NBA rules proposal to address 'tanking' are an overreaction to a one-year phenomenon

The NBA had a tanking problem.

One letter can make a heck of a difference in the English language.

Not 'has'. Had. Because the 2025-26 season is over. Which means every team in the league that became enchanted with the mountain of talent in the pending draft class no longer is actively involved in the process of losing games (or passively involved in attempting to win them, if that seems a more palatable description of what occurred through the winter).

This is not a pervasive, long-term problem for the league. It’s an episodic, anecdotal issue. Occasionally, it develops with specific teams in isolated circumstances. What happened this season with a large segment of teams was an aberration. If anyone still is tanking when the 2026-27 NBA season progresses, they probably ought to be searching for opportunities in another line of work.

Of course this is not the way the 2025-26 “tanktastic” season is being viewed.

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“The problem we’re having these days is it’s become almost impossible to distinguish between the tank and rebuild,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in March. “It’s one that we take very seriously, and we are going to fix it: full stop.”

According to ESPN, there already have been three drastic changes to the draft process proposed as a response to what we saw in 2025-26. Any of the three would be a drastic mistake.

In the past, Silver has discussed “fixing” the NBA Draft age limit, both by extending it to two years removed from high school and later by eliminating it altogether. Instead, the 19-year limit – one of the best ideas the league has had since introducing the odious rookie salary scale in 1995 – stands as implemented in 2006.

Let’s hope this “fix” goes something like that one.

It's already hard enough for teams to improve in this league, and one of the NBA's enduring appeals long has been the possibility that an Admiral or a Fundamental or a Wemby might come along to help accelerate a team's development.

There are teams that enter the season every year with little hope for immediate success. Being bad is not the same as tanking. If there are going to be teams as good as the Spurs and Pistons, there likely will be someone as lousy as the Kings and Wizards.

What we saw this season was different. And there were a variety of reasons for that. The Wizards had made a prior trade that allowed them to keep their 2026 pick if it is inside the top eight selections. The Pacers endured injuries that cost them 265 games among the seven remaining members of the rotation that reached the 2025 NBA Finals.

The primary reason so many teams saw the good in being bad, however, was a draft class with the potential to rank among the very best in the past five decades. There are potential stars and All-Stars and All-NBA types through at least the first dozen picks of most mock drafts you’ll find on the internet. The vast majority of these prospects are the product of a 2025 high school recruiting class so rare it’s been compared to the best groups in modern history, starting with the 1979 group featuring James Worthy, Isiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins and Ralph Sampson.

The whole tanking concept was different then, because players left college basketball in different stages in the time before the NBA’s rookie salary scale reduced the incentive to maximize draft position by remaining in college longer. Thomas won an NCAA title and left Indiana as a sophomore. Worthy won his as a North Carolina junior and left then. Sampson chose to wait until he had completed four years at Virginia. So no one draft class had the benefits of all their talents.

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This one, though, will contain AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, Cameron Boozer, Keaton Wagler and a bunch of their classmates who own exceptional talent. It also will include 6-9 small forward Yaxel Lendeborg, who led Michigan to its second-ever NCAA Championship, and likely 7-3 Wolverines center Aday Mara, who showed he can be a game-changer at both ends of the court.

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For the past decade, those teams that purposefully continued to play the lottery game rarely found the rewards they sought. Of 50 players selected with top-5 picks between the drafts of 2015 and 2024, 19 never appeared in a single playoff game for the team that selected them. Another 14 have played in seven or fewer playoff games, the functional equivalent of a series each. That’s 66 percent of top-5 picks that have had between one and 10 chances but not made a serious impact on their team succeeding.

These numbers obviously will be impacted some by the expected success this spring of Cade Cunningham and the Pistons, Amen Thompson and Reed Sheppard of Rockets and Victor Wembanyama and Steph Castle of the Spurs. But that doesn’t change the histories of Josh Jackson, Brandon Ingram and Kris Dunn.

The majority of top-5 draft picks have not become foundational players for NBA champions. Jaylen Brown (No. 3, 2016) and Jayson Tatum (No. 3, 2017) were core players for the Celtics’ 2024 winners. And Chet Holmgren (No. 2, 2022) was an indispensable part of the Thunder’s 2025 success. They are the clear exceptions – and the only top-5 picks in that period to win a league title with the teams that drafted them.

It’s true that a bit of tank magic and lottery luck allowed Oklahoma City to select Holmgren with the second pick in the 2022 draft. But let’s not forget the most important piece of OKC’s 2025 championship team, MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, was available for the 11^th pick because 10 other teams passed on him in the 2018 draft. Mo Bamba, Wendell Carter and Kevin Knox all were selected ahead of SGA.

It’s been like that a lot in the NBA Draft over the past decade. There has been only one league MVP winner chosen in the top 10 picks of any draft since 2010: Joel Embiid in 2014.

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There have been a lot more players on the order of Marvin Bagley (consistent double-figure scoring, but only two playoff games to date); Lonzo Ball (no playoff appearances) or Killian Hayes (no playoff appearances). And then there are the busts: Markelle Fultz, James Wiseman, Patrick Williams and Dragan Bender, all top-5 picks who’ve made little impact, even less on winning.

We’re not sure yet where to put Zaccharie Risacher.

Pretty much every consequential stat on his season line declined in 2025-26 from what he achieved his rookie year. The Hawks got better while he got worse (and they used him less). Atlanta's leading scorer was Jalen Johnson, who was taken with the 20th overall pick in the 2020 draft. Second was Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who was chosen 17th in 2019.

Nobody tanked for those guys.