“Tanking isn’t the issue. Affordability and quality of game presentation are” should have been the title

I’ve suffered for 30 years and all of the sudden I have to pay more because a team is good? Every team should drop their ticket and food prices but none of these greedy fucks do because it has nothing to do with how good the team is.

IMO these are separate conversations. Tanking is extra ass when regulars will buy tickets not realizing half the stars aren’t playing. That’s beyond fan experience. It’s the NBA product as a whole.

damn cuban spitting facts here, pricing is def the real problem not tanking

when i was a kid my dad could afford to take the whole family to games multiple times a season, now a single ticket costs more than what he spent on all of us. who gives a shit about competitive balance when normal families cant even experiance the game live anymore

Mr. Cuban have you though of this great idea where you do both don’t tank but also don’t price out fans? Like the pricing out fans has nothing to do with tanking, teams owned by billionaires and sometimes with tax payer funded arenas can keep ticket and concessions prices low if they want to and work with there partners to keep merch priced reasonably and at the same time not blatantly throw games and sit all you good players when people pay a hefty amount to come watch them.

Fans don’t want to go to a game and see star players get benched in the 4th quarter in order to tank

“You must accept ¹⁄₃ of the league punting a season every year forever and there’s nothing you can do. Also please respect us and cheer for us and believe we are geniuses”

Vivek expects me to pay $200 for a ticket to see the 12-56 Kings lol

It’s truly a cultural shock as a non american that people try to actually glorify losing on purpose in a lot of places in the world you can actually go to jail for it

Just very interesting and shocking

I don’t understand why everyone is upset. Who is even watching bottom of the standing teams in February. Like if I’m gonna lose 7 next 10 or lose 8 my next 10 playing the young guys the choice is obvious.

If the NBA embraced tanking then it would have to be dropped by every gambling company. Sports gambling is based on the idea that both teams are trying to win every game.

My solution to tanking: Tie ticket prices to a teams record the previous year or average of the past 3-5 years.

How it would work:

• The price a team can charge for their tickets is tied to their record
• If the average ticket price to a game for all teams is \(100 - an average team (41-41 record) can charge an average of \)100 for their tickets. A better seat might cost \(150, but that means a worse seat needs to be sold for \)50 to off-set that.
• A team with a better record can charge a higher average price. Say a team that finishes with a winning % of .600 can charge twice as much, a team with a % of .700 can charge 3x as much and so on.
  • So a team with a winning % of .600 can charge 200 for an average ticket, .700 can charge $300 and so on
• Teams would be incentivized to win games because they can make more money. Fans of shitty teams, or teams that are tanking, will be able to afford games. Sure teams can still tank, but it’ll be more expensive.

Meh. He’s out of touch. Only thing I agree is game affordability. The product does need work. If I’m spending my hard earned cash I don’t wanna see superstars in street clothes due to “load management”.

This dude just a minority owner now. Who cares what he thinks

Man fuck that shit. I’m an nba fan and I don’t really care to follow a team. A better fan experience for me would mean being to catch a couple competitive games every single night. Too much tanking and I’m liable to check out on the season and not make it back to the NBA. This is what they need to be concerned about -whether people think their product is worth watching. Too many tanks and it’s not

This is the worst kinda smooth brained thinking there is. Actually this other thing is happening so we can’t even think about this first thing. I used to think Cuban was smart too

I feel like he has this exactly backwards.

If a family goes to see their 20-43 home team sit all their good players and receive a blowout loss, they’re not going to think “wow, this is great for the long term success of my team! This gives me hope that they’re going to build through the draft!”

They’re going to think “man that sucked.”

It feels good to watch your team win in person no matter the standings. Even if they don’t remember the score they’re gonna remember that it was fun. And tanking, while strategic, is just not fun to watch.

Seeing everyone agree w/Cuban just shows we’ve all lost the plot.

Having a good “fan experience” is directly correlated w/ watching a good team that isn’t purposefully trying to lose. Like bro this is not a fucking movie theater! If my team is tanking what else can you do around the fan experience to make me feel better about going to a game? I’d love to see someone try to explain this far fetched ass logic.

His argument makes no sense. Those are two separate issues.

Mark “I almost got Kobe and Shaq” Cuban

I completely agree, my team is stuck right now, we don’t have hope to win a championship this season and we don’t have hope to get a lottery pick. It’s the worst place to be.

As a Blazer fan, I for one want to see my team compete with a chance to win every night. That’s literally the entire reason I watch NBA basketball. My experience as a fan is centered around my team being competitive and providing a good product. I don’t take time from my day to travel downtown and pay tens/hundreds of dollars just to sit and watch my team lose with my friends. Sure I value the experience but it almost always feels like a waste of an evening to make the trip just to watch my favorite players sit out games.

I agree with the NBA pricing fans out of games, besides that I disagree with Cuban on almost everything he said here. This reads to me as someone who is out of touch with the experience of a typical fan who is not a billionaire where there is more of a financial/personal commitment required to attend a game in person.

I feel tickets should be refunded a certain amount if specific players are not playing. Let’s just say I a Knicks fan pay $500 for two tickets and KAT is missing from the game, I should be refunded 5-10% of the ticket cost or given that as a voucher for tickets in the future, and so on.

But this is only for injuries that are day to day injuries. If someone got injured like a week or two in advanced and it was known they would be missing this game (like if they broke their leg), then no discount or voucher is applied. Also this is only for the home team games, if I’m going to MSG because I’m a Lakers fan and LeBron is out, this again will not be honored.

I think something like this would be a step in the right direction.

America’s top leagues have everything to learn from the European football model. From all star weekends to the tanking problem, to in-season tournaments, there isn’t a single game in the calendar year that isn’t important and tanking never happens without points deductions and generational penalties.

Alright bad premise, wrong messenger, but the right message that they should consider the fan experience again.

This is deflection.

Maybe a bad take here, but I think there’s different forms of tanking. If your tactic is to sit your best players to intentionally lose a game then that shit needs to end. If your tactic is to just trade your best players so you have a shitty roster, then, I’m honestly okay with that.

If teams are gonna tank then their tickets should be discounted

Tanking is only an issue for me because it makes the quality of the product inconsistent. I’m more than willing to go to a game to watch my team get blown out if I know I have players to root for. It’s when I spend a bunch of money and time to go to a game and they decide that none of the starters are going to play due to load management that really upsets me. Like I don’t go to games expecting a down to the wire thriller, I go to watch wemby, Flagg, Lebron, giannis, Cade, Curry, etc. play.

If games meant more, teams wouldn’t be tanking like this. There’s SUCH a disparity between the “haves” and “have nots” that the “have nots” have nothing to play for come the end of November. If the games meant more to the teams, tanking would not exist.

I don’t know if I have the answer, but I will say the lottery as it is currently setup is part of the problem. Teams are competing for PING PONG BALLS. They try to tank to the bottom to get the best odds, lose as many games as possible (bad product), only to have the Mavs (just the most recent example) who were a borderline playoff team get the #1 pick. The Mavs fans got a good product to watch until the very end, and still ended up with the first pick.

The games need to matter right up until the end.

This gives off BUT THE DOW IS 50,000 vibes. They are separate issues, Mark.

If a team is tanking, does that mean they’ll significantly lower ticket prices? Answer: no.

And it got us to where we could improve, trade up to get Luka and improve our team.

spelled Max Christie wrong there buddy

‘Few can remember the score from the last game they saw or went to’

Are we goldfish to billionaires? I can absolutely remember

Congratulations Mavs you rewrote the book on a blitzkrieg tank. Hero to Zero in record time.

Get lucky drafting a generational talent that fell to 3rd pick. Generational talent turns franchise back into a contender almost immediately. Call yourself a MFFL but sell the team (for money reasons) to a group that doesn’t care about basketball. New ownership allows generational talent to be traded. Franchise becomes terrible immediately. Get lucky with draft lottery and land another generational talent. Think tanking is good for fans based off a sample size of 2 when it was actually luck.

Tanking is an issue especially when the NBA has partnerships with gambling companies. Just bad optics more than anything else.

The NBA also has a huge problem with the watchability of the games. It’s very boring to watch teams trade 3 point and FT attempts for 48 minutes, flopping and the fragmented end of game pace don’t help either. Not to mention the cost of watching said games between all the streaming services required. The NBA shouldn’t embrace tanking, the NBA should embrace improving the on-court product and making it easier (cheaper) for fans to watch their favorite teams play.

Mark Cuban is a consistent bad take machine. A poor fan experience is correlated to tanking and resting players/load management on b2b’s for example. A tanking team still may have one or two players that people want to see play even if the team sucks.

What an absolute dumbass take.

Deal. So if your team decides to tank that means concessions cant be over 5 bucks.

Boom I just solved tanking

Mark Cuban was a shit owner who didn’t know what he was doing, and I’m tired of people pretending othersise.

Mark “I won’t ever shut up” Cuban. F this clown 

He’s probably not wrong about general demographics. Certainly ticket prices are a big driver. Still, for me the quality of the game definitely matters. I might not remember the exact score, but I remember good, fun games and the really bad, frustrating games. When we were tanking the last few years, I had no real desire to go to games, even when ticket prices dropped. I don’t even watch many of those games for free on TV. It’s not entertaining. But hey, that’s just me.

He is correct but teams should absolutely issue credits to STH once they start actively tanking.

Every team that tanks can’t charge admission to games…

No negative to tanking for anyone honestly. At most fans can just gamble on non tanking teams and platforms can charge them a higher premium and offer incentives for betting on competitive teams. Tanking helps your team get better if your gm doesn’t suck. Besides teams are only tanking cuz they’re already dog shit. The fans aren’t missing anything by tanking.

I think the only group with an argument against tanking is advertisers, but if fans don’t watch ads/support their team, they will just lose them at some point.

Ok ChatGPT

Brought to you by ChatGPT

Tanking isn’t the solution, but there’s got to be a way to discourage stars from teaming up in the biggest media markets. Parity is what makes the NFL a superior product to the NBA, but it’s harder to achieve when only 5 players are on the court per team.

It’s insane I still get Vivek texts asking to pay $60 for a tank machine. Even nosebleeds are overpriced. Literally day after they broke the loss record

I think he’s right about some aspects here and wrong about others.

As a Sixers fan I did not mind our tank years for two reasons.

1. I could go to games for very cheap.

2. I know what our team was. There was something fun about watching Robert Covington and TJ McConnell become real players and having hope for the Tony Wrotens of the world. I went to games knowing these guys were the ones playing and enjoyed it.

So to the price and experience point Cuban is making here I agree. But on point 2 I feel like that’s where recent ranking has lost me.

I would have hated is going to a game and watching us sit a healthy Embiid or even Covington in the fourth quarter of a close game. I understand tanking is long term helpful, but if I go to a game and our best players are able to play then I want to see them.

I feel like it’s not a binary tanking is right or wrong thing, there’s levels to it and I feel a line has been crossed.

People pretending to care about tanking is the most performative shit I’ve ever seen. Nobody actually cares if the Jazz lose 65 games or 50 games, they aren’t watching their games anyway. I watched my team be bad for over a decade, you know what kept me a fan of my team despite being terrible? The hope that we could draft somebody that could save the franchise. We actually coulda cut that time we were bad in half if we actually tanked properly instead of winning meaningless games. The only thing that should change about the system is that they need to go back to the old draft odds so that teams are bad for less time

Cuban on a generational run of awful takes

Do we have a mute button on mark cuban

So Cuban just openly admitted to tanking? No way he can get back into ownership ever again.

As a fan of a tanking team I would like to say that I get much more frustrated by 5 minute replay reviews to determine whether the ball grazed a guy’s finger for 0.001 seconds than the Wizards playing Anthony Gill in the 4th quarter.

Make the actual broadcasts entertaining by cutting down on fouls and tv stoppages, and we won’t even think about the tanking teams

Hard agree we just don’t have to act like teams are trying to win we all know what’s going on.

But ticket and concession prices don’t change with that

The problem with tanking is the problems with the schedule and why college hoops can be so much fun.

When the games mean something, the players play hard and that makes basketball a truly beautiful sport to watch.

Fewer games, one playoff.

I think a better model would be the European where you get derelegated if you lose too much.

I don’t think he’s wrong but I think this is a misdirect from the league perspective. TV ratings are Silver’s concern, not attendance. He’s spot on about attendance and I love it. But Silver doesn’t care.

Attendance is a team problem. TV ratings are a league problem and nobody watches tanking teams.

I’m fully onboard with lowering prices, but I don’t think Silver gives a damn how many butts are in seats.

Every damn post is about tanking and the draft wtf is happening?

He’s not wrong. Heck, the Dallas Cowboys have consistently sucked for almost 30 years and they still are the most valuable franchise in the world. 

Tanking should come with a mandatory drop in ticket prices and partial refund for season ticket holders.

This would never be acceptable in the NFL. NFL is more successful than the NBA and stole their Christmas games. Why do NBA fans need to accept such a crappy product?

Roger Goodell would drop the hammer on the Chiefs if they sat Mahomes for the entire year after starting 1-5 for a better draft pick.

Goodell going to take that pick lmfao

Im fine with embracing tanking if your ticket prices also tank. Fair trade?

The quality of Kings games are abysimal.  I’m not paying full price to watch it.  

I agree 100% I don’t wanna see my team pick 13th for 10 years straight

He’s right about some things, but tanking is still an issue. If I know my team is legitimately trying to lose, I’ll just tune out for a couple of years. That’s not good for the team or sport. Also, I’ve done this before where I took a break from watching basketball for a couple years and it turned into like 5, because it just slowly left my mind.

Hey Mark, know what I remember about the last game I saw live in an arena? The three star players I went to see all sat out the game.

Also, nobody cares what the score of the last game was, they only care if the team won or lost.

Cuban has zero idea of what non-billionaire fans of the NBA want.

I don’t get why the league is so adamant about giving the worst teams the best lotto odds. Yet so many of those bad teams end up in the lotto every year no matter what. Why keep rewarding teams that are clearly poorly run? Why not just have FLAT ODDS for all lotto teams, and even PLAY IN teams? Why would anyone tank in that scenario? Whats the worst that can happen? A .500 team gets the #1 pick? So what?…lol… if anything that gives mediocre teams hope when they might otherwise be stuck. And you can have stipulations such as teams can’t have top 3 picks b2b years.

It’s the gambling that’s making it a problem now I guarantee.

Here are some ideas. Sometimes a bad team needs to tank to get better. There should be a formal process to apply to be a “tanking team” that needs to be approved by the league. You can only do it twice every 5 years. Teams approved for this still have to compete but can go under the minimum salary cap. Teams doing this would also have to offer drastically reduced general admission tickets and forfeit a portion of shared revenue which would be redistributed to the rest of the league. The benefits of this is that it gives lower income folks access to see NBA games that they normally couldn’t afford. Also gives fringe NBA guys a chance to show they can play. If you don’t formally apply and are found to be tanking you forfeit your first round pick. You could go even further and maybe select a few teams or so every year for this and they each would have an equal chance at the lottery. So that settles the first few picks in the draft. You could also have a “playoff” at the end of the season one-and-done where the winner of the tournament gets the first round pick.

Fans dont pay money to watch g-league players let’s be real

American sports are so backwards. You get rewarded for being bad. How does that sound like the American way? You play bad on purpose and sit your stars and you think fans want to see that? Should be rewarding on merit.

I think the flattening of the lottery odds is having the opposite effect of what the nba intended. Seeing Atlanta and Dallas amongst other teams make huge jumps has just caused more teams in the late lottery range to turn to tanking earlier because there’s massive upside. The alure of chasing the play in has worn off when even the bulls aren’t pursuing it any longer

Idk frankly to me the biggest issue with the nba from 20 years ago when I was a kid is just that our attention spans have gone down and options have gone up. Like in 2001 when I was a kid there was just cable TV and the options were what’s playing live or NBA, of course I’d watch NBA. But like nowadays if I have 3 hours I can fill it with TV shows I like, on streaming services so don’t need to pay for cable / extra packages

These things being issues aren’t at all mutually exclusive

Ppl want to see the stars play the damn game. Why would I want to drop a couple hundred dollars to see the Lakers play and Luka, reaves or LeBron are gonna be on the bench in street clothes.

Ppl are tired of paying their hard earned money that they work 40-100 hours a week for and make special plans and arrangements to go see a multi million put a silly ball through a hoop and then they don’t play.

Not because they are injuries, hurt, sick but because load management or tanking. That’s BS.

Our gambling league has a basketball problem.

Marks just plain wrong and mostly cares about the owners perspective despite talking from the fan perspective.

There are more fans for a team than local or visitors. People pay for online services like league pass and when a 3rd of the teams are tanking by all star break, That creates a ton of games where you have at least one team that’s not trying to win, and in turn an awful product.

Ticket prices should go down, as there’s no reason why any non-premium tickets should be above $100 a head, but to say tanking isn’t an issue is reductive of the non-local fan experience. I’m not just a fan of the Celtics, I’m a fan of basketball and when the premier professional basketball league in the world can’t figure out a way for their teams to care about the games they participate in why should a fan?

The questions around tanking are too simplistic honestly. People are trying to find punishments or cures for tanking instead of addressing the actual problem - the NBA has a league format that rewards below avg teams to purposely lose games instead of competing. Unless that’s fixed there will always be teams that tank, as the drafts socialism like concepts award a race to the bottom. IMO the only recent change the NBA introduced that’s remotely helped with tanking is the play-in tournament bc that encourages teams to remain competitive for longer despite not having realistic title aspirations. Find a format that keeps teams competitive for longer and you’ll come as close as the NBA will ever come to ‘fixing’ tanking.

The only quick fix I can think of is something like a lottery tournament, but that goes against the idea of the draft entirely as it would reward the best of the bad teams, which u could also see counteracting measures like the play-in

Man who doesn’t want a competitive league, after drafting a generational superstar:

Look over here, my dangling keys! Remember low ticket prices? Remember having fun?

Key jingle sounds

It’s perfectly ok for Clippers to do side deals, we all do! Look at how the light reflects off the keys!

People are paying good money to see Lavine play. Let him play dammit!!!!

They should have a system when team gets a top 3 pick, they are put on a prohibited wait period of top 10 picks, ascending, for 5 years. 1st draft after getting the top 3 pick they are prohibited from the #1 pick. Year 2, prohibited from top 3 picks. Year 3, prohibited from top 5 picks. Year 4 prohibited from top 7 picks. Year 5 prohibited from top 10 picks. This might aid in forcing teams to build and compete by year 5 of their top picks contract because they wont get as valuable of a pick if they dont.

So make tickets cheaper and let us be able to watch the games without having a million subscriptions. But I bet they won’t lol

Tanking is an issue. Affordability and quality of game presentation are also an issue. Addressing both issues is not mutually exclusive.

He’s talking about the fans that go to games. What about all of the potential fans at home that aren’t going to turn on the TV when they know their team is trying to lose on purpose? Shit, even the fans at the games aren’t thrilled if the coach won’t put in their best players because they’re trying to lose.

I don’t fault teams for tanking when it’s clearly an advantage to do so. They’re doing what’s best for them. The league needs to do what’s best for itself and change the rules so there’s not as much of a reason to lose games on purpose. There’s a dozen ways to achieve that, but the easiest is to just give all of the non-playoff teams the same odds. Then you won’t have the Jazz sitting their starters in the 4th quarter.

Who tf is kate?

Fans don’t care about tanking. This only became a national story because there were actual teams that were complaining.

Cuban is right that the fan experience matters, but can we extend that to the 4th quarter of games? We need to figure out a way to reduce the number of timeouts and ads. It makes the game pretty unbearable, especially during the playoffs when there are no alternative games to watch.

Then we need to give conditional contracts, so players get paid based upon certain factors. If we get away from guaranteed contracts, players will be more incentivized to work on their bodies, keep their minds sharp, and pursue the game of basketball.

Why does this guy have bad takes every time i see his name.

Owners are simultaneously mad that they’re losing regional broadcasts to national broadcasts yet they’re sabotaging their own product as “strategy.”

Hahahaha of course he would

I agree with Mark wholeheartedly for the first time ever.

This asshole only has one ring. The Spurs and Rockets are much better teams than the Mavericks ever were.

Cuban really has the worst takes.

Nope

Some of this is just dumb. I could go see a G league game for cheap if all I cared about was who I was with.

If I’m buying a ticket to see my team play the Spurs, I’m doing it because I want to see the stars on my team and I want to see Wemby. And if it turns into teams resting their stars for whatever reason, I would be highly disappointed. I’d still be fine paying something to watch NBA players play, but it would be way less than seeing teams with their good players actually try.

It’s been a couple years so I don’t remember the exact score, but I remember who won by roughly how much and who had a good game. It means a lot to be at a really special game. I think every time you go, you hope in some way you get lucky enough to be at one. The game really matters, maybe not to every attendee but definitely to basketball fans that are bringing the casuals in with them.

There’s some truths in what Cuban is saying, but I can’t sign off on that overall. It’s a bit too out of touch for me. Nobody wants to see their team stuck in the middle forever, but as long as there’s a sensible direction and they’re trying things then I’m fine.

Short term tanking when your season is cooked is fine. But I’m not going to watch much if it’s a full on tank, and I’m not buying tickets to that unless it’s for fairly cheap to see some stars from other teams. Year after year of tanking just shows incompetence, and I wouldn’t buy into that very easily.