Of the three NBA teams in Texas, two of them – the San Antonio Spurs and the Houston Rockets – still have championship aspirations this season. They are trying to win as many games as possible to get the best position for the playoffs.
The Dallas Mavericks, however, are spending the last weeks of the season in a much different way. The Mavericks currently have the sixth-worst record in the NBA, and team executives might wish they were even worse.
There’s a lot of competition in the race to the bottom of the NBA standings, though. Losing as many games as possible for the rest of the season is the goal for about 10 NBA teams, as they try to get the highest pick possible to draft a new player.
But the losing has become so chronic with some teams, that league observers are starting to wonder whether this strategy has gone too far.
Kirk Goldsberry, executive director of the Business of Sports Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, former vice president of strategic research with the San Antonio Spurs, and contributor to The Ringer, spoke to the Texas Standard about possible solutions to the league’s problem. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This is a conversation that NBA diehards are very familiar with, but for those who perhaps are a little less familiar, can you explain what’s behind this phenomenon, a sort of race to the bottom among the losingest NBA teams?
Kirk Goldsberry: Yeah, it’s pretty much the ultimate perverse incentive in pro sports right now.
In other words, the league is rewarding the worst-performing teams with the most likely chances to get players like Victor Wembanyama and Cooper Flagg, but also punishing teams in the middle of the standings with lower chances to get those exact types of players.
But you know, you wouldn’t have to be a rocket scientist. I mean, I think, heck, a fifth grader or a sixth grader could figure out that you’re gonna end up with a race to the bottom if the incentive is as great as it is, right?
Help me understand how this could be a thing in the first place.
Well, it’s a thing in the first place for one big reason: That we have a draft — in other words, a contest to see who can get the first pick of the incoming talent. And so a lot of us think the system is broken right there.
Wait a minute. Let me stop you right there because I don’t know that it stands to reason that just a draft… Let’s say that the first to pick would be selected by random so that there wasn’t an incentive to be the worst team.
Yeah, and a lot of people are suggesting that all the draft odds be, quote, “flattened” across all 30 organizations, regardless of how they end. And that’s how some people are saying we should fix this issue of the race to the bottom. If all the teams have a 1/30 chance of getting the next Cooper Flagg, that could fix it.
But others will point out, hey, we need a system, it’s almost socialistic in nature, to give really valuable assets to our worse-performing members in the organization. And so when the draft was started, that was a good-faith understanding: If your team was doing really poorly, hey, we’ll give you this top player to help you get better.
We hope you’ll keep on trying to win. But now, since we’ve got what we got, I imagine there might be a little chicanery involved here. I mean, what are we looking at, like teams exaggerating injuries for the best players and giving them extra rest — that kind of thing?
A hundred percent, and even getting rid of players in advance of a season that they plan on tanking for.
So there are teams that look out two, three, four years in advance and say, Hey, we’re going to be bad for multiple years here and we’re going to do that on purpose. And we’re gonna do that by getting rid of some. “Hey, my point guard’s too good for this project.”
We talked about one potential solution floating out there to help incentivize losing in the NBA. Are there any others you’ve heard about that you’re particularly partial to?
I think that giving these incredible athletes some choice about where they play basketball is my favorite solution.
So Cooper Flagg last year went to the Mavericks and I don’t want to irritate any Maverick’s fans, but imagine a world where he could choose between one of six teams that could offer him a contract.
So in other words, the Mavs or the Wizards or the Kings could all offer the same deal. Potential number one player, and then the player would have some free will choosing where he might go play.
