A Plan to Eliminate Tanking in the NBA
The 2019 NBA draft lottery was held on Tuesday May 16. The draft lottery is the NBA’s attempt to discourage teams from tanking in order to enhance their chances of getting the first picks in the annual player draft. The annual player draft is the selection process used to allocate eligible college and international players to NBA teams. Originally, the draft order was in inverse order of team record during the regular season. That is, the team with the worst record picks first and the team with the best record picks last. The NBA is a league in which one player aka Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, etc. can single handedly in a single season take a team from worst to first. Therefore, having an early round draft pick is highly coveted by teams. Note, having an early draft pick does not necessary guarantee success if the wrong player is chosen aka LaRue Martin, Sam Bowie, Adam Morrison, Anthony Bennett, etc.
Analytics suggests that teams who begin a season poorly or have aging non-productive players should be willing to lose as many games as possible (tanking) to secure a better draft position. In order to discourage tanking, the NBA instituted the draft lottery to make sure that the worst finishing teams don’t automatically get the best picks. Although this lottery process has reconfigured several…
