There’s absolutely nothing we can do about tanking
As a die-hard New York Knicks and New York Jets fan, I have grown accustomed to seeing my favorite teams lose a lot. They lose during the season, they lose during free agency, they lose during the draft, they lose in ways I didn’t even know were possible. I’ve watched as a variety of players only some sports fans would have possibly heard of (Bryce Petty, Lance Thomas, Allonzo Trier and Quincy Enunwa, to name a few) were signed or drafted in hopes of changing the course of these teams for the better — but flopped.
The Knicks and the Jets are by no means the only sports franchises in the last 25 years that have been known as perpetual losing teams. Even though these teams did not have the rosters to compete for the playoffs, let alone a championship, they would still try to spend money on what free agents they could and try to win with the roster they had. That old roster construction philosophy has recently gone out the window; now teams will either go all-in to compete for a championship or dump their entire team in hopes of getting the number one pick in the draft. Welcome to the age of tanking, folks. Whether you like it or not, this is our reality as sports fans.
The idea of tanking, purposely losing games by trading away or resting key players to get a better young player in the draft down the road, has existed for a while. The Houston Rockets did it in 1984 by benching all their starters when they realized they weren’t going to make the playoffs and ended up getting the number one pick in the draft. The strategy seemed to work, because they drafted future Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon with that number one pick. The following year, the NBA instituted the draft lottery so that the draft order of the teams that missed the playoffs would be decided randomly, a hard-hitting blow for all tank-loving general managers.
Most modern-day sports fans know more about tanking from the Philadelphia 76ers and their “trust the process” mindset. When new general manager Sam Hinkie took over, he inherited a team who had just missed the playoffs by two games but finished with a 34-48 record. Hinkie decided it was best to trade away all his players that had value in return for as many draft picks he could get, and then fill his roster with as many players as he could sign for the cheapest amount possible. The 76ers and Hinkie would never say that they were purposefully losing games, but it was clear they sure weren’t trying to win. They didn’t win more than 19 games for three straight years and were one loss off from tying the NBA record for most losses in a season in 2016. But hey, it did work to some extent given they got a ton of high draft picks and are now a top-three team in the Eastern Conference.
Ever since the 76ers employed it, this tanking philosophy has spread to every major sports league, with at least a couple of teams succumbing to the tanking mindset every year. You probably don’t care as much when you see other teams do it, but it could not be more gut-wrenching when your team does it. Knowing your team is doing all they can to trade away your favorite players in an effort to win in three years down the line, if everything even goes according to plan, is the worst.
How can sports leagues enforce stricter rules to ensure teams don’t tank? Most of the time, it’s pure opinion on whether you think a team is tanking or not. There are no set guidelines to enter into “tanking territory,” it’s utterly subjective. Possible rules you could implement could also hurt teams trying to win.
If leagues made a rule that you can’t rest your starters to make sure a tanking team plays all the players they have, that would also hurt teams trying to win and have their players on load management. If leagues set a limit on the number of trades a team can make or the amount of total draft picks a team can have, I’m looking at you Oklahoma City, that could also hurt teams that are trying to add more pieces to their team and win a championship now.
While the NBA is doing it better than most leagues with having the lottery so a team isn’t guaranteed the number one pick, it won’t stop teams from trying to tank. The Oklahoma City Thunder are in such a deep tank that they have asked for and received a draft pick for the 2029 draft in a trade. That draft pick will turn out to be a kid who is currently 12 years old and in sixth grade. These teams will do anything to get their monopoly on young talent when they can.
While tanking may be around for the long haul, it doesn’t always work out for these teams, and sometimes they don’t get what they want after trying to lose as much as they can. Look at my two beloved sports franchises, who somehow couldn’t even tank properly. The New York Jets tried to tank for the 2021 draft to get Trevor Lawerence, but won one too many games and missed out on the first overall pick.
And three years prior, the Knicks tried to tank for Zion Williamson and even finished with the worst record in the NBA, but to my dismay, the lottery fooled their plans. The number one pick went to the New Orleans Pelicans, who had 16 more wins than the Knicks.
It’s now commonplace for a general manager to be under fire for not blowing up his roster and starting over. Fans are adapting and calling for their teams to start from scratch as soon as expectations aren’t met for a given season. We live in a world where instant gratification is above all, and that has seeped its way into sports. There isn’t much we can do to fix the tanking epidemic; it’s the new norm for sports fans. All you can do is hope and pray that your team won’t be the next to dismantle their entire roster before your eyes. For better or for worse, tanking is here to stay.
Stefano Fendrich is a sophomore writing about his opinions on some of sport’s biggest debates in his column “The Great Debate.” He is also a sports editor at the Daily Trojan.