Readers weigh in on how to deal with issue of tanking

The chance to select Kevin Durant in the 2007 draft led to some eyebrow-raising play by some also-rans late last season. AP

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Breaking a sweat over tanking in the NBA -- that is, some lottery-bound teams' bad form of doing less than their best to win late in each regular season -- is so 2007.

That's how some readers saw it after we hit them earlier this week with one proposal for tweaking the league's draft lottery system. Finding some way to sever or at least muddy the direct cause-and-effect between losing games down the stretch and improving one's odds of landing the No. 1 pick (or even just a higher pick, period) meant something 12 months ago when the draft class consisted of Ohio State's Greg Oden, Texas' Kevin Durant and what generally was regarded as a bunch of other guys. No one was disrespecting Mike Conley Jr., Al Horford, Corey Brewer, Brandan Wright and the rest of this rookie crop, per se, but the step down from Oden and Durant to everybody else was seen as rivaling the average cliff height navigated, always badly, by Wile E. Coyote in those bleeping beep-beep quests.

Apparently, a lot of readers don't fear the tank jobs this spring because they don't hold Michael Beasley and Derrick Rose in quite the same esteem as last year's 1-2 draft punch. That's fine -- Oden and Durant probably will be franchise cornerstones in ways that the fellows coming out this year will not.

But that doesn't mean it is OK to ignore tanking, for a couple of reasons. First, we have seen teams backpedal their way down the standings board even when they had no significant chance of swooping all the way down for the best pick. Drafting higher is always better than drafting later (unless your owner really is pinching pennies), and the protection levels of draft picks that still are owed in trade can be triggered with a timely loss here or there.

Also, the system as it exists -- lottery teams getting more chances based on inverse order of records -- is something that can be gamed. And as we have seen in sports, from Spygate to the Van Horn Family College Fund maneuver, if something can be gamed, it will be gamed.

A season-ticket holder in Atlanta, known as "Doc,'' said his four seats cost him $500 per game. "During last year's tanking season, the Hawks absolutely squandered $5,000 of my hard-earned money.'' But Doc was wary of factors such as schedule strength and home/road inequities that wouldn't be accounted for in the anti-tanking solution offered previously.

Fine. At the risk of transporting those who objected to the "2007'' nature of that column even deeper into the past, this is the anti-tanking sequel, with all sorts of new ideas that range from exciting and intriguing to the ever-popular angry and insulting.

The fix explored initially was a draft position "playoff'' that tracked lottery teams' performance, in victories and defeats, from their point of elimination from the postseason. The idea was, those teams that kept playing hard (winning at a pace similar to or better than prior to elimination) would be rewarded in a points system and land a better lottery spot than those who packed it in or tried to rack up extra losses as a way of positioning themselves.

There was a math portion, it's true, that made it all seem more complex than necessary. The formula was hashed out last fall by three guys from the East Coast -- admitted Celtics fans, still peeved about their team slipping to fifth and missing out on Durant -- who were unimpressed with the current lottery system. "Frankly, I really dislike how likely it is that the teams with the best chance for the first pick really do not have a great chance to win it,'' wrote Nathan Altshuler, a junior at Union College who was one of the brainstormers.

In the 18 NBA drafts since 1990, the team with the worst record got the No. 1 pick only three times (Derrick Coleman to New Jersey in 1990, LeBron James to Cleveland in 2003 and Dwight Howard to Orlando in 2004). Last June, the league's three worst teams didn't even get a sniff at the three best prospects; Memphis, Boston and Milwaukee all got bumped down, with Portland, Seattle and Atlanta moving up via lottery luck.

But then, that is built into the machine: The three worst teams, combined, have only a 60.5 percent chance of landing the top pick. The other 11 lottery teams have shares totaling 39.5 percent. And no matter how many games the Heat loses with Dwyane Wade in a swimming pool and Pat Riley scouting NCAA regionals now, chances are good that the No. 1 pick will not be bargain-hunting for a condo in south Florida. Getting stuck with the NBA's worst record earns you only a 25 percent chance at the top pick to the field's 75 percent.

Still, since shorter odds are better than longer, enough teams have been motivated to get themselves unmotivated for March and April games. That is what we were addressing, with the anti-tanking formula offered as one solution worth considering. Here are more courtesy of reader feedback:

No fix necessary

Not everyone sees the problem we do. "Tanking is just one of those inevitabilities that you find in sports,'' Kyle of Winnipeg wrote. "Every proposal I've seen cannot take into account injuries, unbalanced schedules and teams that really are just plain bad.''

Greg, Pelham, N.Y.: "Can't have it both ways: Is it tanking or finding out what you've got with your young players? Lousy teams in every sport are disparaged for not doing this, once this season is lost. Now they also are ripped for 'tanking.' Additional balls in the lottery isn't much of an incentive [but] extra time for players to get healthy for next year and finding out what the young ones can do is.''

To John from Grand Rapids, Mich., the fix is as simple as asking WWTNFLD (What Would The NFL Do)? "In the NFL, the team with the worst record gets the No. 1 pick, with no chance of losing it in a lottery. Yet we hear nothing about tanking.''

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