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NBA warns the Bulls about tanking

BottleWalk

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A little while back the Wizards came back from down 27 against the Knicks to win the game. That is of course a great comeback (allbeit against not a very good team) but going on Knicks twitter after the game you would have thought they had just pulled off the win of the century! The knick fans were absolutely rejoicing that they had lost that game and they were pissed, if you go back a little further, that they were ahead by so much and that their team was putting in the effort to win games they didn't want to win.

Somewhere, and exactly where is a little bit of a murky question, there is a line that you can draw on this stuff,. When fans of a bad team are unanimously unhappy when they are up by 27 in a game late in the season, and then are thrilled, not in a joking way, to blow the game in the fourth quarter or OT, you know there is some sort of problem with the way a league is designed.

Now the NBA has the toughest time with an issue like this because it is so top-heavy and skill-based that the acquisition of one star can take a team from average to the very top or from terrible to playoff-contention. And for this reason we all know they implemented the draft lottery, because lord knows that rockets team trying to get The Dream went all-out in their tanking, but it is still apparently not good enough to prevent tanking from being, not just a thing that exists, but a very prevalent thing in the game.

I imagine there are those who don't think the way I do but in my mind the widespread nature of tanking in this game is a negative. I don't think you can fault the teams for doing it given the way the league is set up and the nature of basketball, but it means that many games late in the season are just unwatchable and you'll have fans on both sides rooting for losses. This isn't what sports should be.
 

msgkings322

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A little while back the Wizards came back from down 27 against the Knicks to win the game. That is of course a great comeback (allbeit against not a very good team) but going on Knicks twitter after the game you would have thought they had just pulled off the win of the century! The knick fans were absolutely rejoicing that they had lost that game and they were pissed, if you go back a little further, that they were ahead by so much and that their team was putting in the effort to win games they didn't want to win.

Somewhere, and exactly where is a little bit of a murky question, there is a line that you can draw on this stuff,. When fans of a bad team are unanimously unhappy when they are up by 27 in a game late in the season, and then are thrilled, not in a joking way, to blow the game in the fourth quarter or OT, you know there is some sort of problem with the way a league is designed.

Now the NBA has the toughest time with an issue like this because it is so top-heavy and skill-based that the acquisition of one star can take a team from average to the very top or from terrible to playoff-contention. And for this reason we all know they implemented the draft lottery, because lord knows that rockets team trying to get The Dream went all-out in their tanking, but it is still apparently not good enough to prevent tanking from being, not just a thing that exists, but a very prevalent thing in the game.

I imagine there are those who don't think the way I do but in my mind the widespread nature of tanking in this game is a negative. I don't think you can fault the teams for doing it given the way the league is set up and the nature of basketball, but it means that many games late in the season are just unwatchable and you'll have fans on both sides rooting for losses. This isn't what sports should be.

Agreed, but as has been discussed ad nauseam, there's no good way to change it. Because as you said the nature of the game is one superstar takes you from crap to good. 2 makes you a contender. So unless you change the game itself and double the size of the court and make it 10 players each team (hold on....that sounds kind of awesome) I just don't see how you fix it.
 

trojanfan12

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Agreed, but as has been discussed ad nauseam, there's no good way to change it. Because as you said the nature of the game is one superstar takes you from crap to good. 2 makes you a contender. So unless you change the game itself and double the size of the court and make it 10 players each team (hold on....that sounds kind of awesome) I just don't see how you fix it.

I'm not sure it needs to be fixed. Tanking has always been a thing to one degree or another. The only difference is that now, with social media, 24/7 news cycles etc. it's talked about a lot more.

Basketball especially lends itself to tanking because, as BottleWalk points out, it's the one sport where adding 1 player can take a team from the lottery to the playoffs overnight.

That's why I think they should go back to "worst to first." The lottery was supposed to curb tanking. However, not only has it not done that, it has led to conspiracy theories about the lottery being fixed.
 

bksballer89

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They're still tanking......

 
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