The Luol Deng Law

The NBA has been dealing with controversy over rampant and shameless tanking lately, and it’s easy to see why. For those who are unaware, teams tank (that is, lose intentionally) because doing so improves their odds in the draft lottery, which determines which players they can select in each year’s amateur draft. Draft position is important in all major professional sports leagues, but it’s uniquely so in the NBA, because there’s only five players on the floor for a give team at any one time and the league is more star-driven than any other sport; it’s widely understood that winning a championship is (almost) impossible if you don’t have a top-ten player, preferably a top-five player. So a lot of teams are openly trying to lose, and they’re doing so more brazenly and earlier and earlier in the season as time goes on. Which, you know, is not a great look.

For example. Recently the Utah Jazz, one of the most fervently tanking teams in the league, played a game against the Orlando Magic. They were winning at the half, then proceeded to bench their three best players in the second half, turning a very winnable game into a loss. To make it even more obvious, the Magic had a three point lead in the last moments of the game, the Jazz had possession and a timeout, and did not use that timeout to set up a potential game-tying three-pointer. That very same day, the Washington Wizards held out every decent player on their roster in order to lose a game against the dreadful Brooklyn Nets, who had lost a game by 50 not that long before. All of this happened before this weekend’s All-Star break, which is traditionally thought of as the halfway point in the season and where the regular season gets serious. It’s bad out there.

Tanking is bad and wrong and wrecks sports and destroys fan trust, and it intersects with another troubling problem for the league, which is “load management,” which means sitting players who are healthy enough to play in order to limit the wear and tear on their bodies. The Los Angeles Lakers certainly aren’t tanking, but that fact would be of little comfort to a family of five that bought tickets well in advance to see them play a