Tanks But No Tanks

The NBA has a tanking problem

The NBA has experienced an upsurge in blowout games over the last few years, particularly towards the end of the season.

Here’s a chart showing percentage of playoffs by decade by month:

The 2020’s are way more above the trend lines for the prior forty years. So what’s going on?

The way the percentage goes up as the season goes on points to an explanation. As it gets later, the number of blowouts increases, peaking in the final few weeks. In April teams just aren’t trying as hard to win games. Teams that have already locked up playoff spots may start resting their starters to avoid injury. But more importantly, teams that are out of the playoffs are actually being incentivized to have as bad a record as possible.

A huge part of game design is about how you structure incentives for your players. You want to make it so that they are incentivized to do the things that are fun or interesting or engaging, or whatever your goal is. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how the league designed their incentive structure.

The NBA draft is a lottery system. Teams that finish outside the playoffs get a number of ‘entries’ into a lottery. After the season entries are drawn at random to determine the top four picks of the draft order. (Once a team has an ‘entry’ chosen the rest of their entries are removed - each team only gets one pick from the lottery).

Prior to the 2019 season the team that finished in last had a 26% chance of getting the first draft pick. The NBA changed that because (among other things) the Philadelphia 76’ers were tanking hard and stringing together a series of top draft picks.

So they changed the odds to ‘flatten’ the draft. They decreased the chances that the absolute worst teams would get the first pick and increased the chances for the rest. Here’s a chart showing the before and after probability of getting the first draft pick:

More importantly, these increased odds for the ‘best of the worst’ dramatically boost the chances of getting one of the top four draft picks:

If you’re the 9th worst team your chances to get a top draft pick more than tripled from the old lottery rules to the new.

By changing the lottery structure, the NBA succeeded in making it less advantageous to be really bad. But they incentivized being merely a little bit bad.

Teams that are on the bubble of making the playoffs, or just missed it, are incentivized pretty hard to drop down even further in the standings. With the old structure it was hard to drop down that much at the end of the season to make a difference.

What is the Game?

The NBA wants teams to play as hard as they can, every game. That’s the “game” that they want to put out there.

But the teams are playing a different game - their goal is not to win every game. Their goal is to win the championship - or in many cases, to make as much profit as possible. Teams are trying to win the season, not just a game. Really, they are playing a multi-season very long game. I have no data on this, but I would guess that a team that finishes in last place one season and then wins the championship the next would be preferable to the fans and more profitable for the owners than a team that is consistently in the middle of the pack.

When you are designing a season or tournament structure it is important to do it in such a way that it doesn’t impact the individual games, but it can be challenging to do so. Just ask the designers of the 1994 Caribbean Cup.

The NBA is planning to discuss this issue during the off-season to try to figure out how to improve it. The draft helps maintain league parity, which everyone agrees is beneficial. But how to do that without rewarding tanking?

The Gold Plan

In 2012 MIT PhD student Adam Gold proposed a plan to deal with this issue. Now unimaginatively called the “Gold Plan”, the idea is that once a team is eliminated from playoff contention it would start to earn ‘ranking points’ based on how well it does from that point on.

Teams with the most ranking points would get the first draft picks.

This attempts to incentivize teams to win games at the end of the season rather than lose them to improve position. It does favor the worst teams as the sooner you are eliminated from contention the more chances you have to earn ranking points.

One of the criticisms the plan is that it just shifts tanking earlier in the season. If you’ve basically lost the season you might as well try to get to the position where you’re earning ranking points as early as possible.

Personally, I admire what the Gold Plan tries to do, but I have concerns that it might be complex for fans to understand, as well as at points rewarding losing games to get to ranking faster.

But it’s a tricky problem. How do you reward teams for winning games while maintaining league parity?

I gave it some thought and came up with a probably-unworkable idea which I am calling…

The Gauntlet

Both the current lottery system and The Gold Plan are predicated on the idea that incentives change when teams are out of the playoffs. So my idea is to eliminate that part of the season. In other words:

Every team makes the playoffs.

But the playoff would be structured differently than the normal NBA playoffs, where teams are seeded and play a series against each other (1 vs 8, 2 vs 7, etc).

Instead the playoffs would be broken into two halves: the regular playoff structure, preceded by The Gauntlet.

The top six teams in each division (out of fifteen teams) would automatically qualify for the normal tournament. The bottom nine would participate in the first part. This is a bit similar to the NBA “Play In” tournament (which uses the bottom four team), but I have something different in mind.

In The Gauntlet, Team #15 plays Team #14 in a single game at Team #14’s home court. The winner moves on the play #13 at #13’s home court. Winner of that plays #12, and so on.

The last two teams remaining in the gauntlet would make the next stage of the playoffs, but they would have a single game to determine who is the #7 seed and who is #8. For an extra sweetener I would also give the winner of the last gauntlet match a higher draft pick than the loser.

Otherwise, draft choice would be determined by how you perform in the Gauntlet (first out gets first pick, or more entries if you stick with a lottery system).

So what would this do?

1. > Guarantee every team except the last place in each division a home playoff game. This will help revenue and fan excitement.

2. > Give every team a shot at the championship for the entire regular season. And finishing higher in the standings will always give you a better chance to win at all.

3. > It is much less likely that a team would not try their hardest in a Gauntlet game just to get a better draft pick. They would be on a national stage, it’s the playoffs, etc. All the incentives are for teams to put it all out on the court.

4. > It would create a series of exciting winner-takes-all games where stories could naturally develop over the course of the Gauntlet.

So what do you think? Does The Gauntlet have any merit? Do you have other ideas for fixing the NBAs tanking problem?

** You might wonder why the other major sports leagues - the NFL and MLB - don’t have this issue. My theories - the NFL does have it, but to a much lesser extent since there are fewer games in the season and more teams (percentage-wise) make the playoffs. So maybe starters sit for a single game. Baseball is much less dependent on the draft than other sports, as they have their own development systems.