Ask any NBA fan what they think the league’s biggest problems are, and you’ll likely hear a lot of the same things.
There are too many three-pointers. Nobody plays (or is allowed to play) defense anymore. The All Star weekend has become an unmitigated mess. The league’s become overrun with social justice sloganeering and pandering. The NBA and its partners are too deeply in bed with sports gambling sites.
While individual mileage may vary on each of those issues, there’s no doubt that the combination of them has put the NBA in an awkward position.
The league’s television deals may be numerous and rich, but fandom and popularity are as middling as they’ve ever been for the NBA.
And a big reason for that is the league putting out an unwatchable product on many nights.
The underlying cause of that? Tanking — which may very well be the biggest problem the NBA currently has.
For the non-sportsball fans, “tanking” in a sport is the act of a team intentionally sabotaging its chances of winning (read: intentionally trying to lose) to better their draft position.
(And yes, this problem is exacerbated due to the NBA’s proximity to sports gambling platforms.)
This is a uniquely NBA problem because of the way it handles its draft. Unlike, say, the NFL, where the worst record gets the best pick, the second worst record gets the second-best pick, and so on, the NBA implements something that’s known as a “draft lottery.”
In short, every non-playoff team in the league is put into a “lottery,” which determines draft order. While the worst records theoretically have the best odds to get the best picks, that doesn’t always happen.
That could leave a team tanking for multiple seasons as they continually miss out on the premium draft picks.
The problem for the NBA is that there are so many teams who aren’t currently trying to win games (The Utah Jazz, for instance, were recently fined $500,000 for intentionally benching its best players in a clear bid to throw the game) — and the league is considering some drastic steps to address this festering issue.
ESPN’s NBA reporter, Shams Charania, reported Thursday that the league is considering some drastic changes to dissuade tanking.
Multiple sources with knowledge of Thursday’s GM meeting as well as a late January Competition Committee meeting told ESPN that the following concepts have been discussed to curb tanking:
•First-round picks can be protected only top-4 or top-14+
•Lottery odds freeze at the… https://t.co/Vk2n1cSzde— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) February 19, 2026
Potential fixes include not allowing a team to pick in the top four in back-to-back years, basing lottery odds on two-year records instead of just a season, and simply flattening lottery odds for every non-playoff team.
These proposals did not go over well on social media, if Charania’s responses are anything to go by.
If you have to do all this to stop teams from tanking – your league is broken.
The NBA has no integrity.
— The Art of Player Props (@LukaOhtani) February 19, 2026
“If you have to do all this to stop teams from tanking – your league is broken,” one user fired back at Charania. “The NBA has no integrity.”
While tanking has always been a part of sports, it usually involves a batch of late games — not half the season.
For fans, this is understandably frustrating. You’re paying your hard-earned money to go watch your tanking basketball team not deploy its best players or, worse yet, playing its worst players on purpose. That’s not the sort of product you’re clamoring to pay again for.
Again, financially, the NBA seems to be doing just fine. Its multiple billion-dollar deals with the likes of ESPN and Amazon Prime has lined the league’s pockets.
But in terms of the on-court product? Not only are teams not putting out the best product possible, there’s a growing trend of them putting out their worst product on purpose.
For the NBA and league commissioner Adam Silver, that’s untenable.
For the fans, it’s unwatchable — and league executives clearly think something needs to be done.
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