Sports’ binary nature is one of its more alluring aspects. Get out of that grey zone and exist in an uncompromising world, where victory has you walking on air and defeat has you wondering why life is cruel and unjust.
The past couple decades, though, have gone a long way toward adding some shading to outcomes. A win is a win, sure, but unconvincing wins are dissected by stats that aim to offer a deeper understanding of how a team is really doing.
The same, of course, holds true for defeats and rarely does a loss — or losing in general — require a bigger asterisk than when it occurs in the name of tanking, a term that seems to mean different things to different people.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver is among those who believe intentionally piling up losses is for, well, losers. And he’s not alone. In recent years, the NHL has altered its draft lottery format so that the top three selections can be won by any of the 14 (15 as of next April) non-playoff teams. And with the NBA season having tipped off on Tuesday, Silver’s league has taken action to ensure The Association’s last-place team will soon no longer have the best hope of claiming the No. 1 pick. As of the 2018-19 campaign, the bottom three clubs will each have a 14 per cent chance of winning the top selection. This upcoming season will be the last in which the cellar dweller’s odds of drafting first is 25 per cent.
It’s not hard to understand why leagues want nothing to do with Ls by design. But like so many other aspects of contemporary sports, tanking as a step in franchise-building has become a much more sophisticated enterprise. It’s really down to semantics and I’d submit that taking a knee for a season or two in pursuit of greater goals shouldn’t carry a loaded label like tanking. Let’s just call it, playing the long game.
Think of it in the context of the Chicago Bulls, who kick off their season Thursday night in Toronto against the Raptors.
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Last year, Chicago used the ghosts of Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo to snag the last playoff spot in the pathetic Eastern Conference, then lost a six-game, opening round series to the Boston Celtics. Only this past summer, by trading Jimmy Butler to the Minnesota Timberwolves, did the Bulls telegraph their intentions to start again. What did Chicago fans gain from the past 12 months? Even if the Bulls had beaten the Celtics, where were they going? Why not set the wheels in motion a year ago and be that much closer to the day when you can actually compete for something more than a joke of a post-season berth?
Never in the history of pro sports have so many smart people staffed front offices. And never has it been more obvious that the only path to parades is through ground-up, meticulous drafting and development. From the defending World Series-champion Chicago Cubs, to the Houston Astros — who still have a great chance at this October’s title — to the Bay Street-rolling Toronto Maple Leafs, many clubs that have either already achieved greatness or appear poised to soon are now simply through to the other side of sport’s macro win/loss equation.
There was a time when tanking was truly a dubious exercise — just ask anyone who watched the 1983-84 Pittsburgh Penguins stink their way to Mario Lemieux. In bygone eras, the next big thing was often an undeserved reward for clueless management groups hoping to backdoor their way to success. But just as the games played on the ice, court and diamond don’t really resemble what we saw 30 years ago, the aesthetic of awful has changed. There’s no Benny Hill, slapstick element to it anymore; nobody’s going out there with their skates on the wrong feet or shoe laces tied together. Ideally, tanking teams are often staffed with hard-working players who have the savvy to stay in games, but lack the skill to win them.
The fact is, tanking is a management-level operation, not a ground-level thing. That’s why it’s so hard on the unfortunate players who happen to be passing through a town when losing is the name of the game. The big-picture goal, however, should always be taking definitive, sometimes difficult actions in the name of inching your team closer to a championship — even that means moving backwards for a bit. Did you ever hear Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein or Leafs boss Brendan Shanahan talk about a rebuild on the fly? That’s the term that should actually cause alarm; it’s akin to hearing someone say they want to lose 20 pounds without changing their diet or going to the gym.
Even in the midst of 100-loss seasons, backers of the Astros or Cubs — who’ve been to three straight National League Championship Series — could dream of better days because they knew the people running the show had their eye on a bigger prize. Sometimes hope is more valuable than victories. Who would you rather be supporting; a terrible team with a plan, or a mushy-middle squad that makes an art of first- and second-round exits? Franchises obsessed with optics need to give fans more credit, because even fandom has become more sophisticated over time. For every face-painter screaming about wins and losses, there are three supporters with intimate knowledge of prospect pipelines, the coming draft and the undeniable blueprint for success.
I think the most excited fan bases at the end of a given season are the four or five cheering for teams with a real chance to win that year’s championship and the handful near the bottom who know a No. 1 overall pick could make all the difference for their club 18 months down the road.
All the number-crunching in the world still won’t reveal a can’t-miss approach to securing a title. You want to de-incentivize tanking, forget re-jigging lottery odds and just make the tortured diaries of Philadelphia 76ers and Buffalo Sabres supporters required reading. That should quickly clear up any debate about the existence of silver bullets as it pertains to chasing championships.
That said, we live in a world where high-end talent has never been more valued and the avenues to acquire it so choked. NHL superstars sign eight-year deals before they can legally drink in the U.S. And, increasingly, baseball players are being locked up at a younger age, too. Trades do happen, but you’ve got to make it work under the cap in a couple leagues and, especially in 2017, you get nothin’ for nothin’.
The NBA is the last place where, if you’re willing to cut big cheques, you can conceivably build a championship-calibre team through free agency — assuming you’re one of the eight to 10 destination organizations in the league.
How are the other 20 supposed to go about building a winner, though? How long do you think it will be before another team drafts players like Steph Curry and Draymond Green seventh and 35th overall, as the Golden State Warriors did? My answer would be in generations, not years.
No team can reach the top without finding good players throughout the draft, but the ones who move the needle most are usually found at the top of the board. The pursuit of those players through any means necessary is the sign of a committed front office servicing hopeful fans.
Why would we want to do anything to change that?
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