"Basketball is my favorite sport I like the way they dribble up and down the court" - Kurtis Blow
This lyric is so iconic among sports fans across the world especially basketball fans. But us basketball fans have been angered as of late with how the NBA has handled teams who intentionally lose ball games. As a former athlete I was always taught that I needed to win and to this day I still want to win at just about everything I do even school-related items and non-competitive things. So watching professional players and teams lose it baffles me more than normal.
The term related to this intentional losing of games is called "tanking" and teams do it in order to acquire draft picks in order to hopefully get a one in a generation player. We have seen it several times specifically in basketball because it is easier to get a top pick in the summer draft. Also with college basketball players only having to stay one year in college it allows for teams to take high school age players and keep them for several years to allow them to grow.
Tanking has hurt basketball because year after year the same teams are struggling for the top pick and they are making the same mistakes. Those young players while they can make an immediate impact, normally it takes them a while to develop and turn into a player that can carry a team. For example, the Cleveland Cavaliers had one of the best players to ever play the game in LeBron James and when he left the team immediately starting losing games and they acquired the top overall pick in Kyrie Irving. Several seasons after that they learned that they would be able to get LeBron back and so they decided to get players that would not be able to compete against the other teams. After that season they had the number one overall pick in the NBA draft and the best player in the league back on their team and they effectively made a super team that this season broke up.
But overall tanking is bad for sports because it emphasizes losing and not competing to the best of their ability. Basketball has always been my favorite sport growing up and it hurts me to watch players and teams just being okay with losing games like it is nothing. I believe that tanking has hurt the NBA more than super teams because it allows for the same teams to continue to repeat a process and get young players. A team that has done this is the Philadelphia 76ers, they have had a high pick in the last several drafts and it has allowed them to get young generational players that could have changed and helped other franchises but they have stashed them on a losing team. If tanking could be eliminated or highly restricted it would allow other teams to experience winning and allow franchises to take the next level in their market and succeed as a team and a business.
