I used to be in the Army. I wasn’t a war hero or a combat veteran. I never got deployed. Most of my time was spent making PowerPoints about wildfires or pretending to understand why the Humvee wasn’t operational. I stubbed my toe pretty bad in the barracks once, though.
During my time in green, I had very few good leaders. But one sticks out in my mind. We all called him Sergeant T. T was a good man. On his first day in the unit, he walked up to me and asked, “Doehass, how often does a good soldier need a haircut?”
I responded with a pretty standard answer, “Around every two weeks.”
“Wrong answer. A good soldier never needs a haircut, because he already got one. Understand?”
That was who Sergeant T was. He was constantly reminding us that we needed to be looking for “the right answer.” The right answer isn’t necessarily the most convenient one, and no answer is right just because “it is the way we have always done it.”
Most importantly, Sergeant T could hold his soldiers to “the right answer” because he himself exemplified it in almost everything he did. “We can’t expect of those who follow us what we won’t do ourselves,” I once heard him say to a Sergeant Major’s face. Even Sergeant Major had no recourse for being criticized by someone of such a lower rank than him, because T was squeaky clean.
In honor of one of the finest men I have ever known, let’s look at the NBA’s tanking issue and try to find the right answer.
I am not going to try to convince you that tanking is bad because it’s bad for competition or because it doesn’t lead to winning on the other side of it. Honestly, when a team is at the end of its competitive window, trading its best players for draft picks and young players is the right move. But we don’t call that tanking, we call that rebuilding.
When we are talking about tanking, we are talking about deliberately sitting healthy, high-performing players so that the team loses by design.
For example, on February 7th, the Utah Jazz pulled their best two players, Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr., at the beginning of the fourth quarter against the Orlando Magic. They never returned to the game. At one point, the Jazz led by 17. They ended up losing the game by 3 while Markkanen and Jackson Jr. watched from the bench.
By not putting their best players back in the game at the end, the Jazz robbed fans of what could have been an incredibly fun finish. That experience matters. I won’t go too far into politics or the socioeconomic status of most of us NBA fans, but I don’t need to in order to tell you that no matter who has been in office on either side of the aisle over the last…THREE DECADES!?…our dollars have become less and less valuable.
That matters because while we have been getting poorer, ticket prices have only risen. On top of ticket prices, NBA fans now need a variety of streaming services and packages in order to watch their basketball team play.
Blatant tanking like the Utah Jazz did on February 7th is not strategy; it is shrinkflation robbing us yet again. While the prices rise, the product decreases in quality. The NBA product is no different from your favorite bag of chips.
Again, trading away your best players to go into a rebuild is a good and viable strategy. Trading away so many of your best players that your team looks more like the Valley Suns than the Phoenix Suns is also a viable strategy. Carrying players on your roster that fans expect to see, but don’t get to, is the wrong answer.
I found this post on NBA Reddit this weekend by u/DariaYankovic:
This is the heart of the issue. Parents working hard so that they can spend whatever is left after the IRS takes its cut to bring their kids to see the best the world has to offer. That is the Reddit post of a man bringing his son to see the Los Angeles Kings next year, not the Los Angeles Lakers.
I don’t care if my team is bad. Of course, I want them to be good, but during the down years in the late 2010s, I was actively rooting for the Suns to lose because I understood that the fourth overall pick in the 2017 draft had the potential to create a future championship-level backcourt of Fox and Booker (I would have been right). Or that the first overall pick in 2018 could create an inside-out dynamism with a Booker-Ayton 1-2 punch would have pushed the Suns over the top (let’s not talk about that one).
But in those years, I never wanted to see my team lose because they sat Devin Booker. I always wanted to see Book play. And he did. Here are the EIGHT career game winners in chronological order that Booker has so far, the second most in the NBA since he entered the league. Notice anything about the first few? Did the Suns win very many games in the years he hit those? In the third game winner, I notice a #3 jersey not on Kelly Oubre, Chris Paul, or Dillon Brooks, but Trevor Ariza.
Let’s rewind to his second career game winner. It came in the 2016-2017 season on March 11, 2017 against the Dallas Mavericks. The Suns were 22-43 coming into the night, the Mavs were 28-36, both teams would end the season in the lottery. The Suns would be the second worst team in the league, ending the season at 24-58. They lost 15 of the next 16 after this shot and finished just four games better than the worst team in the league, the Brooklyn Nets.
Should the Suns have sat Booker, already their best player at just 20 years old, so that they had a better shot at drafting Markelle Fultz? Should it have been Ronnie Price or Leandro Barbosa taking that shot instead? Of course not.
Suns fans in attendance and at home watching got to see a flash of brilliance.
Some of our Bright Side readers may have even been at that game. Some of you may have taken your kids and left that arena as the coolest parent on Earth, with a shared memory that will last for life.
I was fifteen years old when Devin Booker hit that shot nine years ago. Devin Booker’s greatness made me a Suns fan for life. Long after he is retired and in the Ring of Honor, I am going to be a fan of the Phoenix Suns because I was here for the Devin Booker era. And that started when the team was terrible, but Book was playing.
Of those next 16 games in 2017, by the way, Devin Booker played 14. I don’t want you to leave this article with the impression that the Sarver Suns were above tanking, though. A quick look at game logs to end the year from 2016-2018 will tell you that the Suns were definitely on board the tank train at times. But they never fully committed before the All-Star break the way teams are nowadays.
In John Voita’s article yesterday, he wrote about how a rebuilding Ishbia Suns team may look different from it did in the Sarver era.
UPDATE: Voita was right, Ishbia isn’t a tanker. I love this entire statement by Mat Ishbia. He summed up all of my biggest complaints about tanking in one tweet.
Furthermore, it can be debated whether or not tanking does work. Below are the draft positions of the best player on each team in the NBA Finals over the last decade, top 5 picks are bolded:
2025: SGA – 11th, Haliburton – 12th
2024: Tatum – 3rd, Doncic – 3rd
2023: Jokic – 41st, Butler – 30th
2022: Curry – 7th, Tatum – 3rd
2021: Antetokounmpo – 15th, Booker – 13th
2020: James – 1st, Butler – 30th
2019: Leonard – 15th, Curry – 7th
2018: Durant – 2nd, James – 1st
2017: Durant – 2nd, James – 1st
2016: James – 1st, Curry – 7th
Four players. In the last decade, there have been twelve different best players on a Finals team. Of those twelve, only four, or one-third of them, have been top five picks in the draft. I will grant you, however, that those four players reached the NBA Finals six times out of ten. But one of those four is a top two player of all time. Another is a top ten to fifteen player of all time.
Tanking sucks for you, the fan, and its results are murky at best.
Still, the right answer can be to lose. The way we reach the losses is how we get the wrong answer, however. The ends do not justify the means.
What is the solution? I don’t know. If the solution is financial penalties, then the NBA needs to do more than a $500,000 fine. Ask the Dallas Mavericks organization if they would have spent that much money in exchange for the rights to draft Cooper Flagg. They would have said yes and that they would have spent so much more.
People smarter than me will eventually figure out the solution to fix tanking. For now, I only argue that it does matter. It matters because your hard work matters. It matters because the experiences you share with your son matter. It matters because we all know, deep down, that this might as well be cheating.
And if it doesn’t matter, then why won’t any of us stop talking about it?