Alexander: The NBA’s race to the bottom continues

INGLEWOOD — Tanking has been a subject of conversation in the NBA almost as long as there’s been a draft.

It is, after all, the reason why the league first invented the draft lottery, 41 years ago in 1985. Specifically, the idea was to prevent a race to the bottom to draft presumptive No. 1 pick Patrick Ewing, the Georgetown star who was perceived as a franchise-changer. A coin flip, to then the traditional method of determining the No. 1 pick between the league’s two biggest laggards, wasn’t good enough to keep teams from considering that the best path to a brighter tomorrow was by losing today.

Then again, when the New York Knicks won that first lottery and earned the right to bring Ewing to the league’s largest market … well, there was ample suspicion anyway.

The old method was certainly good enough over the years for the Lakers, who benefited from both shrewd trades and the luck of the flip to get Magic Johnson in 1979 (with a pick acquired from the then-New Orleans Jazz) and James Worthy in 1982 (with a pick acquired from Cleveland).

Worth noting: The Lakers got Worthy by winning a coin flip with the then-San Diego Clippers, and that was a season before owner Donald Sterling told San Diego Union-Tribune columnist Nick Canepa (and his sports editor): “We must finish last so we can draft Ralph Sampson.”

Yes, they published it. And yes, Sterling got fined for the privilege, $10,000, which in those days was significant money.

So, flash forward to today. The league fined Utah $500,000 and Indiana $100,000 a few days ago for lineup manipulation. When the Jazz (18-38) benched Lauri Markkanen and recently acquired Jaren Jackson Jr. in the fourth quarter of games they were winning, against Orlando and Miami on Feb. 7 and 9, well, cue the suspicion.

(Of course, Utah won that game in Miami, so maybe this tanking business isn’t so foolproof.)

Indiana’s sin was holding out three starters, including Pascal Siakam, from a Feb. 3 game; the league, which used an independent physician’s review, determined the players could have played according to the league’s medical policy.

That was two days before the trade deadline. The significance of that will become apparent later in this column.

There are plenty of candidates in this year’s race to the bottom, with a particularly deep collection of college talent waiting. Besides the Jazz and Pacers (15-40), Sacramento (12-44), New Orleans (15-41) and Dallas (19-41) are all jockeying for position.

So how did NBA commissioner Adam Silver respond when the subject came up at Saturday’s pre-All-Star news conference at the Intuit Dome?

“Yes, it’s been part of this league for a long time,” Silver said, noting that the lottery has been changed “roughly five times over the years to stay ahead of some of the behavior of our teams.

“The incentives are not necessarily matched here,” he added. “I think the tradition in sports where the worst-performing team receives the first pick from their partners, when any economist comes and looks at our system, they always point out you have the incentives backwards there. That doesn’t necessarily make sense.”

Bur economists aren’t concerned with parity. And it has become an article of faith, particularly in sports in which the best college players come right into the league and are expected to contribute quickly, that the laggards should get the first choice. Maybe the NFL’s Pete Rozelle didn’t invent the philosophy, but that league has exploited it and has yet to resort to a lottery, probably because it’s harder to out-and-out tank in that league.

Silver pointed to “a more classical view … in the old days, where it was just sort of an understanding among partners in terms of behavior,” and he suggested that the analytics revolution in sports has helped promote such roguish behavior.

But I don’t believe analytics were in play in the early ’80s. And really, it’s a simple equation that has nothing to do with sports’ new math: The sooner your season goes south, the greater the urgency to bolster your future.

“Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we’ve seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view,” Silver said. “Which was what led to those fines, and not just those fines but to my statement that we’re going to be looking more closely at the totality of all the circumstances this season in terms of teams’ behavior, and very intentionally wantedhms to be on notice.”

So how do you stop tanking? You probably don’t, as long as the prevailing wisdom exists that the worst place to be is in the middle, not good enough to compete for a championship but not bad enough to earn a high pick. That is how most fans perceive the stakes, even as that goes against the ethos of competing every night to the ultimate degree and giving the fans in the arena their money’s worth.

Then again, we saw it earlier this week with the Lakers when all three of their stars sat out a second game in two nights – and really have seen it throughout a season in which LeBron James, Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves have been on the court at the same time in just 10 of their 54 games. Injuries, ailments and the sometimes brutal demands of an 82-game schedule over 174 days, with sometimes crazy-quilt travel and way too many back-to-backs, can make that implicit promise of maximum best effort every night awfully elusive.

And sometimes, as the commissioner acknowledged on Saturday, “fans of those teams – remember, it’s not what they want to pay for to see poor performance on the floor, but they’re actually rooting for their teams in some cases to be bad to improve their draft chances.”

So, while Silver’s office monitors teams’ behavior and does “whatever we can to remind them of what their obligation is to the fans and to their partner teams,” he also noted that the Competition Committee is “reexamining the whole approach to how the draft lottery works.”

Ah, but there’s another way to prevent tanking.

Even when the Clippers were frightfully bad, with a 6-21 record on Dec. 18, there was no chance of their very own race to the bottom because Oklahoma City owns that pick. When they traded James Harden and Ivica Zubac in separate deals at last week’s deadline, they might have taken steps back in their attempt to at least get into the play-in round but they also picked up two first-round picks and two second-round picks in those deals.

The 2026 first-rounder they acquired? It’s Indiana’s. Can the Pacers appeal to get that fine rescinded?

jalexander@scng.com