On March 27th the Utah Jazz were taking it to the Denver Nuggets. Up by 6 points with 7 minutes left in the third quarter, the fact that these geographic rivals - who share opposite sides of the same mountain range - were heading towards a close finish shouldn't surprise anyone. The Jazz are historically the better team, leading the all-time head to head series 124-96.
And yet, this game wasn't supposed to be close.
That's because the Utah Jazz, despite their on-court players appearing to be playing a competitive basketball game, were actually engaged in a different kind of competition entirely - one that benefits from losing as many games as possible now with an eye to winning in the future. This in the NBA is called 'tanking', where teams attempt to lose games to secure better odds for the all-important offseason NBA draft, where they may be rewarded with a high pick allowing their team to gain a future star on a rookie contract.
But the problem is that the Jazz already have some good players and a great coach. Which means that the hot start their up-and-coming center Kyle Filipowski had in this game - putting up 25 points on 11-of-17 shooting with eight rebounds and five assists in just 25 minutes - the writing was on the wall. With 7 minutes left in the third quarter he was sat, not to return for the rest of the game, to give them a shot at losing.
This wasn't a one-off, late-season move to throw a game or two either. The Utah Jazz have blatantly been working against playing winning basketball all season, a fact that opposing teams, their fans, and the wider basketball world all know and discuss openly. They play a kind of cloak and dagger game with the NBA league office to avoid fines - which are nominal - and other punitive actions that could impact their ability, this May, to secure a top draft pick and select one of the exciting, potentially history-changing prospects available.
Their crimes against honest competition are long and galling, but the reasoning is sound. If they'd tried this season with their current roster they were unlikely to be anything more than a bubble playoff team - maybe being a bit frisky in a first round exit, but most likely missing the playoffs entirely. And their reward for that effort? A lower draft pick and potentially more years in NBA purgatory: middling talent, low expectations, and front office and coaching turnover as targets are set and inevitably missed.
So they lose and bide their time, putting their team through an extended rebuild and posting a .326 winning percentage since they last made the playoffs four seasons ago.
As a lifelong fan of the Colorado Rockies I know something about - and can appreciate - all kinds of ways of losing. The Rockies are one of the worst franchises in all of American sports: formed in 1993, they have only seven winning seasons in 33 years. Their achievements in losing are, at this point, impressive. They have never won their division (which comprises only 5 teams), they had the second-worst season in terms of total losses in the 100-plus year history of baseball last year, and the one year they did find success and go to the World Series in 2007 they got swept by the Boston Red Sox - which isn't bad in general, but for me - then a Coloradan living in New Hampshire - was its own little fun swift kick in the shorts.
So I can appreciate and stick with a team through losing for a long time.
The issue with the NBA isn't that the Jazz and other tanking teams are losing. Every league has its own Rockies - teams that live in the basement and struggle to get out. The issue the NBA has is that the league heavily incentivizes this losing via the reward structure it grants. The Rockies are, by and large, trying to win. The Jazz are not. And we know why.
Part of the issue comes down to the relative importance of individual players versus the team in the NBA. Only 5 players are on the court at a single time, which means that getting a great player can have a larger impact on team success than in nearly any other major sport - especially compared to the other North American sports that utilize a draft. The NBA is also a star-driven league where big personalities and superstars drive engagement, discussion, and ticket sales to a level that doesn't correlate as well on average across other sports. Ohtani is a huge draw in baseball certainly, but the average experience in baseball is to go see, say, the Detroit Tigers because they are the Detroit Tigers - nine dudes you may or may not know - and they are playing baseball. In the NBA there has been a real shift towards fans of individual players and the excitement of seeing them when they come to town.
So with the ability higher to potentially impact the outcomes of games, and the hopes and revenue of a franchise tied to landing a star, there's a lot on the line in the draft for struggling teams. Draft picks are also seen as a type of capital inside the economy of the NBA, and with each team trying to get an advantage on the other, having that capital be more valuable matters - especially for teams that aren't where they want to be. This is for two main reasons: drafted players could be incredible and they'll be on a controlled, standardized, and relatively cheap rookie contract, which creates the potential that you might get All-Star performance at a price that allows you to spend other parts of your finite, salary-capped budget elsewhere. And you can trade your picks - the better they are, the more potentially valuable they are to other teams.
So there's a lot on the line with getting a good pick in the lottery.
With odds being literally determined by a lottery where ping-pong balls are pulled at random, getting better odds is all-important - which is why, with odds still largely tied to how poorly you do in a season, it gives teams the incentive to pull Filipowski when he's playing too well and you're up with six minutes left in the third quarter.
The NBA knows this is a problem. They've actually tried several times to fix it, and today there is less of an obvious path for the very worst team to always be rewarded for that performance - but the issue still persists, because at the end of the day having a bad record is still the most linear way to increase your odds, even if it isn't a guarantee.
And what we see most years around this time, when the best teams are making a final push to the playoffs, is that a lot of the dialogue around the league is fixated instead on the teams that are not trying hard to win - the ones making a final cynical, pathetic push to reach the bottom.
This does a few things: it puts out an inferior product that devalues the league and its entertainment experience, it abuses fans who give their time and heart and energy to a team, it's a hard sell for in-person tickets, and importantly it's not fun. And basketball should be fun.
So that's why I think the recent suggestions the NBA has put forth to again fix this issue fall into the same trap: they don't change the motivation structure for teams to lose in order to gain an advantage. Until that is fixed the issue isn't going away, even with marginal moves to level the draft odds or penalize losing. It all just feels like a teacher shushing the back of an unruly classroom, giving up, and then pulling a warm airplane bottle of gin from their desk drawer and saying - well, that's all I can do here.
Now there are leagues where even the worst teams are Incentivized to play hard every game, through the final whistle of the season. The example held up most often here is European football - soccer - leagues and their system of promotion and relegation.
In a pro/rel system the league is fixed but teams earn their spot in the competition through result in that league, and a certain number of last-place finishers are demoted at the end of the season to the lesser league a level below, whose own winners are promoted to the more prestigious competition.
What this creates is a huge incentive structure for bottom-dwelling teams to try really hard until the very end, because relegation comes with less prestige the following year, unhappy fans, less television revenue, and likely a lot of people inside the organization getting canned. Last place teams will try anything down the stretch to secure wins - and ties - that will help them stay up, even against teams on the opposite end of the table.
The league most often cited when discussing the benefits of this structure is the EPL, or English Premier League. Its fans in North America often invoke the wonder of this pro/rel system as a kind of magical sports MacGuffin - the unprovable but unassailable fix to any of the myriad sins of American sports. I almost balked at bringing it up for this reason, because the dialogue around it can be so silly - usually forced on you via angry internet comments from the kind of person who claims that if you cut them open they would bleed the colors of a team in a town in England thousands of miles away they decided to root for for reasons decipherable only to them, but who would put their nose up at supporting soccer in their own backyard.
Tangent aside, I do bring up pro/rel for a reason. Not because I think the NBA will ever have it - owners buy into the league the same way you might pay Subway to open a franchise in your area. There are currently bids being discussed for new expansion teams in Seattle and Las Vegas expected to come in at $7-10 billion per team. If a capital group puts that kind of money toward a franchise expecting to play against LeBron James twice a year and appear on prime-time NBC a bunch, they are never going to accept the risk of playing the Maine Celtics. This won't happen.
I bring it up because the way teams are determined for relegation is based on cumulative points - where a win counts for 3, a draw for 1, and a loss for 0, over a 38-game season. Opta's projection model expects around 38 points to secure Premier League survival, and teams finishing on 36 or more have avoided relegation in each of the last nine seasons. There is never any incentive to not go for points, and performing well until the final game is incentivized for bad teams - which sounds exactly like what NBA fans are hoping for out of a fix.
This year we have five teams with a sub-.300 winning percentage: the Kings, Pacers, Nets, Wizards, and the aforementioned Jazz. Over the remaining part of the season none of these teams will try to win a single game, handing their fans a dull, demoralizing experience and giving a boost to competing teams who will benefit from easy wins by the fluke of scheduling more than talent.
What if it was different? What if these five teams were fighting tooth and nail to get every bucket, and not letting up one inch on defense? What if they had winning - and more importantly, point differential (points scored minus points allowed) - on the line?
With a flipped incentive structure, fans would have performances to be proud of, something to look forward to in watching how well their young or downtrodden team can actually perform against the competition, and would be fully rooting for their team to win in order to get better odds towards the elusive and all-important prize of great draft positioning.
But how?
Well, quite simply it won't happen until we incentivize bad teams to care about their performance down the stretch. Nothing is more important than that.
So we need to reward teams that are already out of the playoff race - or likely to be - to care about wins. Or if not just wins, since wins are hard to come by for bad teams, we need them to care about scoring points and playing defense.
To do that, I propose we elevate cumulative point differential as a determining factor in lottery odds.
Point differential is a stat that simply tracks the total points a team scores minus the total they allow. It's used across advanced analytics to measure how well a team is truly performing, and it's even used to determine advancement in non-NBA competitions like Olympic basketball group play. So it's not an unknown or wild concept. But using it in the lottery odds process would be pretty radical, and would take some justification to sell to teams and fans.
So how would it work? My proposition is that the entire league tracks point differential starting after the All-Star break - a point a little more than halfway through the season - so early-season sins are wiped clean and teams that know they're out of the playoff race can adjust to this new dimension of the competition. Every team will have point differential tracked, but it won't really matter for teams solidly in playoff position. For those who are out of the picture or on the bubble, however, it becomes everything - because in this new structure, the best draft odds go to the top three teams that miss the playoffs but post the best overall point differential from the All-Star break onward.
This past week on April 5th, the Washington Wizards (17-60) played the Brooklyn Nets (18-59) in a late-season matchup between two teams trying desperately to secure the best possible lottery odds - a game that in many ways felt more like a fifth-grade rec league contest than an NBA product. The Wizards had only eight available players, like half the team caught the flu in Ms. Bender's science class. No Net played more than 30 minutes, like their coach was all about equal playing time because the parents might yell at him. Yet this was televised and sold as an NBA product, and people paid good money to watch - with no Anthony Davis, Trae Young, or Michael Porter Jr. suiting up for reasons you have to wonder would magically disappear if there were something other than losing on the line.
So what if instead of this blatant tank-a-thon, both teams had a reason to play hard - to score as many points as possible and lock their opponents down defensively to secure those coveted draft odds?
This game would have looked a lot different. And it would have been a lot more fun.
For starters, their stars would have been playing. The best players on the team become assets that help compete for point differential, not liabilities to be hidden. There's also a kind of glory on the line - sure, they're not going to make the playoffs, but what if Trae Young averaged 35 points for a month and a half and lifted the Wizards' point differential above the Nets or the Grizzlies or whoever? He'd be a hero in Washington. It would be a huge, fun storyline from a stretch of the season that usually drags for everyone outside of playoff contenders.
This new structure would also encourage bad teams to take it to good ones and play through the entire game until the final whistle - there are no nights off when every point counts toward lottery odds. That makes it instantly more compelling for fans of these teams, giving them something to actually root for toward the end of the season. It brings a little of that EPL relegation battle magic - underdogs finding glory in late-season heroics - to a part of the NBA calendar that currently has none.
It would also create the possibility of individual performances worth talking about. If Michael Porter Jr. goes for 60 in a late-March game because his team needs to close the point differential gap on the Nets, that's a highlight reel moment instead of a night he spent thinking about Cancun.
So why is this unlikely to happen? Partly because losing, despite being bad product and tough on fans, is still preferred by struggling franchises over trying to win and failing visibly. It's an easier sell internally: we're one good draft pick away, just lose this year, get lucky in the lottery, and then we can really build something. Introducing a merit-based competition for odds shines an uncomfortable light on organizations that aren't well-run - and those are precisely the organizations most likely to resist change and prefer the cover of the existing system.
The other objection is that this works against parity - that rewarding the best of the non-playoff teams with better odds takes away the mechanism designed to help basement-dwellers gain a shot at relevancy. If the almost-good teams get the best odds, how do the truly terrible teams ever climb out?
This is hogwash.
First, changing the odds doesn't change who gets the #1 pick - as proven by the 2025 draft, where the Dallas Mavericks, a team that just barely missed the playoffs, won the right to draft Cooper Flagg with just 1.8% odds. The lottery is still a lottery.
Second, getting the #1 pick guarantees nothing in terms of future success. The history of top picks winning championships with the team that selected them is spotty at best. LeBron James had to leave Cleveland and then come back to win a championship there. Tim Duncan is the exception, not the rule.
Third - and this is the one I'd make loudest - a league that needs to develop exciting new stars in the post-LeBron, post-Curry era should want those players landing on teams that have shown they're at least competitive and driven enough to put together a strong point differential down the stretch. Wouldn't it be better for a generational talent to slot into a team with structure, identity, and momentum rather than arriving on a franchise that spent the last four months actively trying to lose?
The teams that actually get better don't do it purely on draft luck. They make smart moves in free agency, hire good coaches, develop an identity, and turn later picks into contributors. A team capable of competing hard enough to post a strong point differential while missing the playoffs - that's a team on the verge. That's a team worth handing a top prospect.
Shouldn't the teams with the best odds of selecting a generational player have shown they're ready for one?
If you watch the final quarter of the Wizards vs. Nets game on April 5th you see something interesting. The names on the court aren't the ones highlighted on posters outside the arena, but they're still NBA players - the best basketball players in the world - and once they get their shot they compete. There were good finishes at the rim, sharp shooting, and occasionally hard-nosed defense. These guys are fighting to make a name for themselves and stay on NBA rosters. They're trying. Their organization just doesn't want them to win.
That's the tragedy of it. The competitive spirit is there. The players are there. The fans - some of them, the faithful ones - are there. What's missing is any reason for the game to matter.
This proposal doesn't ask the NBA to blow up its structure, abandon its lottery, or tell owners to forfeit their investments. It asks for one change: give bad teams something to play for after the All-Star break. Track the scoreboard. Reward the effort. Let Trae Young go for 40 in late March because it means something. Let the fans in Washington and Brooklyn and Salt Lake City have a stretch run of their own.
Basketball is at its best when everyone on the floor is trying to win. That shouldn't be too much to ask.