More on tanking

The stretch run of a National Basketball Association (NBA) campaign is supposed to sharpen competitive instinct. Instead, it has increasingly underscored calculation, and not of the kind that produces better basketball. The league now finds itself confronting reality rarely acknowledged in such blunt terms: Losing, in some corners, has become a strategy. Not a byproduct of rebuilding, not a consequence of injuries, but a conscious plan of action.

Late last week, the NBA signaled it finally had enough. Commissioner Adam Silver informed general managers that new anti-tanking rules are coming next season. To give teeth to its most aggressive attempt yet to disrupt incentives that reward failure, the league is considering sweeping changes to the draft sweepstakes: freezing standings earlier, limiting repeated high picks, tying odds to multi-year performance, and even expanding lottery eligibility. The message is clear; the system that was designed to help struggling teams recover has instead incentivized them to lose more efficiently.

Silver has been unusually candid. He believes the behavior is worse now than in recent memory, and the league is searching for “fresh thinking” to correct inducements that have drifted badly off course. His reaction alone would have been significant, but what transformed the discussion from procedural to moral was the intervention of one of the NBA’s newest power brokers. Suns owner Mat Ishbia did not merely criticize tanking; he denounced it in no uncertain terms. He called it “losing behavior done by losers,” a deliberate corruption of competition. More provocatively, he said it is “much worse than any prop bet scandal,” framing intentional losing not as clever roster management but as a direct assault on the integrity of the sport itself.

The escalation of rhetoric was nothing short of remarkable. Match manipulation is typically discussed in the shadow of gambling investigations, legal risk, and criminal liability. Yet Ishbia argued that the normalization of openly engineered losing, in the form of deliberate shutdowns, scheduled absences, and performance management designed to fail, is more corrosive. It happens in plain sight, under the banner of “long-term planning.”

Unfortunately, dramatic reform carries complications. Even before formal adoption, the proposed anti-tanking measures have drawn criticism. Some observers argue the league is constructing a patchwork of deterrents that could well punish legitimately rebuilding teams or those undone by injuries or circumstances beyond their control. Others suggest the NBA is just responding to optics, particularly in an era of legalized sports betting, instead of addressing structural stimuli embedded in the draft itself.

In other words, the league may be trying to regulate symptoms rather than redesign the underlying mechanism that makes losing valuable in the first place. Which, in a nutshell, is the paradox professional leagues have never fully solved. Competitive balance requires helping weaker teams. On the flipside, helping weaker teams inevitably fuels motivation to become even more handicapped, or at least appear so at the right time. The draft lottery was meant to blunt that incentive. Instead, front offices learned to manage probability as carefully as they manage salary caps.

To be sure, tanking is not novel to front offices looking to get ahead in every possible way. It has always been an option. What is different is the scale, the sophistication, and the openness with which it is now discussed: ranked, modeled, and even admired in certain analytical circles. Losing is no longer merely tolerated; it is evaluated for efficiency. And because this is what the NBA wants to reverse, the success of the coming reforms becomes secondary to what they represent. The league is publicly acknowledging that its competitive framework has drifted far enough from sporting instinct to require structural correction. A commissioner is admitting the problem has intensified. An owner is declaring that strategic defeat undermines legitimacy.

The NBA has always thrived on the drama of promise: young stars rising, franchises reborn, fortunes reversed. Tanking, in its most aggressive form, rewrites the narrative. It replaces ascent with postponement. It turns hope into inventory. It transforms losing from hardship to asset accumulation. And that, more than any rule change, is what the league aim to eliminate. Bottom line, it does not want to lose the meaning of winning.

Anthony L. Cuaycong has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994. He is a consultant on strategic planning, operations and human resources management, corporate communications, and business development.