To understand this peculiar NBA season, a season increasingly overshadowed by the topic of tanking, you should have seen Saturday’s game between the Washington Wizards and Toronto Raptors through the perspective of the Oliver family, die-hard Wizards fans from Leesburg, Va.
Mark Oliver took his sons Wyatt, Jack and Owen, ages 7 to 14, to Capital One Arena for a weekend night out. They wore Wizards jerseys, and they arrived about one hour before the national anthems. Wyatt and Jack brought basketball cards for players to sign, and they grinned when forward Bilal Coulibaly signed a card in orange marker.
The Olivers want to see the Wizards grow into a consistent winner. Just not this season.
In a year when even NBA commissioner Adam Silver acknowledges that the league is seeing worse tanking behavior than at any other time in recent memory, the Olivers hope that the Wizards will accumulate enough losses to retain their first-round draft pick, luck out in May’s draft lottery and then select a future superstar.
Washington entered Saturday’s game with the league’s fourth-worst record, 16-43. This season is the franchise’s eighth consecutive losing season.
Mark Oliver, the CEO of a health technology business, credits the team’s top executives, Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger and Wizards general manager Will Dawkins, for not fielding a team that will finish in the middle of the standings.
“When you’re trying to build any kind of good, sustainable business, you’ve got to make good, sustainable strategic choices,” Oliver said. “That’s what we’re finally happy about here with the Wizards. Dawkins and Winger, they’re making the choices that are setting us up for strategic success long term. So, I think we’re pretty happy about it.”
Wyatt Oliver, 7, who wore a jersey with Coulibaly’s name on it and a Wizards cap, said it bluntly: “I’m happy that they’re losing.”
This is the state of the NBA these days. Tanking has occurred for decades, but this season, it arguably started earlier than usual and has been more prevalent. At least several front offices across the league would be happy to lose now if those losses put them in better position to draft a future star.
The lose-now, win-later mentality is no longer confined to front offices. Segments of many fan bases — perhaps even large segments — endorse tanking as a short-term strategy. The Oliver family is not alone in their point of view.
So, how did the NBA reach this point, where fans root for their favorite teams to lose and those teams’ executives feel this path offers an acceptable option to build?
All the ingredients exist this season for a blizzard of tanking.
Led by Kansas guard Darryn Peterson, BYU wing AJ Dybantsa and Duke power forward Cameron Boozer, the 2026 draft class is said to be unusually deep at the top, with perhaps up to six or seven prospects regarded by NBA front offices as potential future stars.
The nature of basketball itself, with only five players on the court for each team at any one time, playing on both offense and defense, makes it a sport in which transcendent stars make outsized impacts. Among the three other major North American team sports, perhaps only a truly great quarterback — such as Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes — can impact a game as much as Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan and LeBron James did during their primes. Even a dominant starting pitcher in baseball, for example, pitches only once every fifth game during a regular season; a dominant hitter is only one of nine people in a lineup.
Since the beginning of the 1989-90 season, every single NBA champion has included at least one player who earned a spot that regular season on one of the league’s three All-NBA teams. Only four of the last 37 NBA Finals runners-up did not have at least one first-, second- or third-team All-NBA player that season.
The lesson, to both NBA team executives and to NBA fans, is that for a team to win big, it must have at least one great player.
For many teams, particularly those not considered glamour franchises, the draft is the most direct method of acquiring franchise difference-makers.
Many of those teams cannot afford to lose those picks, but that could happen this season. NBA officials believe that conditional picks stemming from prior trades have contributed to this season’s tanking epidemic, a league source said, with teams trying to guarantee that they won’t lose those picks.
The Indiana Pacers will keep their first-round pick only if it falls from No. 1 to No. 4 or from No. 10 to No. 30; otherwise, the LA Clippers will receive that pick. The Utah Jazz will retain their first-round pick only if it falls within the top eight choices; if the pick falls from No. 9 to No. 30, it will go to the Oklahoma City Thunder. And the Wizards will hold on to their first-round pick only if it falls in the top eight of the draft order; if it ranges from No. 9 to No. 30, the pick will go to the New York Knicks.
GM Will Dawkins and the Wizards have their sights set on May’s draft lottery and holding on to a top-eight-protected first-round selection. (Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
In mid-February, the NBA fined the Jazz $500,000. On Feb. 7, the Jazz led the Orlando Magic 94-87 at the end of the third quarter and sat top players Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. (as well as starting center Jusef Nurkić) for the entire fourth quarter. Utah lost that game 120-117. Two nights later, the Jazz led the Miami Heat 85-82 at the end of the third quarter and once again held out Markkanen, Jackson and Nurkić for the entire fourth quarter. Utah won 115-111.
At the same time, the NBA fined the Pacers $100,000 for violating the league’s player participation policy on Feb. 3 in a game against the Jazz. A league investigation, which included a review by an independent doctor, determined that Pascal Siakam, considered a star player under the policy, and two other starters who also did not play could have played under the policy’s medical standard. League officials said the Pacers could have played Siakam and the two other starters reduced minutes or kept the players out of other games that would have “better promoted compliance” with the policy.
“Overt behavior like this that prioritizes draft position over winning undermines the foundation of NBA competition, and we will respond accordingly to any further actions that compromise the integrity of our games,” Silver said in a statement issued when the league announced the fines. Silver added that the league’s competition committee and board of governors are working to enact additional regulations to prevent tanking.
The league has made adjustments before, because tanking is not a new phenomenon. It has occurred at least since the early 1980s.
From 1966 through 1984, the league held a coin flip between the team with the worst regular-season record in the East and the team with the worst regular-season record in the West. The team that won the coin flip received the top pick, and the loser received the second pick. The other teams were slotted in the draft by the inverse order of their records.
In 1982, the league fined the San Diego Clippers $10,000 after then-Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, said at a luncheon that the franchise would embrace a last-place finish if it provided a chance to draft Ralph Sampson, the 7-foot-4 University of Virginia center who was hailed as one of the greatest prospects in college basketball history.
“We have to bite the bullet,” Sterling was quoted as saying. “We must end up last in order to draw first and get a franchise-maker, like Ralph Sampson.”
The Houston Rockets wound up drafting Sampson in 1983. During the 1983-84 season, the Rockets were thought to have tanked to draft University of Houston center Hakeem Olajuwon; competing against the Clippers for the worst record in the Western Conference, the Rockets played future Hall of Fame forward Elvin Hayes all 53 minutes on April 13, 1984, in an overtime loss in the Rockets’ next-to-last game of the season. Hayes was 38 years old at the time and retired after the season. Houston finished the season 29-53, while the Clippers finished 30-52, and the Rockets won the coin flip and drafted Olajuwon first.
The NBA responded by changing the mechanism for determining the top pick. It created the draft lottery, which went into effect in 1985 and determined the selection order for non-playoff teams.
“It was quite clearly an effort to avoid tanking at the time,” former NBA Deputy Commissioner Russ Granik, who in 1984 was the NBA’s executive vice president, told The Athletic.
“All we had was a coin flip, like a lot of leagues had, for a long time. So, if you could get to the bottom, you were guaranteed one of the first two picks. We had a couple of incidents, especially right around that time, where it seemed pretty obvious that that’s what some teams were intent on doing.”
From 1985 through 1989, lottery teams had an equal chance of winning the No. 1 pick. The 1990 lottery was the first time the league employed a weighted system, with the team with the worst regular-season record holding 11 chances out of 66 for the top pick, the second-worst team having 10 chances and the non-playoff team with the best record having only one chance.
Other changes have followed. Beginning with the 1994 lottery, the worst regular-season team received a 25.0 percent chance of winning the top pick.
But all along, Granik said, the league faced a difficult balance of what he calls “diametrically opposed” priorities: trying to ensure that the worst teams had the best opportunities to improve their rosters while, at the same time, trying not to incentivize losing.
“I just think that they’re perhaps totally incompatible,” said Granik, who has been the vice chairman of Galatioto Sports Partners since 2006.
“You’ve got to decide whether you want to take away every incentive to tank and occasionally suffer a team you really didn’t want to win the lottery and get the first pick to get it. Or you have to accept that you have a strong incentive to tank, even though it might seem that you wouldn’t tank for only a 14.0 percent chance to win or something like that. That doesn’t seem to be the case. It seems to be the case of some teams that see no future in that year’s playoffs are ready for any small advantage in the odds. That’s enough incentive for them to try and lose.”
The early-to-mid-2010s brought another tipping point. The Philadelphia 76ers, under then-general manager Sam Hinkie, tore down their roster to make themselves as bad as possible to secure early draft picks in consecutive seasons. A team that had gone 34-48 during the 2012-13 season bottomed out under Hinkie, going 19-63, 18-64 and 10-72 the next three years.
The Sixers’ so-called “Process,” as it was called, provided the primary impetus for another change to the lottery format, approved in 2017 and put into effect for the 2019 lottery, the league source said. The Process has not led to a championship, but it helped the Sixers draft future All-NBA center Joel Embiid, who became the franchise’s cornerstone. Hinkie’s strategy would have been more successful if more of the franchise’s top draft picks had performed better. Jahlil Okafor (drafted third in 2015), Ben Simmons (the first overall pick in 2016) and Markelle Fultz (the first overall pick in 2017) went on to largely disappointing NBA careers.
In the preceding years, the teams with the two worst records had odds of 25.0 percent and 19.9 percent to win the lottery, respectively. From 2019 onward, in an attempt to reduce the incentives for teams to plunge to the bottom of the standings, the teams with the three worst records have received equal 14.0 percent chances of winning, and the odds descend gradually after that. The lottery determines the top four spots in the draft order, and the remaining spots are decided by the inverse order of record.
To be sure, some of the game’s most dominant current players were not selected in the top three or top four of the draft. The Milwaukee Bucks chose Giannis Antetokounmpo, a two-time NBA Most Valuable Player, 15th in 2013. The Denver Nuggets selected future three-time league MVP Nikola Jokić 41st in 2014. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the reigning MVP and key player on the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder, was drafted 11th in 2018 and had his draft rights sent to the Clippers.
But the current NBA standings show the value of drafting first. The Pistons, who hold the Eastern Conference’s best record at 45-15, are led by point guard Cade Cunningham, the top pick in 2021. The San Antonio Spurs, with the league’s third-best record, revolve around center Victor Wembanyama, the No. 1 pick in 2023, when he was widely hailed as the best draft prospect since LeBron James in 2003.
Two weeks ago, Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks’ former majority owner, wrote on X that “the NBA should embrace tanking.”
“Fans know their team can’t win every game,” Cuban wrote. “They know only one team can win a ring. What fan(s) 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.”
Until recently, hope has been in short supply for fans of Washington’s NBA team.
The Wizards won their only NBA title in 1978 when they were known as the Washington Bullets. The 1978-79 Bullets posted a 54-28 record, returned to the NBA Finals as defending champions but lost the championship series to the Seattle SuperSonics.
Washington has not won at least 50 games in a season or reached the Eastern Conference finals since 1979. The franchise has endured mediocrity for many of the intervening seasons, as longtime fans such as Jim Moore know all too well.
Moore, now 57 and living with his wife and three daughters in London, where he works in private equity, grew up in the Washington area and remembers that Bullets championship team. Moore would attend Bullets games at Capital Centre in Landover, Md., as a child and as a teenager.
He and two longtime friends have a text chain that they call “Bullets Fever,” an homage to a song of the same name released in 1978 by Nils Lofgren, a future member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band who grew up in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md.
Moore and his two friends on the text chain are pleased with most of the moves that Winger and Dawkins have made, including the decision to draft Alex Sarr second in 2024, acquire the draft rights to 24th pick Kyshawn George in 2024 and, lately, the trades for Trae Young and Anthony Davis.
Moore and his friends support the Wizards’ strategy of bottoming out for this year’s draft. The franchise last landed the No. 1 pick in the lottery in 2010, when it drafted John Wall, who developed into a five-time All-Star.
“It’s a weird feeling to wake up every morning and be super excited about a loss and be frustrated about either your (favorite team’s) wins or losses coming from New Orleans or whoever you’re trying to track in the standings,” Moore said. “But, at the end of the day, I think that in this particular season, I feel very comfortable with losing because it feels like the last year that we’re trying to position ourselves for a good draft pick, and it’s been a long time coming, and in the last few years, it’s been frustrating to be bad.
“But this year, I see a lot of really positive (signs) with the young players we have, and if you can combine that with some losses in the loss column, then that’s a good place to be from my perspective.”
Adam Silver recently informed team executives that the league plans to make anti-tanking rule changes ahead of next season. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images)
Next season is likely to be a more competitive season for the league. The 2027 and 2028 draft classes, as even Silver acknowledged during All-Star weekend, are not thought to be as talented as this year’s class. Meanwhile, Silver has pledged to enact solutions that will begin next season.
“I think what Adam’s doing is the right thing,” Granik said. “I always took the view that if we had a problem, you’ve got to acknowledge it and then go after it. He certainly seems to be continuing in that vein. I think that’s the right thing, because I think this is important for the sport, and it’s important, also, to the fans. …
“I don’t know that you can have a perfect world here because of the issues on both sides of what they’re trying to do. But I assume they’ll make some improvements. They’ve got a lot of smart people there.”
In the meantime, however, the tanking issue has obscured some of the NBA’s best feel-good stories this season, such as the rise of the Cunningham-led Pistons, the emergence of the Spurs as a potential contender, the Boston Celtics’ unexpected success despite the absence of injured star Jayson Tatum and the recent emergence of the Charlotte Hornets, led by rookie Kon Knueppel.
Wizards fans agree that their team is among the league’s worst, but they’re willing to accept pain now if it means a Pistons- or Spurs-like rise in the years to come.
On Saturday, about one hour before “O Canada” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Mark Oliver and 14-year-old Owen sat as 10-year-old Jack and 7-year-old Wyatt stood near the railing where Wizards players walked from the court to their locker room.
“I never cheer for a loss,” Mark said. “I always want to see the players playing hard, having a good time. Morale is huge and important for the culture. But if we lose, it’s no big deal. We’re happy about the loss long-term. So, (if) see them play hard, keep it close, make it a game, it’ll be great.”
Owen said: “As long as we’re developing and then we’re just getting better, and then next year, when we’ve got AD and Trae, we’re going to be good to go. We’re going to be all set, and we’ll start winning some games.”
For months now, there has been an argument within the Oliver household. The boys’ mom, Kim Oliver, is a Celtics fan, and she tells her husband and their children that the Celtics don’t tank. Mark and the boys have watched almost every Wizards game on TV this season, much to her frustration.
The boys remain fans, even if it involves tanking for the remainder of this season.
“I know you’re not supposed to do it,” Jack Oliver said, referring to tanking. “But you could get Cameron Boozer or AJ Dybantsa.”
