dacomeup
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Wild performance to have on the heels of that coming out. Might help his stock 
2025 NBA Draft Thread
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by addict4sneakers,
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Kobe didn't even hit Denver that hard after returning to Colorado.
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Hard to see him not being a legitimate starter in the league.
Kinda stiff and upright, but the length/shooting/finishing in traffic ability is there.
Kinda stiff and upright, but the length/shooting/finishing in traffic ability is there.
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Miller playing this well against south carolina shouldn't be this suppressing
SC only had GG who could play him this was a elite HS senior vs sophomore matchup
Him being nervous or tight because of the crowd was expected ?
SC only had GG who could play him this was a elite HS senior vs sophomore matchup
Him being nervous or tight because of the crowd was expected ?
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lowkey got austin daye vibes from him
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Why Victor Wembanyama race might not be widespread down the stretch
That alarm bell you just heard? It’s tank o’clock in the NBA.
The trade deadline has passed, the All-Star break is over and now it’s time for the league’s bottom feeders to get down to the dirty business of acting in the enterprise’s best long-term interests. With two franchise-caliber talents available at the top of the draft in French center Victor Wembanyama and G League Ignite guard Scoot Henderson, the temptation will be strong for teams to give themselves the best possible odds at May’s lottery.
However, the actual mechanism for how that works is a little trickier. In fact, that alarm bell you heard may not be for tank o’clock at all, but instead for an early-morning advanced economics course. Hey, don’t hit snooze on me yet. The lottery-tanking equation has huge elements of Game Theory, and that’s what can make it tricky to figure out what incentives will pull most strongly on these teams.
Let’s back up, first, before we get knee-deep in von Neumann. The whole point of tanking, of course, is to maximize a team’s odds of getting a high draft pick. Relative to five years ago, the league has done tremendous work to reduce — though not eliminate — the incentives for teams to go down this road. (I will also remind you, once again, that tanking is almost entirely a management-driven tactic; once the ball goes up, these players and coaches want to win.)
The odds of the team with the league’s worst record getting the top pick and, presumably, Wembanyama, are only 14 percent, not the 25 percent of half a decade ago. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of tanking has also increased because of the Play-In, which could potentially result in ninth or 10th place teams making the postseason.
For instance, 25 of the league’s 30 teams are within 2 1/2 games of the 10th spot in their conference as of Thursday morning. Moreover, the current compressed standings mean those same 25 teams are all within 3 1/2 games of the eighth spot — the one that offers two cracks at a playoff berth. Punting on the season from that position is a tough sell, internally and externally.
On the other hand … the league is patting itself on the back for how competitive things have been thus far in 2022-23, but now is when the Brick for Vic momentum gets real. History tells us the stretch after the All-Star break is when the true tank commanders earn their stars.
I can tell you this from the inside too. Our team in Memphis was part of the league’s last great tankathon, when a stacked 2018 draft promised riches to any team that could get into the top five. Four players from that lottery have already made an All-Star team (Luka Dončić, Jaren Jackson Jr., Trae Young and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander), while two others (Deandre Ayton and Michael Porter Jr.) have already signed max contracts. A seventh (Mikal Bridges) was a starter on an NBA Finals team and had rivals competing to see how many first-round picks they could throw at Brooklyn for his services at the trade deadline.
And let’s just say that 2018 race to the bottom was a doozy. With a 25 percent chance of the top pick for the league’s worst record, and only three spots drawn randomly, the reverse turbo-thrusters kicked in sharply for every team out of the playoff race. The other important part of this was the Game Theory aspect, though: The fact that the other teams were tanking forced everyone else to redouble their efforts. Tanking begets tanking.
Check out the reverse standings after the All-Star break from that season:
Bottom feeders post All-Star break, 2018
Still, it’s not hard to guess which team didn’t have its own pick, right? The Nets went a quasi-respectable 9-14 after the break, but the other eight teams were a ghastly 46-146 (.240). Even that level of “quality” owes much to tanker vs. tanker matchups (such as the Grizzlies’ riveting April thriller against Sacramento) where by definition one team had to win.
I should point out a lot of these teams had other motivations beyond pure tanking, including our own. Late in a lost season, there is really no point in sending out veterans with money due in future seasons; that would be the case even if the draft didn’t exist. Some players get shut down with nagging injuries that they might play through in a playoff chase. Finally, several of these teams also traded key players on expiring deals at the trade deadline or bought them out shortly afterward. (We bid adieu to James Ennis for a second-round pick and Brandan Wright in a buyout, for instance.)
Largely as a response to what was seen as a particularly brazen tankfest, the NBA shifted the rules after 2018. Now the top four spots are drawn randomly, the worst three records all have the same odds and the best odds a team can get are a 14 percent chance of the worst pick. Additionally, the Play-In has made it more palatable for a mediocre team to keep fighting, because the endgame is to finish at least 10th rather than shoot for eighth.
This almost surely improved things. Game Theory would tell us that in this new system, once a team has secured a bottom-three record, its work is effectively done. Yes, there is some marginal utility in finishing worse than a rival in case both teams lose out on a top-four spot in the lottery, but the reality is that a bottom-three team has virtually no chance of picking worse than sixth and can’t do much to change its odds within that top-six range.
In a related story, here’s how the three worst teams fared after the break last season:
"Bottom three" post-break, 2022
Progress! Those three teams seemingly had a lock on the bottom three spots well ahead of April and thus felt more or less free to chase some wins. For teams that were the league’s three worst entering the break, a 24-46 stretch is a hell of a run. Almost a veritable hot streak, actually.
On the other hand, the real race was happening right behind them:
"Bottom four to bottom six" post-break, 2022
Four of the 13 wins by these three teams came when they played each other, including a hilarious April game between Portland and Oklahoma City in which the coaches spent the fourth quarter in a game of “No, please, you take it.” Against everyone else, these three clubs went 9-52, shutting down most of their key players and sending out some truly embarrassing lineups.
Overall, the bottom six teams went 37-102 after the break (.266) — hardly different from 2018. The tanking just happened in a different place on the standings board than you might have expected.
You can see why. Those three teams turbo-thrusting backward in the standings more or less doubled their lottery odds; they go from 6 percent for the eighth-worst record to 12.5 percent for the fourth-worst.
Even beyond lucking into a golden ping-pong ball for the top overall pick, the odds of landing second through fourth also increase fairly dramatically in these spots. For instance, once Orlando and Oklahoma City were off the board with the top two picks at the 2022 lottery, Indiana had a 14.3 percent of picking third and a 16.5 percent chance of picking fourth.
Additionally, locking in a bottom-six record left those teams fairly secure they would pick no worse than eighth and likely no worse than seventh; on average, only one team in the seventh through 14th slots in the reverse standings will get picked into the top four. (Last season, for instance, seventh-worst Sacramento moved up to fourth.)
Game Theory, of course, also notes that the optimal strategy will change based on the decisions made by rivals. Indiana likely realized it needed to step up its tanking once it noted that a “threat” from Portland to pass it was becoming increasingly real. Tanking tends to beget more tanking.
The only other full NBA season under the current lottery odds was 2018-19, and it was an odd one because it’s the only full season with the newly revised odds but no Play-In Tournament. Still, the 2018-19 season tells a positive story that might offer some hope for this spring.
"Bottom five" post-break, 2019
The bottom four teams combined to post a relatively respectable 29-66 mark after the break, while the fifth-worst team, Atlanta, was so locked into that spot that it could glide in at 10-14.
Between them, the five-worst teams won nearly a third of their games (.32
in that stretch, despite a much-hyped lottery featuring Duke’s Zion Williamson. As a whole, these teams were actually better after the break than before it.
Again, Game Theory explains a lot here. The fourth-worst Bulls (22-60) were plenty bad but would have had to reach a whole other level to catch the Cavs, Suns and Knicks, each of whom failed to win 20 games. Those three teams, however, had zero incentive to outdo one another once they had secured enough Ls to guarantee a bottom-three position.
This takes us to this season. Could this be another anti-tank draft? Or will other forces compel teams to pull the rip cord and make a speedy descent?
The argument for this season being another 2019 are pretty powerful. The Play-In incentivizes at least 22 or so of the league’s 30 teams to keep trying. (We’ll get to a few who might be on the fence in a minute.) Additionally, the lottery odds being capped at 14 percent for the league’s worst teams means there is little incentive to keep racking up Ls beyond a certain level of badness.
Finally, this isn’t 2018. The depth of the draft is a secondary consideration, but to the extent it matters, the consolation prizes for tanking this year seem pretty limited. Conversations with scouts on the road have indicated a profound lack of enthusiasm for basically any player outside the top two in this year’s draft. I’m not even sure the vibes I’m getting could be called lukewarm; I’ll optimistically call them lukecold.
Compared to that 2018 draft, in which even teams picking in the mid-lottery could feel like they were getting a potential All-Star, this draft doesn’t have the same depth to support the Plan B of a tanking strategy: That even if the lottery doesn’t go your way, you get a big advantage by picking, say, fifth instead of ninth. Maybe opinions will change between now and June, but that’s how things seem right now.
On the other hand…
That’s Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta owning up to the fact that they’re praying to win the Wembanyama sweepstakes. Yes, that’s a pretty sweet prize at the top, and this year we have four bad teams (Charlotte, Detroit, San Antonio and Houston) instead of three. That’s important because only three of them will get the best lottery odds.
Again, it all gets back to Game Theory and the change in lottery odds at the bottom of the standings: If four teams intend to tank, we have a disaster. If only three teams intend to tank, then we have a non-event.
Houston, as shown above, has some pretty clear motive as well as the league’s worst record coming out of the break, while the Spurs have shown their resolve with a 14-game losing streak and a deadline trade of their best player (Jakob Poeltl). The Pistons, meanwhile, still can go to the nuclear option of shutting down Bojan Bogdanović and Alec Burks.
This leaves Charlotte as the real fulcrum of any tanking race this season. Already sitting at 17 wins, the Hornets probably can’t afford to win more than four times the rest of the season to, um, “keep pace” with their rivals. If they’re not willing to prostrate themselves before the lottery gods to earn an extra 1.5 percent probability, then any brazen tanking in the bottom four positions in the standings is likely to be minor.
On the other hand, if the Hornets go chips-in on this and shut down LaMelo Ball, Gordon Hayward and Terry Rozier, look out below. A four-team tanking race could get ugly fast. I don’t see this as likely, but it can’t be dismissed. What seems more likely is that the Hornets are the 2019 Bulls.
Meanwhile, the real tanking issue is likely to be where it was last season, in the fifth, sixth and seventh spots in the reverse standings. Fortunately, several of the teams that might otherwise pivot to tanking have at least some incentive not to. Let’s take a look:
Orlando (24-35): Locked into the fifth-best odds at the moment, the Magic are also enjoying the first stretch of sustained decent basketball since they nuked the roster in 2020 and might be reluctant to pull the plug. Also, as I wrote earlier this week, essentially the whole team is under 25 and could use the development reps.
I could see Orlando operating strategically in the final week or two of the season, perhaps, but it’s hard to see anything too crazy happening before then. That’s especially true once you see the scenarios of the other teams. Game Theory tells you the Magic don’t need to think too hard about tanking unless multiple other teams are also doing it, and I don’t really see that happening.
Indiana (26-34): Among the most brazen tankers a year ago, would the Pacers really give us an encore performance just to go from sixth-worst to fifth-worst, when Orlando might catch them anyway? With Myles Turner’s extension secure, I wouldn’t be shocked to see his minutes limited in March and April. Otherwise, as with Orlando, I wouldn’t expect Indiana to crater unless it really needed a result in April … especially since the next two teams in the standings aren’t incentivized to catch the Pacers.
Chicago (26-33): The Bulls’ incentives are severely constrained by a top-four protected first-round pick they owe to the Magic from the 2020 Nikola Vučević trade. (Side note: Yikes!) Just two games out of 10th with a nearly neutral net rating, their best bet is likely to keep trying to fight the good fight. Until or unless they’re mathematically eliminated, any Bulls tanking almost certainly helps the Magic more than it helps Chicago.
Lakers (27-32): Much like Brooklyn in 2018, the Lakers have zero tanking incentive due to an unprotected pick swap with New Orleans from the Anthony Davis trade. Any move backward in the standings helps the Pelicans, not the Lakers, who also loaded up at the trade deadline to try to make a playoff push. It may or may not work, but this team is not a threat to usurp top-six lottery odds.
Portland (28-30): The Blazers tanked with wild abandon in 2021-22, but I wouldn’t expect a repeat with a veteran roster that was built with a playoff push in mind and, unlike a year ago, is almost completely healthy. As with Chicago, Portland could opt to shut everybody down if and when it is mathematically eliminated, but that likely wouldn’t happen until the final week of the season.
Utah (29-31): This is the team to watch as far as pulling the rip cord on a standings slide after midseason trades removed Mike Conley, Malik Beasley and Jarred Vanderbilt from the mix. However, how far could they really go? The Jazz have already banked 29 wins and have three games left against the Spurs. They were also able to win road games in Toronto and Indiana even after the trade deadline.
It would be an awful look for the Jazz to capitulate right now, just half a game from the 10th position, but that stance might change if their three games in the next 10 days against Oklahoma City(!) don’t go well. Positioning themselves behind the Lakers, Bulls and Blazers in the standings would give their odds a nice jolt and likely wouldn’t even require that brazen a tanking effort. However, catching the Pacers and Magic to reverse-thrust into the bottom six seems unlikely.
Oklahoma City (28-29): Noted as a potential preseason tanker after losing rookie Chet Holmgren for the season, the Thunder would make the Play-In if their season ended today. As with Utah, they’ve likely banked too many wins and have too much quality to mount a true tanking effort; such a move might also cost Shai Gilgeous-Alexander All-NBA consideration and generate some bad feelings. The Thunder would have to hit an immediate, severe tailspin to make this scenario remotely plausible.
That’s every realistic and quasi-realistic tanker; teams like Washington, Toronto, Atlanta, Minnesota and (gasp) Golden State aren’t bailing on the season. Overall, then, it sure looks like the circumstances of this season are going to allow the NBA to dodge a bullet on tanking. All the fans are yelling, “Tank for Wembanyama!” But the reality of the situation is not that many teams would really benefit from it right now, and the lack of “competition” on this front disincentivized everybody else.
At the very bottom, the worst teams are established enough in the standings that they don’t really need to make any outsized effort to maintain their position. Just behind them, the teams that otherwise might have the greatest incentive to dive-bomb are disincentivized by either draft pick trades (Chicago and the Lakers) or their own accidental success (Utah and Oklahoma City).
The lack of tanking from the Lakers and Bulls, in particular, has knock-on effects, as it likely stops teams like Orlando and Indiana from needing to match their efforts.
Again, the league deserves some credit for this. Changing the structure of the lottery so that the three worst teams have the same odds was a genius stroke that has mostly removed some of the most absurdist tanking schemes from the spring playbook. Game Theory, however, tells us that the structure of the standings and teams’ draft pick obligations have an outsized impact in any given season. The standings shook out in a way that was very league-friendly this year, but in future years, the table coming out of the All-Star break might not be so kind.
That alarm bell you just heard? It’s tank o’clock in the NBA.
The trade deadline has passed, the All-Star break is over and now it’s time for the league’s bottom feeders to get down to the dirty business of acting in the enterprise’s best long-term interests. With two franchise-caliber talents available at the top of the draft in French center Victor Wembanyama and G League Ignite guard Scoot Henderson, the temptation will be strong for teams to give themselves the best possible odds at May’s lottery.
However, the actual mechanism for how that works is a little trickier. In fact, that alarm bell you heard may not be for tank o’clock at all, but instead for an early-morning advanced economics course. Hey, don’t hit snooze on me yet. The lottery-tanking equation has huge elements of Game Theory, and that’s what can make it tricky to figure out what incentives will pull most strongly on these teams.
Let’s back up, first, before we get knee-deep in von Neumann. The whole point of tanking, of course, is to maximize a team’s odds of getting a high draft pick. Relative to five years ago, the league has done tremendous work to reduce — though not eliminate — the incentives for teams to go down this road. (I will also remind you, once again, that tanking is almost entirely a management-driven tactic; once the ball goes up, these players and coaches want to win.)
The odds of the team with the league’s worst record getting the top pick and, presumably, Wembanyama, are only 14 percent, not the 25 percent of half a decade ago. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of tanking has also increased because of the Play-In, which could potentially result in ninth or 10th place teams making the postseason.
For instance, 25 of the league’s 30 teams are within 2 1/2 games of the 10th spot in their conference as of Thursday morning. Moreover, the current compressed standings mean those same 25 teams are all within 3 1/2 games of the eighth spot — the one that offers two cracks at a playoff berth. Punting on the season from that position is a tough sell, internally and externally.
On the other hand … the league is patting itself on the back for how competitive things have been thus far in 2022-23, but now is when the Brick for Vic momentum gets real. History tells us the stretch after the All-Star break is when the true tank commanders earn their stars.
I can tell you this from the inside too. Our team in Memphis was part of the league’s last great tankathon, when a stacked 2018 draft promised riches to any team that could get into the top five. Four players from that lottery have already made an All-Star team (Luka Dončić, Jaren Jackson Jr., Trae Young and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander), while two others (Deandre Ayton and Michael Porter Jr.) have already signed max contracts. A seventh (Mikal Bridges) was a starter on an NBA Finals team and had rivals competing to see how many first-round picks they could throw at Brooklyn for his services at the trade deadline.
And let’s just say that 2018 race to the bottom was a doozy. With a 25 percent chance of the top pick for the league’s worst record, and only three spots drawn randomly, the reverse turbo-thrusters kicked in sharply for every team out of the playoff race. The other important part of this was the Game Theory aspect, though: The fact that the other teams were tanking forced everyone else to redouble their efforts. Tanking begets tanking.
Check out the reverse standings after the All-Star break from that season:
Bottom feeders post All-Star break, 2018
Still, it’s not hard to guess which team didn’t have its own pick, right? The Nets went a quasi-respectable 9-14 after the break, but the other eight teams were a ghastly 46-146 (.240). Even that level of “quality” owes much to tanker vs. tanker matchups (such as the Grizzlies’ riveting April thriller against Sacramento) where by definition one team had to win.
I should point out a lot of these teams had other motivations beyond pure tanking, including our own. Late in a lost season, there is really no point in sending out veterans with money due in future seasons; that would be the case even if the draft didn’t exist. Some players get shut down with nagging injuries that they might play through in a playoff chase. Finally, several of these teams also traded key players on expiring deals at the trade deadline or bought them out shortly afterward. (We bid adieu to James Ennis for a second-round pick and Brandan Wright in a buyout, for instance.)
Largely as a response to what was seen as a particularly brazen tankfest, the NBA shifted the rules after 2018. Now the top four spots are drawn randomly, the worst three records all have the same odds and the best odds a team can get are a 14 percent chance of the worst pick. Additionally, the Play-In has made it more palatable for a mediocre team to keep fighting, because the endgame is to finish at least 10th rather than shoot for eighth.
This almost surely improved things. Game Theory would tell us that in this new system, once a team has secured a bottom-three record, its work is effectively done. Yes, there is some marginal utility in finishing worse than a rival in case both teams lose out on a top-four spot in the lottery, but the reality is that a bottom-three team has virtually no chance of picking worse than sixth and can’t do much to change its odds within that top-six range.
In a related story, here’s how the three worst teams fared after the break last season:
"Bottom three" post-break, 2022
Progress! Those three teams seemingly had a lock on the bottom three spots well ahead of April and thus felt more or less free to chase some wins. For teams that were the league’s three worst entering the break, a 24-46 stretch is a hell of a run. Almost a veritable hot streak, actually.
On the other hand, the real race was happening right behind them:
"Bottom four to bottom six" post-break, 2022
Four of the 13 wins by these three teams came when they played each other, including a hilarious April game between Portland and Oklahoma City in which the coaches spent the fourth quarter in a game of “No, please, you take it.” Against everyone else, these three clubs went 9-52, shutting down most of their key players and sending out some truly embarrassing lineups.
Overall, the bottom six teams went 37-102 after the break (.266) — hardly different from 2018. The tanking just happened in a different place on the standings board than you might have expected.
You can see why. Those three teams turbo-thrusting backward in the standings more or less doubled their lottery odds; they go from 6 percent for the eighth-worst record to 12.5 percent for the fourth-worst.
Even beyond lucking into a golden ping-pong ball for the top overall pick, the odds of landing second through fourth also increase fairly dramatically in these spots. For instance, once Orlando and Oklahoma City were off the board with the top two picks at the 2022 lottery, Indiana had a 14.3 percent of picking third and a 16.5 percent chance of picking fourth.
Additionally, locking in a bottom-six record left those teams fairly secure they would pick no worse than eighth and likely no worse than seventh; on average, only one team in the seventh through 14th slots in the reverse standings will get picked into the top four. (Last season, for instance, seventh-worst Sacramento moved up to fourth.)
Game Theory, of course, also notes that the optimal strategy will change based on the decisions made by rivals. Indiana likely realized it needed to step up its tanking once it noted that a “threat” from Portland to pass it was becoming increasingly real. Tanking tends to beget more tanking.
The only other full NBA season under the current lottery odds was 2018-19, and it was an odd one because it’s the only full season with the newly revised odds but no Play-In Tournament. Still, the 2018-19 season tells a positive story that might offer some hope for this spring.
"Bottom five" post-break, 2019
The bottom four teams combined to post a relatively respectable 29-66 mark after the break, while the fifth-worst team, Atlanta, was so locked into that spot that it could glide in at 10-14.
Between them, the five-worst teams won nearly a third of their games (.32
in that stretch, despite a much-hyped lottery featuring Duke’s Zion Williamson. As a whole, these teams were actually better after the break than before it.Again, Game Theory explains a lot here. The fourth-worst Bulls (22-60) were plenty bad but would have had to reach a whole other level to catch the Cavs, Suns and Knicks, each of whom failed to win 20 games. Those three teams, however, had zero incentive to outdo one another once they had secured enough Ls to guarantee a bottom-three position.
This takes us to this season. Could this be another anti-tank draft? Or will other forces compel teams to pull the rip cord and make a speedy descent?
The argument for this season being another 2019 are pretty powerful. The Play-In incentivizes at least 22 or so of the league’s 30 teams to keep trying. (We’ll get to a few who might be on the fence in a minute.) Additionally, the lottery odds being capped at 14 percent for the league’s worst teams means there is little incentive to keep racking up Ls beyond a certain level of badness.
Finally, this isn’t 2018. The depth of the draft is a secondary consideration, but to the extent it matters, the consolation prizes for tanking this year seem pretty limited. Conversations with scouts on the road have indicated a profound lack of enthusiasm for basically any player outside the top two in this year’s draft. I’m not even sure the vibes I’m getting could be called lukewarm; I’ll optimistically call them lukecold.
Compared to that 2018 draft, in which even teams picking in the mid-lottery could feel like they were getting a potential All-Star, this draft doesn’t have the same depth to support the Plan B of a tanking strategy: That even if the lottery doesn’t go your way, you get a big advantage by picking, say, fifth instead of ninth. Maybe opinions will change between now and June, but that’s how things seem right now.
On the other hand…
That’s Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta owning up to the fact that they’re praying to win the Wembanyama sweepstakes. Yes, that’s a pretty sweet prize at the top, and this year we have four bad teams (Charlotte, Detroit, San Antonio and Houston) instead of three. That’s important because only three of them will get the best lottery odds.
Again, it all gets back to Game Theory and the change in lottery odds at the bottom of the standings: If four teams intend to tank, we have a disaster. If only three teams intend to tank, then we have a non-event.
Houston, as shown above, has some pretty clear motive as well as the league’s worst record coming out of the break, while the Spurs have shown their resolve with a 14-game losing streak and a deadline trade of their best player (Jakob Poeltl). The Pistons, meanwhile, still can go to the nuclear option of shutting down Bojan Bogdanović and Alec Burks.
This leaves Charlotte as the real fulcrum of any tanking race this season. Already sitting at 17 wins, the Hornets probably can’t afford to win more than four times the rest of the season to, um, “keep pace” with their rivals. If they’re not willing to prostrate themselves before the lottery gods to earn an extra 1.5 percent probability, then any brazen tanking in the bottom four positions in the standings is likely to be minor.
On the other hand, if the Hornets go chips-in on this and shut down LaMelo Ball, Gordon Hayward and Terry Rozier, look out below. A four-team tanking race could get ugly fast. I don’t see this as likely, but it can’t be dismissed. What seems more likely is that the Hornets are the 2019 Bulls.
Meanwhile, the real tanking issue is likely to be where it was last season, in the fifth, sixth and seventh spots in the reverse standings. Fortunately, several of the teams that might otherwise pivot to tanking have at least some incentive not to. Let’s take a look:
Orlando (24-35): Locked into the fifth-best odds at the moment, the Magic are also enjoying the first stretch of sustained decent basketball since they nuked the roster in 2020 and might be reluctant to pull the plug. Also, as I wrote earlier this week, essentially the whole team is under 25 and could use the development reps.
I could see Orlando operating strategically in the final week or two of the season, perhaps, but it’s hard to see anything too crazy happening before then. That’s especially true once you see the scenarios of the other teams. Game Theory tells you the Magic don’t need to think too hard about tanking unless multiple other teams are also doing it, and I don’t really see that happening.
Indiana (26-34): Among the most brazen tankers a year ago, would the Pacers really give us an encore performance just to go from sixth-worst to fifth-worst, when Orlando might catch them anyway? With Myles Turner’s extension secure, I wouldn’t be shocked to see his minutes limited in March and April. Otherwise, as with Orlando, I wouldn’t expect Indiana to crater unless it really needed a result in April … especially since the next two teams in the standings aren’t incentivized to catch the Pacers.
Chicago (26-33): The Bulls’ incentives are severely constrained by a top-four protected first-round pick they owe to the Magic from the 2020 Nikola Vučević trade. (Side note: Yikes!) Just two games out of 10th with a nearly neutral net rating, their best bet is likely to keep trying to fight the good fight. Until or unless they’re mathematically eliminated, any Bulls tanking almost certainly helps the Magic more than it helps Chicago.
Lakers (27-32): Much like Brooklyn in 2018, the Lakers have zero tanking incentive due to an unprotected pick swap with New Orleans from the Anthony Davis trade. Any move backward in the standings helps the Pelicans, not the Lakers, who also loaded up at the trade deadline to try to make a playoff push. It may or may not work, but this team is not a threat to usurp top-six lottery odds.
Portland (28-30): The Blazers tanked with wild abandon in 2021-22, but I wouldn’t expect a repeat with a veteran roster that was built with a playoff push in mind and, unlike a year ago, is almost completely healthy. As with Chicago, Portland could opt to shut everybody down if and when it is mathematically eliminated, but that likely wouldn’t happen until the final week of the season.
Utah (29-31): This is the team to watch as far as pulling the rip cord on a standings slide after midseason trades removed Mike Conley, Malik Beasley and Jarred Vanderbilt from the mix. However, how far could they really go? The Jazz have already banked 29 wins and have three games left against the Spurs. They were also able to win road games in Toronto and Indiana even after the trade deadline.
It would be an awful look for the Jazz to capitulate right now, just half a game from the 10th position, but that stance might change if their three games in the next 10 days against Oklahoma City(!) don’t go well. Positioning themselves behind the Lakers, Bulls and Blazers in the standings would give their odds a nice jolt and likely wouldn’t even require that brazen a tanking effort. However, catching the Pacers and Magic to reverse-thrust into the bottom six seems unlikely.
Oklahoma City (28-29): Noted as a potential preseason tanker after losing rookie Chet Holmgren for the season, the Thunder would make the Play-In if their season ended today. As with Utah, they’ve likely banked too many wins and have too much quality to mount a true tanking effort; such a move might also cost Shai Gilgeous-Alexander All-NBA consideration and generate some bad feelings. The Thunder would have to hit an immediate, severe tailspin to make this scenario remotely plausible.
That’s every realistic and quasi-realistic tanker; teams like Washington, Toronto, Atlanta, Minnesota and (gasp) Golden State aren’t bailing on the season. Overall, then, it sure looks like the circumstances of this season are going to allow the NBA to dodge a bullet on tanking. All the fans are yelling, “Tank for Wembanyama!” But the reality of the situation is not that many teams would really benefit from it right now, and the lack of “competition” on this front disincentivized everybody else.
At the very bottom, the worst teams are established enough in the standings that they don’t really need to make any outsized effort to maintain their position. Just behind them, the teams that otherwise might have the greatest incentive to dive-bomb are disincentivized by either draft pick trades (Chicago and the Lakers) or their own accidental success (Utah and Oklahoma City).
The lack of tanking from the Lakers and Bulls, in particular, has knock-on effects, as it likely stops teams like Orlando and Indiana from needing to match their efforts.
Again, the league deserves some credit for this. Changing the structure of the lottery so that the three worst teams have the same odds was a genius stroke that has mostly removed some of the most absurdist tanking schemes from the spring playbook. Game Theory, however, tells us that the structure of the standings and teams’ draft pick obligations have an outsized impact in any given season. The standings shook out in a way that was very league-friendly this year, but in future years, the table coming out of the All-Star break might not be so kind.
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They killin him
chanting "Lock Him Up"
Something just doesn't sit right in my soul watching a bunch of privileged white kids going to an SEC school yelling at a black athlete to be locked up.
EYE AM NOT SAYING WHAT BRANDON MILLER DID WAS OK
EYE AM NOT SAYING WHAT BRANDON MILLER DID WAS OK
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There’s also a bunch of privileged white kids and adults from Alabama online right now trying to absolve him from what he did…simply because of who he is and who he plays for.
EYE couldn’t give a **** about either side or what color they are. If the worse that’s about to happen to that kid are some chants…cry me a river.
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Wemby
Hendricks
D!ck
Strawther
Sasser
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HOU$TON
formerly convertibleburt
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His midrange pull-up is so smooth.
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The top two teams bout to be blessed
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Haven't seen any other details but just watching the video that seems like a reach. Two of the guys were catching him to keep him from falling. The 3rd guy had turned his head and seemed to be thinking it was his friend running onto the court, and was holding him back like bench guys hold back other bench guys.
I don't know why they were all close to the action like that but that really seems like a stretch based on that video.
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Arkansas-Alabama. 
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dacomeup
Supporter
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This seems like a reach… come on man.
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That being tone deaf is a reach? You're involved in one of the most controversial stories in all of sports right now...you know every little thing you do is going to be analyzed. Why give people a reason to talk?
