This National Basketball Association (NBA) campaign should sharpen the competitive spirit. Instead, it has put more emphasis on the score, not the kind that produces better basketball. The league now finds itself facing a truth rarely acknowledged in blunt terms: Losing, in some corners, has become the strategy. It is not the result of rebuilding, not the result of an injury, but a conscious application.
Late last week, the NBA signaled that enough is finally enough. Commissioner Adam Silver informed the general managers that new anti-tank rules are coming next season. To give teeth to its worst effort yet to disrupt the prize’s failed incentive, the league is considering major changes to the draft sweepstakes: less standing, limiting repeated top picks, adding odds to multi-year performance, and even increasing lottery eligibility. The message is clear; a system designed to help struggling teams to recover has encouraged them to effectively lose.
The silver was unusually transparent. He believes the behavior is worse now than it has been in recent memory, and the league wants “new thinking” to fix incentives that have gone astray. His reaction alone would have been significant, but what turned the conversation from procedural to moral was the intervention of one of the NBA’s newest power brokers. Sun owner Matt Ishbia didn’t just criticize the tanking; he rejected it outright. He called it “loser morale,” the deliberate corruption of competition. More offensively, he said it was “worse than any betting scandal,” labeling intentional losing not as clever system management but as a direct attack on the integrity of the game itself.
The escalation of the rhetoric was not remarkable. Game manipulation is often discussed under gambling investigation, legal risk, and liability. However Ishbia asserted that the practice of clearly designed losses, in the form of deliberate shutdowns, planned absences, and operational management designed to fail, is highly destructive. It is clearly happening, under the banner of “long-term planning.”
Unfortunately, the dramatic transformation has problems. Even before the official acquisition, the proposed anti-tanker measures have received criticism. Some observers say the league is creating a number of things that could punish teams that are legitimately rebuilding or those that are set back by injuries or circumstances beyond their control. Some suggest that the NBA is simply responding to ideology, especially in the era of legalized sports betting, rather than addressing the structural motivations embedded in the framework itself.
In other words, the league could be trying to control the symptoms instead of restructuring the underlying mechanism that made the loss important in the first place. Which is, in short, professional leagues that have never been fully resolved. Competitive balance needs to favor weaker teams. On the flipside, helping disadvantaged groups reinforces the incentive for them to become even more disabled, or at least to come forward at the right time. The draft lottery was intended to blunt that incentive. Instead, front offices have learned to manage opportunities as carefully as they manage salary caps.
To be sure, tanking is not novel to front offices that want to go all the way. It has always been an option. What is different is the scale, complexity, and openness that is now being discussed: measured, modeled, and even praised in certain analytical circles. Loss is no longer just tolerated; performance is evaluated. And because this is what the NBA wants to reverse, the success of the upcoming changes is secondary to what they represent. The league publicly admits that its competition structure has strayed far enough from the spirit of the sport to require structural reform. The commissioner agrees that the problem is acute. The owner declares that strategic defeat undermines legitimacy.
The NBA has always thrived on the drama of promise: young stars rise, franchises are reborn, fortunes are restored. Tanking, in its most aggressive form, rewrites the narrative. It takes the place of going up and down. It turns prospect into inventory. It changes the loss from difficulty to accumulation. And that, more than any rule change, is what the league aims to eliminate. Bottom line, it doesn’t want to lose the meaning of winning.
Anthony L. Cuaycong was writing The court since BusinessWorld launched the Sports category in 1994. He is a consultant in strategic planning, operations and human resources management, business communication, and business development.
