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The Daily Cardinal Est. 1892
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Jonah Beleckis

Column: NBA teams riggin' for Wiggins is part of a scary trend for league

An anonymous NBA General Manager told Jeff Goodman something we already know, but were still shocked to hear.

“Our team isn’t good enough to win and we know it. So this season we want to develop and evaluate our young players, let them learn from their mistakes and get us in pole position to grab a great player. The best way to do that is to lose a lot of games.”

Next year is supposed to be the draft of all drafts in recent years. Kansas’s Andrew Wiggins, Duke’s Jabari Parker and Kentucky’s Julius Randle headline what is supposed to be the deepest draft class in years, filled with potential starters, all-stars and franchise players.

The anonymous GM is correctly portraying how this league is at the moment. Without a better way of putting it, in the NBA, the best way to turn your team around is to suck and draft the next big thing.

The Cleveland Cavaliers’ record almost reversed itself from 61-21 with LeBron James in 2009-’10, to 19-63 the next season without him. However the Cavaliers have had two first overall draft picks since LeBron left, getting Kyrie Irving and Anthony Bennett.

The San Antonio Spurs lost David Robinson to injuries for all but six games of the 1996-’97 season. The year before they won 59 games. Then they played their horrible season winning only 20 games, won the first overall pick, landed Tim Duncan and went on to win four NBA championships.

While the jury is still out about the Cavaliers turning their franchise back around, those two examples show sometimes you have to lose to get back in the game with drafting another future superstar.

But there is a reason you play the game. Because all of the scouting, “expert” picks and multi-million dollar decisions are all subject to human error. There will never be a “can’t miss” player.

Forgetting all of the human error that comes with scouting for a second, another glaring issue with tanking is there is no guarantee you will get the first overall pick. In fact, that chance is 25 percent, meaning on average three times out of four your team will not get what several people sacrificed a valuable year of their short careers for.

The anonymous GM also explained that the owner and coach will understand the benefits of tanking the season, but highlighted that the players do not and cannot know what is going on.

“I bet [all 30 teams would] say they are a playoff team. That’s good, because you want them to play with effort and lose organically. You never tell the players not to try to win a game, but it’s obvious that you’re putting out a team that’s just not good enough to win.”

The NBA is heading in a very dangerous direction. The league is moving towards two tiers: The contenders and the tankers. You can throw the Milwaukee Bucks somewhere in the middle too.

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If you are an elite player, you will move to play with other elite players to compete with teams that already have multiple elite players. Roughly the other half or two thirds of the league will be left out of this multi-million dollar game of musical chairs and be left with average or below average rosters.

On a general scale, all sports should work like that when they have the great, the average and the not so good teams.

But when the GMs perceive the only way to get out of the dregs is through tanking and hoping for a quick superstar fix as opposed to slow, methodical work and team building, then the gap between the contenders and the rest of the league will expand and expand.

If the players catch wind of this tanking plan, then teams will get even worse because in essence they will be removing what is at the core of athletics: competition.

And once that is gone, once what so many people play for is removed, the entire product will suffer and the league will cease to exist as we know it.

Is it worth it to tank the season for a chance at getting a top-three pick? Email Jonah at jonah.beleckis@dailycardinal.com to let him know what you think.

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