A Solution for NBA Tanking

I have been an NBA fan all my life.  I am a Celtics fan and I started watching during the Dave Collins era.  As a Celtics fan I am used to winning.  But I am also realistic. I realize my Celtics are woeful this year and while I enjoy watching the young players, 82 games is a long, long time and my time is precious.  In short, it is hard to be motivated for the whole long season.

Recently, however, I have been more and more turned off to the NBA because of something I simply cannot or will not abide as a fan.  That something is season long tanking.  As an NFL fan as well as an NBA fan I can put up with tanking in the NFL because it’s really only for two weeks at the end of the season.  And even if a team tanked for all 16 weeks, which doesn’t happen, well that’s only 16 games worth of bad viewing where my team is concerned.  I can live with that.  But the NBA season is 82 freaking games long and quite frankly, I have better things to do than to watch garbage night in and night out.

My solution to tanking is not original, but I think it is the best way to solve this problem.  In the NBA 16 out of the 30 teams make the playoffs.  I believe teams 17-24 should play an Elite 8 style knock-out tournament for the top three draft picks.  Here is how it would work.  At a neutral site, the seeded tournament would work like the NCAA tournament.  After the first round, we are left with a final four.

The losers of the final four play for the third pick in a sort of consolation game while the winners go for the #1 pick.  The loser of the 3^rd, fourth game would draft 4^th in the upcoming draft and the draft order would proceed as normal from there.  This knock-out tournament would coincide with the first round of the real playoffs.  This solution has many advantages.

First, teams 25-30 have no chance of getting a top pick.  This means they should fight like mad to get into the tournament.  No more of this season long tanking crap.  It gives bad teams a reason to try to win and prevents a 76ers style team from taking the court.  Add to this the drama at the end of the season as teams scramble for those last lottery tournament positions.  So you accomplish two things during the regular season.  You discourage the blatant tanking that goes on now, and you give fans of bad teams something to look forward to and some excitement.  Suddenly a Knicks v 76ers game means something.

The actual lottery tournament itself would probably generate more excitement than the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs.  I think fans would be very interested in how the tournament progresses.  It also gives fringe players a chance to showcase themselves on the national stage.  The NBA would get extra revenue and the TV networks would get decent ratings.  Finally, this gives top draft prospects a decent chance of going to halfway decent teams instead of the bottom feeders they are forced to join.    Such a tournament gives players, fans, coaches, and TV networks something positive.  Meanwhile the top 16 teams can play for the ultimate prize, the NBA championship as they always do. 

But will the really bad teams ever get off the bottom?  In this scenario, the 30^th ranked team drafts 5^th.  Not too bad really.  So they have a chance to build.  In addition, they might play in some meaningful games toward the end of the season which will give them experience playing games that matter, instead of the endless stream of meaningless games they play in now.  So all in all, there is no downside.