Chris Mannix and Rachel Nichols break down the NBA's new anti-tanking proposals, why they won't help much, and why the league refuses to get to the root of the issue
They talked a new Euroleague, and yes, they talked about fixing tanking.The barnacle on the league's backside, tanking, uh, which has grown larger this season, and, uh, Adam Silver says the NBA is hell-bent on fixing it.
It has business implications, has basketball implications, has integrity, integrity implications for the league.So Rachel, the NBA has promised a vote on tanking reforms , and I want to run down the three reforms that were discussed.I'm going to try to truncate it as best I can.The 10 teams that missed the play and the 8 that qualified, the bottom 10 teams have. X percentage, I don't know what it is to, to get the, one of the top picks, then it descends from there. The second one is where 22 teams are in the lottery with with records that are weighted across two seasons, which is the most complicated of the, the three proposals.From the first concept.The teams with the 5 worst records would then all have the same odds with them descending from there, and there would be a lottery drawing for each of the top 5 picks in the draft.Uh, look, I, I think all of this is insane and ridiculous.Tanking is a symptom.No team wants to tank.Let's alienate a bunch of our fans. Teach our players how to lose and string together as many losses as we can so our attendance dip, our profits dip, our concessions dip.So making it harder for bad teams to get good is going in the opposite direction that we need, which is what all of these proposals would do.Should get the best picks and then maybe put in a rule or two of like, hey, you can't pick in the top 5 in consecutive years. You can't pick in the top 52 out of 3 years, whatever it is that you want to keep teams from just bottoming out and bottoming it out, but at least give them the chance to get better. Now you're talking about with some of these reforms, some of these proposals have teams that lost in the first round.Let's say the Nuggets and the Lakers play in the first round against each other this season. One of them could get the top pick, and a team that hasn't gotten to the playoffs in a decade, can't, can't get a sniffet.Like , I just don't understand how we have seen reactionary rule changes fail over time, over and over again.rule that we are just talking about now, oh my gosh , you're watching a guy like Cade Cunningham who absolutely deserves to be on an all NBA team, not make one because we were so scared about one thing we had to make a rule about something else.The supermax was a result of Kevin Durant going to Golden State, and now we've all got problems with the way the supermax operates.Another thing that people are gonna rush, wave their hands around, make a convoluted rule change that doesn't actually fix the problem, and we're gonna be sitting here in 5 years saying, oh, they gotta undo that.The bottom line is this, if the owners wanted to fix tanking, they wouldn't need any of these rules. They would need to pinky promise each other that none of their teams were gonna tank because you know who controls tanking?How is this happening in our league?Fix your own problems.I agree with you, um, on the fundamental problem that it doesn't address the issue of the worst teams getting the best players. That is the fundamental problem that the league has, and the idea that you're gonna put 18 teams in the lottery, or why have a lottery?It's, it's nice to say that there are other ways for teams to get better.The Charlotte Hornets are a great example of this.How many years in a row have they been in the lottery?Lamelo Ball, Con Knipple, Miles Bridges, Brandon Miller, like. These are high draft picks that they've needed to keep churning to get to the point where they've got the foundation of a young contender.The Boston Celtics fundamentally are a team that was built through the draft.Oklahoma City made a good trade with Shay.You had teams that made trades based on the rules as they are now. If you pass any of these three proposed lottery reforms, you are completely changing the value of the picks that those players were traded for.You had players recently traded for a lot of picks.How is that fair to the teams that made those trades?Like, could you make it?Like it is, it is unfair for the teams that have built out a collection of draft picks.All of a sudden their crappy draft picks are now gonna be worth more.And by the way, the kicker on all of this, on all of this is it has been reported that if Adam Silver still. After any of these changes, he thinks the team is tanking, that he will be able to sit there and reach in and take away a draft pick or kick it to the end.Like at All-Star, he's like, we don't want to do this.I, I don't think that is, that's deal. When it gets to the votes, you and I were talking just before we went on air, and I'd love you to repeat it if you can, that the masterful job one of these teams is doing right now to say which, which team it was, but I was talking to a coach that recently played against one of these tanking teams, and he was telling me about the masterful job the coach of the tanking team did. Um, to tank down the against them to tank down the stretch, effectively running low percentage plays.It's not tanking because your guys out there trying to score, but you're running low percentage plays. I, I, that, that was a new one to me that, that struck me on Adam Silver is gonna get into the X's and O's down the line.I would love them to sit here and say we're getting rid of the lottery.I, I've been kind of talked out of it over the last few days when I brought this up to, uh, people that are on the board of governors, people in the league. One thing that's brought to my attention is that like you couldn't just do it without having safeguards in like you talked about.But what that does, the way it was explained to me by some people, like what that could do is that other teams.Like they're like, wait a minute, we don't have to be like one of the 5 worst teams in the NBA to get the number 1 overall pick. We just have to be like 5 to 10 because if you can't, like the team that gets the 1st overall pick probably isn't gonna be that good the next year. But like, so these teams out there, it would make it easier for teams that are kind of in the middle to strategically plan to be there, and they can get the top pick.Just by being 5 to 10 because if that those teams in the bottom 5 can't draft 2 years in a row, but I, I wouldn't say that.You, you can make a sliding scale of like, OK, they can't drop in the top 22 years in a row.They can't drop, you know, I mean, you, you make it so that it's a scale. The, the, to sort of summarize in a, a vague way, that is a system that NBA people believe is easily manipulated.I was abolished the lottery truther as of like 3 days ago, like when I started talking to league people about this, the bottom line is if owners in this league wanted to stop teams from tanking, it would happen tomorrow.We've decided as an ownership group it is to the detriment of the league.Teams are allowed to tank anymore and we are all going to our front offices and we are going to say no more tanking.But the problem is no one trusts each other and no one would actually do it. So don't sit here and be hypocrites and make 14 rules that involve 18 teams and 16 draft picks and 14 lottery picks.And now these are and all the stuff. If you are not going to walk downstairs to your GM and say no more, then don't sit here and have this farce of rules changes for me, because all it's gonna do is make it more complicated. It's going to make it harder for fans to know what they're even rooting for, right, in draft lotteries and in drafts and any of this stuff, and it could be easily solved tomorrow by you guys.Don't make all these rules, all these reforms.Um, I think it's far more likely that we see much more minor tweaks to the system that already exists, whether that's protections that say in the current system you can't draft in the top for two years in a row. Pick protections, not eliminated because that's a tough one to get by the competition committee, but You can't do certain things, certain takeaways. You can't be in this Indiana range where it's like 1 to 5, 10 to whatever, like those, those you, you get to keep.I, I've looked at these, I've made a whole bunch of calls.And if they do, I don't think it's a good idea because I think you're gonna wind up seeing a lot of teams that need these players, not get these players. The worst thing, the worst thing that could could have happened to, uh, advocates of the lottery system is what happened last year with the Mavericks getting number one.The Spurs getting Dylan Harper with the 2nd overall pick with low percentage, less than 5%.Again, there should be no lottery. There should be some rules in place that you can't manipulate the system at least as much as possible, but guys, if you want to eliminate tanking as ownership, go downstairs and tell your GMs you cannot tank but their GMs are gonna tell them like how else are we gonna get better, man, dude.But if you want to insist it's the problem, and you want to insist it needs to be stopped right now, go do it.You don't need 18 convoluted rule changes.And if you're not gonna be big boys and assorted girls and do it yourselves, don't sit here and screw with the fans and screw with the players and sit here and make all these rule changes and make us not know.Like the in-season tournament is complicated.And when I Say to certain NBA people like this makes the lottery more complicated.You're further complicating what was already kind of a complicated system.I'm just not sure that the NBA is ultimately gonna get there.
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