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After NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last weekend that tanking is the worst it’s been “in recent memory,” Mark Cuban believes he and the league office should “embrace” it.
The NBA recently fined the Utah Jazz and Indiana Pacers, who own a combined record of 33-78, $500,000 and $100,000, respectively, for sitting healthy players, and Silver said last weekend he is considering “every possible remedy” to combat it.
But Cuban, who has admitted to tanking in the past, posted on X “Why the NBA should embrace” teams not putting their best foot forward for future gain.
“The NBA has…been misguided thinking that fans want to see their teams compete every night with a chance to win. It’s never been that way,” Cuban began in a lengthy X post.
“When I got into the NBA, they thought they were in the basketball business. They aren’t. They are in the business of creating experiences for fans. Few can remember the score from the last game they saw or went to. They can’t remember the dunks or shots. What they remember is who they were with. Their family, friends, a date. That’s what makes the experience special.
“Fans know their team can’t win every game. They know only one team can win a ring. What fan (sic) that care about their team’s record want is hope. Hope they will get better and have a chance to compete for the playoffs and then maybe a ring. The one way to get closer to that is via the draft. And trades. And cap room. You have a better chance of improving via all 3, when you tank.
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“We didn’t tank often. Only a few times over 23 years, but when we did, our fans appreciated it. And it got us to where we could improve, trade up to get Luka [Doncic] and improve our team.
“The NBA should worry more about fan experience than tanking. It should worry more about pricing fans out of games than tanking. You know who cares the least about tanking, a parent who cant afford to bring their 3 kids to a game and buy their kids a jersey of their fave player Tanking isn’t the issue. Affordability and quality of game presentation are.”
With a stacked NBA Draft class, it appears that more teams are vying for better chances at the No. 1 pick. And while the lottery had good intentions to not guarantee the worst team the best pick, the luck of the draw has led to more and more teams who know they cannot compete for a championship to compete for what they hope will be their next chance at one.
“If teams are manipulating their performance in order to get higher draft picks even in a lottery, then the question becomes … are they really the worst-performing teams?” Silver said during NBA All-Star Weekend. “It’s not clear to me, for example, that the 30th-performing team is that much measurably worse than the 22nd-performing team, particularly if you have incentive to perform poorly to get a better draft pick…
“The league is 80 years old. It’s time to take a fresh look at this to see to whether that’s an antiquated way of going about doing it.”
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