Rebuilding is fine. Field your young guys, take the losses, grow from it. What feels off is when teams suddenly “remember” injuries once lottery odds start looking juicy. If you’re bad, be bad honestly. Don’t cosplay competitiveness.

Utah rebuild coulda basically been done by now if they didn’t choose to be decent the first half the last two years then change their mind the second half, the wizards feel like the only team that’s genuinely been ass but getting unlucky with the draft order.

Problem is tanking doesn’t always guarantee a franchise player like it did for Pistons or Spurs. And if you happen to have a good player who you want to build around that future star you are tanking for, you keep them. Nothing wrong with that.

We’re still losing with MPJ, wdym? He’s only not playing on B2bs because of his back.

And do you see or know our roster? It’s 5 rookies, a center who can’t shoot and skinny, a pf who likes to chuck 3s and inconsistent and bad rebounder, 1 2nd rounder, Mann, and MPJ. We’re genuinely bad.

You’re not a real Pistons fan if you call what we went through tanking. It was not tanking, we sucked. We’ve had bad coaches, bad draft picks, I’m getting really sick of this revisionist history of the Pistons. Even after we drafted Cade he suffered injuries in his first two years. Jerami Grant was our best player for multiple years, we were hyping up Christian fucking Wood. Diallo, Josh Jackson, completely revisionist to say we were tanking. We had Dwane Casey, who would fail to develop any players, instead telling them to sit in the corner, and wait to get the ball.

Why are you acting like MPJ is a championship level first option

I feel you just included the Nets just to include them because what makes you think they’re building around MPJ?

Having a Salary floor is why teams have vets, if it was up to a rebuilding team they’d have a team full of Rookie contracts. Someone has to get paid and they got paid (2032 FRP) to have MPJ on their Roster.

Sounds like a betting issue more than a competitive one.

Maybe exclude teams in the bottom 6 or so from luxury tax payouts. That’s historically come out to 10-16 million per team. If you choose to throw away your season to build for the future you shouldn’t be getting benefits by the teams actually competing in the sport.

Easiest way in the world to fix tanking that doesn’t involve any shenanigans or bullshit…. Keep the salary floor close to the salary cap. Change distribution of profits to owners so that it scales with wins. Make the delta between top and bottom large enough that no one wants to be bad.

I agree with this. Teams like the Jazz are basically cheating because they’re trying to gain a better draft pick than the talent level on their roster would normally yield

Bobcats/Hornets never tanked once. Thats most of the reason why they sucked for so long.

The issue is that it’s a perverse incentive to be dishonest about your good players’ minutes, injuries and rotations if your whole team isn’t close to good. Like yeah, no one thought the Wizards should have been the 6 seed this year, but the ways that they are trying to make sure they have better odds than the Pacers (and some vice versa) aren’t good for the NBA so they’re gonna try to make it less of a perverse incentive.

So how can you have a self balancing draft and no perverse incentive to lose? One option is to just separate the pick from the results of the season by delay. The standings at the end of the 2026 season give you the draft odds for the 2028 or even 2030 pick. This will mean that GMs and coaches who make those decisions might be thinking “is it really worth it to lose these games for a pick I likely won’t even be here to make? Maybe I should show my next team I know how to win with what I’ve got and can get players to buy in even when times are tough.” Of course an owner can just say we need to make the best pick possible and if you guys don’t find a way to lose more games we need to trade our best players, but I don’t think the league has a problem with using roster construction to lose. To set this up you need to double up each year having an impact on the draft for some number of years. So like 2026 results impact pick order for 26 and 27, 27 for 28 and 29, 28 for 30 etc for however much delay you want. Of course that means you’ll have a few years of double incentivized tanking.

Or make it a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ of each draft lottery being flat odds or graduated odds. Imagine you tank and that year Adam Silver flips a heads and you have the same chance as the play-in loser to get the first pick.

You nailed it.

This is why what Utah is doing is very different than OKC, HOU, PHI etc. Adam Silver needs to lay the hammer and penalize the Utahs of the world for the decisions around Lauri/Keyonte sitting games that they were deemed healthy for. It’s different if they just trotted Cody Williams out there for 48mins to see if he becomes any good

I don’t agree with your MPJ take. One of the great tools of a rebuilding teams is to take on overpaid high end role players/low tier stars and sit in their contract for a year or two and then trade them once their contract is shorter and the cap has increased.

One piece of this current mess these rebuilding teams have is how the new salary cap rules have affected the overall value of stars. Trading for stars is not nearly as effective as it was in previous years for building contenders.

I’m fine with people hating on the funky lineups we’ve been putting out the last few weeks (and probably the rest of the season), but what we’ve been doing up until then, what some call ethical tanking, I have zero apologies for. Kyshawn George and Alex Sarr likely do not make their sophomore leaps without being given the room to try and fail throughout their rookie seasons, especially Sarr. Tearing down your roster and giving low floor high ceiling prospects the room to grow is a valid strategy.

For me, basketball is an entertainment product, and from an enjoyment side, there is no difference to me between a team that sits good players to be bad, and a team that doesn’t bother to have good players and is bad.  I don’t give a shit if Utah is sitting Laurie or trades him away, the end result is I end up watching G-leaguers (if I happen to watch a jazz game).

But the only way a team can become consistently good/relevant is to take as many swings as possible until you get a star.  Doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you eventually do.

The biggest aspect to the tanking problem (in my opinion) is that the top athletes in the NBA have an outsized impact on a team, it’s marketability, and it’s ability to win vs other sports.  As long as any superstar can so drastically affect winning, the end incentive for every team will always boil down to biding time until you can luck into a superstar.

That’s why it feels so difficult for the NBA.  You’d have to either change rules so drastically a single player can’t have the impact that LeBron or Shai can have, or instill real anti-tanking rules and just accept that some teams will almost never be competitive like in the MLB.

Dw the front offices are reading your post and will act immediately

I think you bring up great points. I love reading about this stuff because I love this sport but I do think we are really losing the essence of the league in recent years with the tanking.

The talent is as deep as it’s ever been but it’s forcing teams to realize that there isn’t a point in trying when they know they have no chance of winning so teams are quick to try to maximize their lottery odds while building on the side

I’m not sure if we can ever get to a point where we can efficiently manage every team roster to ensure every player is playing as often and as much as they could.

I really think the league has to change the rules to prevent teams from trying to lose hard and quick to maximize their lottery odds. We have to get to a point where are prioritizing talent and roster building, which will result in better games to watch! A league where veterans are valued and teams have less turn over because they value consistency like they has pre 2014ish before Hinkie (ahead of his time) thought to just field a completely young team to get the best odds possible.

I think removing pick protections from trades could help. If you know you don’t own your 1st, you will build as competitive of a team as possible, which is a hard thing to get teams to do nowadays. If you traded a top 8 protected pick, you will try hard to finish at the bottom of the league to keep your pick.

Bad GMs will be bad GMs. Not every team will have an amazing architect.

It’s interesting this doesn’t happen at all in the NFL. 1st overall is so valuable there and it seems so easy to just shut a QB down or sit some guys for backups. And yet you see these 1-12 teams win a miracle game to move from 1st overall to 3rd overall like every year.

I just really dislike good players not playing for large swaths of games. Guys like Lauri only playing 15 minutes *after* their breakout? Nonsense. I feel like it can really damage a player’s career. I’d be pissed.

That’s something you can do in the nfl not nba. Fully guaranteed contracts, lottery system, and the draft being crapshoot. Also its a sport that having 8 good players isnt good enough, you need highend talent and there’s not enough to go around.

Also a pistons fan here, I didn’t read every comment so I’m sorry if someone already said something to this effect. But I think the problem is more with teams who tank for several years and get screwed by the lotto, there’s really only 3 truly tanking teams right now, the nets the wizards and the jazz. the wizards and the jazz have been tanking slightly longer but haven’t gotten any lotto luck, when the point of the lottery should be to spread the wealth. The wizards and jazz have already made moves to be better next year and the nets have to try to be better next year since they don’t have their pick, probably a reason they kept mpj. Beyond that teams like the pelicans and kings wanted to be good this year they just aren’t, the grizzlies are just starting a reset, the bulls are just starting a reset it seems which people have been screaming at them to do for several years, the bucks want to be good, and with the pacers hali tore his Achilles and with the mavs kyrie tore his acl, if he hadn’t they’d probably be much better and may not have traded AD, could even be in the playoff mix. Going back to wizards nets and jazz those three teams just want a crack at a franchise guy but because of the way the lotto works they haven’t gotten lucky. A solution could be to double down and make lottery odds include last seasons record as well, giving teams who are bad multiple years a better chance at getting their guy and making it so teams that don’t deserve a top pick like the mavs last year or don’t need it like the pacers this year a far less chance of getting a top pick. This way they’d spend less time at the bottom with nothing to show for it.

Surprised the Bulls aren’t mentioned here. We haven’t sat guys like other teams, but we’ve spent years refusing to tank while also never trying to really compete because Reinsdorf’s only objective is to make as much money as possible while spending as little as possible. We’re just as guilty as any other team of not competing with integrity.

They shouldn’t need to fully commit to be rewarded

The problem is 2 things

1. Fans expect a “rebuild” to take 2 years, no fanbase wants to commit to 5 years of hopelessness

2. You have to have complete and total trust in the management, it’s one thing to build through the draft but you have to make sure you don’t give that responsibility to someone who wouldn’t take Anthony Bennett with the first overall pick.

This is true and a key point that most miss OP. I heard Zach lowe discussing this (and missing the point) on his podcast. “ the draft is designed to help the teams at the bottom and even the playing field”. Yes Zach that is technically correct. But what we have is teams manipulating this process, gutting it, in order to slingshot quicker. The jazz have some real talent on their team. 35-40 wins probably. But they are trying to finish with 20 wins despite two (maybe 3) all star level players. All because they lose their pick if they don’t end bottom 8. And they can guarantee a bottom 8 slot by losing enough. All of that has to change. The pick protection. The tanking to manipulate the odds. Trading for guys and shelving them. The point of the draft is totally changed in this scenario. A team good enough to win but loses on purpose. Cannot be rewarded for that. Actually have to be punished. And It’s getting worse. I know it’s been done in the past but we have a crisis now. The time of year for the nba to shine has 30% of the league trying to lose. 50% chance every game you watch in the next two months has a team trying to lose in it. Have fun with that fans. It messes with playoffs teams as well down the stretch. Teams fighting for playoff spots some are playing tanking teams and some are not. Fraudulent league when it’s like this.

Teams should always have the option to win games without being punished. It’s a fucking sport you’re there to win the game.

It’s fucking pathetic that’s sports has turned into rewarding losing and punishing winning.

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The fact that sports fans have been brainwashed into accepting that losing is a completely okay way to get good in a sport is crazy

The tank, while sad to experience in real time, did allow the Pistons to recover from years of mediocrity.

No, it did not. Detroit right now is precisely where Chicago was, four years ago – a position which was attained completely without tanking. Now Chicago had the bad luck of seeing their point guard suffer a catastrophic injury, which unraveled their team, but the same misfortune could befall Detroit, too. I doubt anyone thinks Detroit is any better than mediocre without Cunningham.

The simple fact of the matter is that tanking does not work, unless you are San Antonio – and their circumstance is unique, because the league gifts them lottery wins every time they enter, and no other franchise benefits from such charity. Only San Antonio has ever turned a tank into a title, and that required unmatched charity from the league.

That does not mean that a team which tanks can never benefit. It means that tanking teams do not succeed any more often than non-tanking teams do – and in point of fact, tanking teams succeed far less often. None of the recent Finalists reached the Finals by tanking. It has been a while since a Conference Finalist even did.

As good as Cunningham is, I’m unsure he’s much better than Şengün or Johnson, who were both available in the same draft with non-lottery picks.

This full commitment to a rebuild allowed other teams like the Cavs, Magic, Rockets, and now possibly the Hornets to climb from the cellar. 

All of these teams remain thoroughly mediocre, and collectively have won two playoff series in this decade – both by Cleveland, who drafted almost none of their best players, and largely bailed on that plan to trade for Harden and Mitchell (not together). Houston largely bailed on their draft rebuild, such as it was, and traded for Şengün and Durant. Orlando just blew up their future to trade for Desmond Bane, in what appears to be a highly-questionable move.

Tanking just does not work, and we have mountains of evidence proving that by now.

The real solution to tanking is to allow bad teams to do a disaster draft with minimal protections so that they can get good players from other teams for free. This way, the talent in the league is redistributed such that there is never really a bad team.