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People walk by a sign during the NBA basketball draft lottery in Chicago, Tuesday, May 16, 2023. | Nam Y. Huh, Associated Press
Congratulations to the Utah Jazz. They are going to finish the season with the worst record in franchise history (it isn’t even close) and maybe the worst in the league. They are losers, which, in this case, means they are winners. They tanked like a champ.
With three games to go, they’ve won just 16 games, topping even their dismal days in New Orleans, where they hit rock bottom with a mere 23 wins in their debut season of 1974-75. Their goal this season wasn’t the top of the standings, it was the bottom, and they did it.
That was the plan all along of course. It’s Year 3 of the Great Tank in which they have fallen from a league-leading 52 wins in 2020-21 to 49 wins a year later, then 37 wins, 31 wins, 16 wins. Going, going, gone. In four years, they went from best in the league to possibly the worst.
It wasn’t easy, but anything worth doing wrong is worth doing right. They had to purge their roster of top players — twice.
(Utah Jazz fans better hope that Danny Ainge knows what he’s doing.)
As everyone knows, the Jazz aimed for the bottom to secure the first pick of the draft — also known as Cooper Flagg, the sensational 18-year-old Duke freshman. He’s the prize, the franchise changer.
The Jazz are in a race to the bottom with the Wizards (17 wins). May the worst team win. Or lose. Whatever.
The problem is that it really doesn’t matter at this point. The bottom three teams in the regular-season standings have the same odds of winning the first pick — 14%. The odds for the fourth-worst team are 12.5%.
After all the tanking, it comes down to the luck of the draw and no better than 14% odds.
You probably know how the draft works by now. Well, probably not, on second thought. Can someone explain the convoluted lottery system — the numbered ping-pong balls and assigning combinations to each team, etc.? The first three teams have 140 combinations, the fourth team 125, the fifth team 105, etc. It’s a mess. Who thought of this thing, Congress? Never mind government waste; let’s see if Elon Musk can fix something really complex, like the NBA draft.
The NFL method is straightforward (and better): The draft order is the inverse of how each team finished during the regular season — the last shall be first, if you want to be Biblical.
Here’s an idea: Can we get rid of the ping-pong balls and use the NFL method? It’s worked out pretty well for that league.
The lottery was introduced in 1984 as a way to deter teams from tanking. Before that they tried coin flips (no, seriously) and territorial picks (no, seriously). Well, that didn’t pan out. None of the plans worked, especially the lottery system; more teams are tanking than ever and there isn’t anything anyone can really do about it. The league won’t acknowledge it, but there are two races during the regular season — one to the top and one to the bottom.
The lottery system doesn’t discourage tanking; it actually encourages more of it because it means more teams have a shot at drawing the first pick. The fifth-worst team has a 10.5% chance of winning it, the sixth worst team 9%, and so on.
The Atlanta Hawks were awarded the first pick last year after finishing with the 10th-worst record in the league. They had only a 3% chance of winning. The Pistons had the worst record, but received only the fifth pick.
The Pistons also finished with the worst record in 2022-23 and again received no better than the fifth pick. The first pick went to the second-worst team, the San Antonio Spurs, who used it to select Victor Wembanyama, a generational player.
Since the lottery system was adopted in 1985, the team with the worst regular-season record has won the lottery only six times, the last time occurring in 2018, the year before the league flattened the odds from 25% to 14%.
Tanking — not trying to win — is unfair to fans; it’s dishonest. It’s supposed to be a real competition. This isn’t pro wrestling. No league foments more disingenuous competition — tanking — than the NBA, and the NBA draft format only makes it worse.
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