THE MORAL CASE AGAINST TANKING
Chicago’s skid
since Derrick Rose’s latest season-ending injury has drawn cries from Bulls fans to “tank” the season. Hey, maybe the Bulls win the lottery and get Andrew Wiggins or get the second or third pick, and select Jabari Parker, who, like Rose himself, attended Simeon HS in Chicago.
Deliberately losing, such as staying in bed for 20 hours each day, is a tempting path of least resistance if things aren’t going well. But using this strategy in the NBA is out of control.
The Sixers, Raptors, Celtics, and Magic, in the East alone, are throwing away today for the illusion of a glorious tomorrow. The Bucks, after their best player got injured in a bar fight, have also plunged into the tank. So the Bulls must “contend” with those teams, plus the Jazz in the West. Given that dirty half-dozen, plus squads that involuntarily suck like the Knicks, the chance that a team with a Deng-Boozer-Noah frontcourt loses enough to win is slim, present slide notwithstanding.
But, regardless, of the Bulls pickle, I find distasteful the idea that tanking is shrewd, that the Sixers are some paragon of managerial sophistication dealing Jrue Holiday, a 23 year-old point guard who made the all-star team last year, for Nerlens Noel, who will probably not play this year due to a well-documented college injury. Squads such as the Wizards and Mavericks and Pelicans, who acquired Holiday, are apparently sucker teams, playing by yesterday’s rules and trying to win games, even though they seem to lack championship-level talent.
This is something like basketball punditry snobbery, a (but not entirely!) harmless sport equivalent to when the “serious people” in Washington coalesce around the Middle East country de jour deserving of U.S. defense and/or drone attacks. When the Raptors recently unloaded Rudy Gay to the Kings, the basketball chattering classes barely bothered to write that Toronto won the trade. I mean anyone with the slightest conceptual understanding of league finance issues and player metrics understands that Rudy Gay is not just a sometimes counter-productive small forward, but also a walking disgrace, right?
My more substantive complaint here is that tanking rarely works. This is fairly proven historically, and it just makes common sense that a team cannot smoothly concoct a master plan, where like Malcolm X or Tim Ribbons in the Shawshank Redemption, they hit rock bottom in order to become stronger than ever before.
The most successful tanking team of all team was the ’97 Spurs and they “organically tanked.” The ’96 Spurs won 59 games, got mauled by Utah in the playoffs, and then saw their two best players, David Robinson and Sean Elliot, go down in ’97. Already at a bit of a crossroads as a team, the Spurs realized that these injuries equaled the opportunity to throw their hat in the Tim Duncan lottery sweepstakes.
Out of the playoff race, they did not bring Robinson back when he got healthy in March. Instead, San Antonio let a 36 year-old Dominique Wilkins (!) lead the team in scoring. They went 20-62, won the lottery, selected Tim Duncan and won the title in ’99 with Duncan anchoring a front line with a slightly past their prime Robinson and Elliot. (Is there a parallel between the Robinson injury and Rose injury? Not really. Robinson’s injury was a one-time thing. Rose can’t stay on the floor and Chicago’s whole roster outside Noah and Butler is suddenly up in the air.)
But also in 1997 were the Boston Celtics and Denver Nuggets, teams that, like the Sixers and Jazz of today, viewed themselves as something more than awful, but awful with a trajectory toward excellence. The Nuggets oh-so-super-shrewd dumping of veterans like Dikembe Mutombo, Jalen Rose, and Ervin Johnson, players who had just entered the prime of their careers, resulted in the drafting of Tony Battie and Danny Fortson. Denver’s next winning season was 2004.
Boston in ‘97, meanwhile, saw it as manifest destiny that they would win the Duncan lottery and that a Duncan-lead/Rick Pitino-coached Celtic team would raise holy hell into the 21st Century. But they drafted Chauncey Billups and Ron Mercer, and traded Billups and Mercer within the year. Their next winning season was 2002, with a team lead by Paul Pierce, the tenth overall pick in the ’98 draft.
Even winning the lottery often does not validate tanking. For years the Milwaukee Bucks trotted out proud and fiercely competitive, if athletically overmatched teams. Then, Mike Dunleavy was given carte blanche over the franchise– owner/then-U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl made him coach/GM. Dunleavy decided that the team would soil itself through the ’94 season. Every time you looked up Todd Day was hoisting a long two-point shot. The Bucks won the ’94 lottery and took Glenn Robinson over Jason Kidd (Important note: Robinson, not Kidd or Grant Hill, truly was the consensus no. 1. Tanking supposedly lets a team get a franchise player. Only, often GMs have no sense that, for example, Paul Pierce will be a franchise small forward but Glenn Robinson will not be.)
In ’91 the Hornets let Rex Chapman and J.R. Reid play the two-man game through the frostiest of springs, won the lottery and then smartly picked Larry Johnson over Kenny Anderson and Billy Owens. Then, Johnson’s back gave out two years later, right after the team signed him to, at the time, the biggest contract in league history.
Things are supposed to be different this year because Andrew Wiggins is a once-in-a-generation sure thing. The most generous and recent historic comparisons, then, are the ’97 Spurs plus the ’92 Magic who got Shaq and ’03 Cavs who got LeBron. The executive personnel who comprised those Magic and Cavs franchises do not lament sucking extra hard to get transcendent players. But even in these “jackpot” instances, Shaq and LeBron left as free agents, not leading their first NBA teams to a title.
The early-to-mid 80’s Houston Rockets are the Michael Jordan of tanking. In 1981 the Rockets made the NBA Finals with Moses Malone and not much else, and in ’82 the Rockets won a “whatever” 46 games with a similar roster. So when Malone became a free agent and the Sixers offered him a then-record $2 million-a-year deal, Houston let Moses walk. They apparently figured signing him would prevent Houston from getting additional good players to win the title.
Then, the Rockets really started tanking. For example, Robert Reid, a starting guard on the ’82 team simply sat out the ’83 season. I think at the time he claimed to be retiring. He rejoined the team the next year.
Playing selfish veterans like Joe “Jellybean/Kobe’s father” Bryant and a 74 year-old Elvin Hayes an irresponsible number of minutes, the Rockets shot the moon to the tune of 14-68. And it worked. They won the coin flip in ’83 and the right to select Ralph Sampson.
They are many ways to convey Sampson’s hype. He was a three-time college player of the year; he would have gone no. 1 overall in ’80, ’81 or ’82 had he declared early, he made the Sports Illustrated cover six times in college. But the most appropriate, succinct comment is this: “Ralph Sampson was more hyped in 1983 than Andrew Wiggins today.”
Sampson, though, wasn’t enough and Houston, scandalously, tanked the next season as well. The Rocket’s beyond the pale ‘84 tanking (the book Tip-Off by Flip Bondy provided my information of this tankisode) made the league institute the draft lottery in ‘85– and gave the Rockets Hakeem Olajuwan. Armed with the two most hyped big men in a decade, the Rockets demonstrated the value of shameless tanking to the world, necessitating the lottery.
But even with the fabled Twin Towers, the Rockets were beset by bad luck and bad decisions. Sampson got injured; they used their second first round pick in ’83 on Rodney McCray instead of local hero Clyde Drexler; their point guard John Lucas was beset by drugs; desperate for a point guard in the ’86 draft, they picked Buck Johnson over Mark Price; their platoon at shooting guard Lewis Lloyd and Mitchell Wiggins (yes, Andrew Wiggin’s father) got kicked out of the league for drugs in ’87.
Houston memorably beat the defending champion Lakers in ’86 to make the NBA Finals. They won a first round series in ’87 and then didn’t win another playoff series until ’93 when a reinvented Olajuwan meshed with a reconfigured line-up of jump shooters. Sampson was dealt in ’87 for Eric “Sleepy” Floyd and Joe “Barely Cares” Barry Carroll.
The history of tanking provides little template for the salary cap/analytics-driven tank drivers of today’s NBA. In theory, a team like the Sixers could combine the 80’s Rockets shameless nosedive with shrewd complimentary moves. Here is partly what has to happen:
Philly gets one of the top four picks in a lottery – winning out in a game of both probability and random chance – and selects a franchise player, along the likes of Olajuwan. Not along the likes of Glenn Robinson, or Larry Johnson, or Jay Williams, a “franchise” player the Bulls got in 2002 that lost his career due to a motorcycle accident, or Greg Oden – or even John Wall or Kyrie Irving, amazing talents who cannot lift their team to .500.
- This franchise player then will: stay healthy, not leave the team as a free agent, but then also not cripple the team’s finances when they sign a long-term deal.
- This franchise player will mesh with Noel, Michael Carter-Williams, Thaddeus Young, Evan Turner or whomever the Sixers trade Turner for.
- This franchise player will mesh with Coach Brett Brown. Alternatively, the Sixers will, at some point, need a new coach.
- Let’s assume all this happened: The Sixers must also simply hope and pray that their tank-petitors – the Magic, Raptors, Celtics, all with equally “shrewd” and modern front officers – have some combination of bad decisions and bad luck. Also: the Sixers are not just competing against these teams. They’re competing against the whole league, against teams like the Heat, that get all the great free agents, and teams like the Pacers, smart and lucky enough to build through more traditional means.
So successfully tanking is actually painstaking, but it’s the first step to compete for a title, right? Tanking suggests that one successful draft lottery can change the entire trajectory of the franchise. But even if you have LeBron James or Kevin Durant, teams get really good by playing together, developing together and catching some breaks.
That’s what the Pacers are doing. It’s also what Portland did by keeping LeMarcus Aldridge. Portland could have decided after the Oden and Brandon Roy injuries to dump Aldridge for picks and cap space.
Instead, they made significant but not wildly dramatic moves like signing Nic Batum and acquiring Robin Lopez, moves that seemed modest, even myopic at the time. Comments were uttered that Portland is “running on a treadmill” or “doomed to mediocrity” by not “pulling the trigger” on trading Aldridge and “blowing this up.” These comments have been toned down by the Blazers 23-5 start.
Philly was a game away from the conference finals in 2012. They then gambled away their team by dealing Andre Iguodala for Andrew Bynum. Next they decided to not at least patiently address that mistake by giving Bynum and Coach Doug Collins a year to see what they had. No, the Sixers fired Collins, made no offer to free agent Bynum, and made the almost universally lauded choice to blow things up.
There is a pernicious American-ness to tanking. For some corporations, celebrities and, now the city of Detroit (not the Detroit Pistons, though! Joe Dumars is doubling down with Josh Smith! Shoot it, Josh! You’re open!) tanking means declaring bankruptcy. It means needlessly dramatic public policy, from shutting down the federal government to closing 50 public schools in Chicago.
When things suck, the sexy and righteous thing to do is to “blow things up” – sever ties, take the last train out, close the door and not come back. There is always a new idea, a new illusion, and a messy, dissatisfying today to destroy. How many of us are not doing our best grinding through jobs/our unemployment, our relationships/our lack of relationships, in the hopes of landing Andrew Wiggins?
Photo: Blacksportsonline.com