The Los Angeles Lakers don't stand a chance of making the playoffs and need their draft pick to fall in the top five or it'll be sent to Phoenix. Those seem like the perfect circumstances to benefit from losing, but Lakers President Jeanie Buss says she doesn't "see what the logic would be" in tanking the rest of the season.
Jeanie Buss uses Lakers’ protected lottery pick as reason not to tank
Tanking might make sense for the Lakers, but the team’s president says she doesn’t see the logic in such a strategy.
Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
“The draft pick to Phoenix, if we don’t give it to them this year, we have to give it to them next year, so I don’t really see what the logic would be,” Buss said Tuesday during an interview with Jared Greenberg and former Laker Rick Fox on Sirius XM’s “Off The Dribble.”
“Try to tank to keep it this year, because we’d just have to give it away next year -- that doesn’t resonate with me,” she continued. “I think it’s impossible to tell your coach and tell your players, ‘Try not to win.’ That goes against everything an organization is about.”
The reasoning behind a Lakers tanking effort is similar to that of most tanking efforts: improving those nifty draft odds. Except in this instance, the stakes are even higher -- if the Lakers' 2015 pick falls outside the top five, it'll be sent to the Suns as a result of the Steve Nash trade.
Silver screen and roll
That could be significant for the Lakers, because while Buss is correct in noting that the team will send a first-round pick to Phoenix no matter what, she seems to be ignoring that not all first-round picks are created equally. Los Angeles will presumably be a much-improved group next year, and that means a lower draft pick, possibly even outside the lottery.
Ignoring the benefits of having a prospect in house for an extra year and how that affects the team’s timeline, it’s not hard to see why -- for example -- the No. 7 pick in the 2015 draft offers more value than the No. 18 pick in the 2016 draft.
Of course, things aren’t necessarily that simple for a team like the Lakers, who have a storied history of winning and one of the most competitive superstars in the league. Buss could’ve pointed to the team’s unique situation and claimed that the franchise’s winning culture transcends the value of a superior draft pick.
That’s an argument with some merit behind it, particularly as the league at large continues debating the benefits of different degrees of tanking. The Lakers should be riding high again fairly soon, and may not want to ruffle any feathers among the fan base by deliberately losing games.
However, it’s fairly plain to see why the Lakers would gain from keeping their 2015 lottery pick instead of sending it to Phoenix, and one imagines Buss knows that. Giving away a worse draft pick one year later is an undeniably better scenario.
That may not matter to Buss, though, and she probably won’t have a hard time convincing a Kobe Bryant-led group not to intentionally lose games. There are probably a few reasons why the Lakers won’t tank this season, but “we gotta trade the pick anyway” isn’t really one of them.
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