Bill Oram: The NBA’s tanking problem isn’t going away, it’s just evolving

NBA Draft Lottery

The NBA conducted its draft lottery Monday night in Chicago.Kevin Armstrong | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Years ago, I came up with what I thought was the solution to the NBA’s tanking problem.

My suggestion was that the NBA should invert the lottery, meaning that the team that was closest to reaching the playoffs would have the best odds of landing the top pick. The league‘s worst team would have the worst odds. It would encourage winning and aggressive roster moves and, I reasoned, would create more top-to-bottom parity over time.

But what I realized after Monday’s lottery, which saw the Portland Trail Blazers slide from 10th to earn the No. 11 pick in next month’s draft, is that the NBA has taken the best parts of my admittedly imperfect idea and combined them with the worst parts of the existing system.

The real tanking, the smart tanking, no longer happens at the top of the lottery. It happens at the bottom of it.

The defending Western Conference-champion Dallas Mavericks, with a 1.8 percent chance of winning the lottery, shot to the top of the field and won the privilege of drafting Duke superstar Cooper Flagg.

Last year, the Atlanta Hawks jumped from ninth to No. 1 with just 3 percent odds.

Under modern rules, the incentive is not to be bad, but to be just good enough that it obscures how bad you are trying to be.

And in that sense, the 36-win Blazers were ahead of the curve, I suppose.

But now that Portland has gone 0-for-2 in its dual-path quest of making a wink-wink run at the play-in while maintaining passable lottery odds, the real question isn’t what they got out of it but, instead, what it says about the state of the league?

NBA teams, after all, have no job other than to sell hope. But hope only works if it is occasionally rewarded.

And so you can criticize the Blazers, as I have, for going 24-18 down the stretch and dramatically reducing their chances of winning the lottery and the right to draft Flagg.

But how did that work out for useless Utah, woeful Washington and shameful Charlotte? Those are teams, like the Blazers, whose only real path to viability is through the draft.

The lottery wasn’t rigged, but it does need to be fixed.

And I don’t say this simply because Lady Luck smiled on someone other than the local team.

Longshot luck isn’t a sound team-building strategy for anyone, let alone a third of the league.

I never bought into the “basketball gods” line of thinking for the Blazers, appealing as it was to think that their credible effort down the stretch deserved some kind of cosmic reward.

God does not exist.

At least not in the form of a celestial being who frets over the fate of small market teams in the top basketball association of a nation with actual problems, glaring and urgent.

There may be math. And in the opposite corner, irony. But nowhere in the equation is justice divinely delivered from hoops heaven.

Because if that God existed, he or she would not have rewarded Dallas. Not after the Mavericks reached the NBA Finals last year. Not after they dumped 26-year-old Luka Doncic in what has been universally acknowledged as one of the worst trades in NBA history.

(Although I will acknowledge that the most significant development of the lottery may not have even been Dallas earning the right to draft Flagg, but San Antonio jumping from eighth to No. 2. The ascendant Spurs have drafted the last two Rookies of the Year and can now add another franchise-changer or dangle the pick for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Anyway...)

The Blazers weren’t wrong to give up own the tank and chase wins this season.

But only because when it comes to building through the draft, there is no right, there is no wrong, and there is no reason.

The Jazz, Wizards and Hornets put their fans through 65, 64 and 63 losses this season. A combined 192 exercises in futility since October. Those were the worst marks in the NBA and, correspondingly, gave them the best three odds of winning the lottery.

At one point, the Wizards lost 16 games in a row.

For what?

Those three teams will pick, in order, fifth, fourth and sixth in next month’s draft, despite all three having better than a 50% chance of picking in the top four.

The NBA flattened odds at the top of the lottery several years ago to reduce the incentive for the worst teams in the league to be truly awful. The worst team in the league has no better odds of the top pick than the third-worst.

But the rules change not only failed to disincentivize tanking at the top of the lottery, they managed to incentivize it for teams on the playoff bubble, thereby creating a bit of rebuilding loophole for teams like Dallas that are actually reasonably close to contention. The Mavericks have future Hall of Famers on the roster in Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis and Klay Thompson.

The Blazers don’t have that kind of talent, but with their promising core of role players minus a franchise player, attempted to walk a similar tightrope in the second half of last season. They were a tanking team masquerading as a breakout team while hoping that the math would lead them to the same place either way.

While it is an utterly absurd outcome that the Mavs minuscule shot at No. 1 paid off, Dallas entered the lottery with an 8.5% chance of getting into the top four.

And in a draft that offers not only the coveted Flagg, but Rutgers’ Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, and Baylor’s V.J. Edgecombe, that 8.5% was worth a blind swing — and potentially much more valuable than an early playoff exit.

The Mavericks finished 39-43. On the night they traded Doncic to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and one first round pick, they were 26-23 and eighth in the Western Conference.

They got their cake and subsequently feasted on it by sneaking into the play-in, losing, and maintaining their draft odds. For a team with no real chance at advancing in the playoffs, that has to be seen as the sweet spot.

Watching the Mavericks cash in long shot odds to win the lottery a year after Atlanta did the same thing I wondered if we might have finally witnessed the end of tanking in the NBA.

But we didn’t.

It’s just become a more potent tool for the teams that need it least.

-- Bill Oram is the sports columnist at The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Bill Oram

Stories by Bill Oram

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