disincentivise losing.
“What we’ve essentially done, and we have a proposal that we’re going to be bringing to our team owners at the end of May, and that is to create essentially a system of flat odds, so that you have no particular incentive to be bad,” Silver continued. “There’s even something we’re calling draft relegation, that if you’re one of the bottom three teams in the league, you’ll actually have worse odds than teams that sort of are four through up until teams make the playoffs. We’re still playing a little bit with the system there.”
The NBA’s proposal was controversial among fans and analysts. The NBA Draft is one of the few ways for teams to work their way out of bad situations, particularly for small market franchises who cannot rely on big name free agent signings.
It is crucial that the NBA’s efforts to combat tanking doesn’t keep team’s in a cycle of purgatory.
Follow Alejandro Lopez on Twitter
Follow Adam Zagoria on Twitter
Follow ZAGSBLOGHOOPS on Instagram
