Like it or not, tanking is part of the NBA game. In this week’s edition of the NBA Power Rankings, Mike Prada proposes the Seven Levels of Tanking to give us a better idea how to define it.
NBA Power Rankings: Where We Define Tanking
There are a lot of things talking heads like to do to, for lack of a better word, “hate” on the NBA. One such thing they do is write about the major problem the league has with “tanking.” In it’s simplest terms, tanking simply refers to teams giving up on this season. In it’s most pejorative terms, it means coaches and/or players intentionally losing games in order to get better position in the draft lottery. Either way, assuming you don’t want to take a beating in the arena of public opinion, you don’t want to be a team that’s “tanking.”
But here’s the problem: what exactly is tanking? Yahoo! Sports’ Kelly Dwyer raises a good point: tanking means a lot of things. If a team is out of the playoff race and decides to go to a youth movement, that’s tanking, isn’t it? If a team decides to clear a big long-term salary off the books to create cap room, that’s tanking, isn’t it? If a team decides to give an impending young free agent an extended look to give them a better idea about whether they should re-sign him, that’s tanking, isn’t it? All these are things fans ask their teams to do every year, yet they kind of fall under the definition of tanking.
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