Hope you enjoyed the peaceful respite these last 12 months. Because after a year-long layoff, the “T” word is coming back with a vengeance in the NBA.
Amazingly, we made it through the entire 2023-24 season while hardly hearing about tanking. More stunningly, this took place despite the unrelenting awfulness of the league’s bottom teams. As I wrote halfway through the campaign, the bottom of the league was as bad as ever last season.
The Detroit Pistons lost a league-record 28 consecutive games, for crying out loud. The Washington Wizards went 15-67, including a 16-game losing streak of their own. The San Antonio Spurs had a generational talent on their team and still lost 18 times consecutively and 60 games in total. And the Portland Trail Blazers, no strangers to draft-motivated intentional humiliation, dropped one game by 60 points and another by 62 en route to a final tally of 21 wins.
Thank goodness last year’s draft class was so bad. In almost any other season, the Pistons’ streak and its ilk would have produced a slew of overwrought, hand-wringing columns about what the draft lottery has done and how we must fix it.
Well, get ready, because it’s coming.
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What saved us from a series of tanking accusations every time a bad team was blown out or held out an injured player was the utter mediocrity of the 2024 draft. Even casual fans understood there was no Victor Wembanyama pot of gold at the end of the tanking rainbow, not in a draft with little distinction between the top 10 players on most boards, and certainly not in a draft where even the first pick (Atlanta’s Zaccharie Risacher) may top out more as a Shane Battier-esque off-ball role player than a franchise centerpiece.
This season, however, it’s quite a different story. I’ve seen nearly all the top players in the 2025 draft play in person over the course of the last year, and they’re good.
It’s not just that the likely top lottery prize, Duke forward Cooper Flagg, is one of the most highly touted prospects in years. He’s not quite in the Wembanyama/LeBron James stratosphere, perhaps, but comparable to, say, Zion Williamson or Blake Griffin in other years.
There are so many dudes. The depth of quality in this draft is comparable, in my mind, to the loaded 2018 draft class … and perhaps even better. To review, that year gave us two relative duds at the top (Deandre Ayton and Marvin Bagley) … but also yielded Luka Dončić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jaren Jackson Jr., Trae Young, Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges, among others.
That’s four different guys who have been the best player on a contender, a Defensive Player of the Year and a guy who just netted (sorry) four firsts in a trade. And it goes on from there: An amazing 24 players from the 2018 class have made at least $10 million in a season after their rookie deals expired, including the undrafted Duncan Robinson and Gabe Vincent.
I can’t promise the depth of the 2024 class goes quite that deep, to the point that teams are plucking Brunsons and Bruce Browns and De’Anthony Meltons in the second round. But the top tier is loaded. It’s not just Flagg; at least four other players — Rutgers teammates Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey, French guard Nolan Traore and Baylor guard V.J. Edgecombe — all would have been hyped as the top prize if they’d been in the 2024 class, and you could possibly say the same if they were in 2022’s.
Even after that, the middle and back of the lottery looks strong. Georgia’s Asa Newell had 17 points, 10 rebounds and three steals in the Hoop Summit game with the other players I mentioned above. He was one of the best players on the 2023 U.S. U-19 World Cup team and barely has a peep said about him. Texas guard Tre Johnson matched Harper’s production on that U-19 team and has a lot of fans on the scouting circuit. Two overseas forwards with clear defensive chops, Real Madrid’s Hugo Gonzalez and Ratiopharm’s Noa Essengue, each has a great chance to move up boards when scouts check in on them this winter. Heck, Arizona’s Carter Bryant didn’t even make the roster for the U.S. side’s Hoop Summit team, then promptly carved them up in a scrimmage the day before the main event.
There are some pretty clear rewards for being bad this season. The NBA has reformed draft lottery odds since my Grizzlies (I was vice president of basketball operations at the time) secured the fourth pick and Jackson in that 2018 draft with a 4-29 drive to the finish. It’s terribly, terribly unfortunate that we lost so much that spring — I’m not sure what happened — but in a league where a single star can make an outsized impact, the incentives for non-playoff teams remain clear.
The bottom three teams this season will have the best odds of getting the top pick (14 percent each), and the most elevated chance of landing one of the top four spots that are randomly drawn (52.1 percent). Additionally, landing the league’s worst record assures a top-five pick and a guaranteed shot at one or more of the players I’ve mentioned above.
That top-five distinction matters; historically, your odds of getting a game-changing talent decrease dramatically after the fifth spot. While in recent years that relationship has broken down a bit (only six of last year’s 15 All-NBA selections were top-five picks, and only seven in 2023), it might just be a short-term blip. Either way, this is still a far more bankable strategy than, say, hoping to luck into a three-time MVP with pick No. 41.
This takes us to the final part of the story: Will there be enough badness to generate consternation about tanking?
Oh, most likely. And while last year the awfulness of the worst teams was, in several cases, unintentional, this season it’s a feature, not a bug. Even if some team’s execs weren’t already sotto voce admitting it wouldn’t be so bad to land a high lottery pick this season, their actions have spoken loudly enough for everyone to hear.
Consider that Washington won 15 games last year, traded arguably the best player from that team and used its exception money to sign Saddiq Bey, who tore his ACL in March. Consider that Brooklyn lost 50 games and then traded Bridges, the best player from that team, for (many, many) draft picks. Consider that Charlotte traded two of its best players from last year’s 21-win juggernaut, used its cap room and exception money to acquire unproductive players from other teams in return for draft picks and selected a teenaged project, Tidjane Salaün, with its lottery pick. Consider that, even if Detroit doubles its win total, that still means the Pistons lose 54 games. Finally, consider that Chicago and Utah are double-incentivized for 2024-25, not only by the strength of this lottery, but also by top-1o-protected picks they owe from previous trades.
On top of that, consider that all those above teams, as well as Portland, will likely be shopping their few remaining quality veterans over the course of the season. As bad as they look on paper now, they’re likely to look a lot worse by the Feb. 6 trade deadline.
At least we can enjoy the rhymes this season. Sag for Flagg. Bag for Flagg. Lag for Flagg. Drag for Flagg. The opportunities are endless, especially if Flagg stays at the top of draft boards. (Fail-ey for Bailey? Spillin’ for Dylan? Trollin’ for Nolan? We’re still workshopping those.)
The lottery is unquestionably more random, and thus, the incentives for losing have lessened. However, with teams this bad at the bottom of the standings, and players this talented as a potential prize, the great tanking debate is about to have a grand renaissance.
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; top photos: Grant Halverson/ Getty Images; Brian Spurlock / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Cameron Browne / NBAE via Getty Images; David Grau / EuroLeague Basketball via Getty Images; Nicholas Muller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
