The Portland Trail Blazers defeated the Milwaukee Bucks on Tuesday night. It was their 5th win in 6 games, a far cry from the 13-28 record that preceded it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Celebration Town. Before, when the Blazers were losing, a segment of Portland fans expressed displeasure with the directionless nature of the franchise and all the bitter defeats that came with. Now, with the Blazers winning, a segment of Portland fans is expressing displeasure with the directionless nature of the franchise and all the fruitless victories that come with.

This submission to the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag, for instance, came before the Milwaukee victory. It no doubt has intensified since then.

Hi Dave,

Please make it make sense. Our three lottery picks (Sharpe, Scoot, Clingan) are coming off the bench while Grant, Ayton, and Simons are starting.

We have no shot at the playoffs but we’re also using the vets to win enough games to knock us out of lottery contention for any of the great players that might actually turn things around for us.

What are we doing? Am I the crazy one here?

-J

No, my friend. You’re not crazy. Neither are the people who are going to object to your question. This is the nature of the “To Tank or Not to Tank” debate. It’s a Rorschach test. We’re never going to come to a consensus on the shape of those inkblots. We just know they’re making the paper pretty messy.

Part of the issue is perspective. Let’s say the Blazers would benefit from a lottery pick like you posit. (Safe assumption there!) Let’s also say they kinda sorta halfway know that the best thing this season is to lose a bit and they’ve been careful not to make moves that would stop that process unless those moves would tangibly benefit them in the future. For instance, they’ll acquire Toumani Camara because he’s young and underpaid and he’s going to provide outsized benefit for years but they’re not going to use their mid-level exception on a veteran who might help them to a few more wins but won’t change anything bigger than that. I think that’s a fair way to describe tanking without accusing a team of literally trying to lose, which few franchises do.

Presuming all that is true. How much does that change the day-to-day operation of the team?

Completely hypothetically, imagine a problematic leader in power: autocratic, dense, a nightmare. This terrible rotten unqualified megalomaniac politician decides he wants a bridge built connecting the highway and an island just offshore. A rock on a small hill there looks like his face if you see it in the right profile. He wants everyone in the universe to be able to drive past it, gaze on it, and view it as a divine sign of his right to rule. Other than that, there’s nothing on the island at all. It’s literally a bridge to nowhere.

Our leader contracts with a construction company to build the bridge.

What are they to do?

The construction boss is probably going to look at the project, shrug his shoulders, and say, “My job is to build the bridge I’m contracted to build, the best bridge possible.”

We might say, “But it’s going nowhere! It’s a bogus project. You’re actually leading people backwards and astray by building this. It’d be better overall to not build a bridge, let alone a good one.”

But that’s not his call, right? If he’s going to build a bridge, he’s going to build it. From his viewpoint, making a worse bridge would be counterproductive. Cars might crash through or it might collapse. Then people would get hurt. Or even if that didn’t happen, other people would see the bad bridge and say, “This construction company sucks. I’m never hiring them to do my work.”

We might suggest subtle ways to sabotage the project or advance other priorities. “Why don’t you invert the organizational structure? Your experienced workers already know how to do this. You’ve got promising trainees on hand. If ever there were a project to tell the experienced guys to knock off and let the young guys spread their wings, this bridge to nowhere is it. You’ll probably benefit in the long run.”

He’s not going to do that either, though. That would create a worse bridge now. It’d also mess up his chain of command, confuse his experienced workers, and probably expose his trainees to situations they’re not ready for yet, leading to mistakes. The ramifications of that could last beyond this current bridge project, impacting organization and workers for years to come.

Instead our construction boss is going to build that bridge exactly like he knows how to do, with the people and resources he has on hand, period. The project may be questionable at the conception level, but he’s not going to let that change sound bridge-building the way he sees it.

How you perceive all this depends on your viewpoint. Is this whole thing crazy and probably useless? Yes. Is that justification for doing less than the best you can when it comes to actually measuring pillars and pouring cement? Probably not. Are those trainees going to end up better in the long run than the tenured workers? Maybe. Does this situation mandate a change in organizational order, promoting the trainees over the guys who know what they’re doing in order to give them experience? Ehhhh…

Welcome to the wonderful world of tanking. There are no solid answers. There’s no perfectly right way forward. It’s a bridge to nowhere. The only hope is that another project will come after this one, a project that matters more, where excellent skills get used towards an excellent product that actually ends up taking people somewhere. Until that happens everybody can find something to question and express displeasure with at any given moment, a civil war between priorities and procedures.

In the midst of this, the only prayer is to do the best you can each day, keep those skills sharp and the process sensible, and wait for that next call that will hopefully be agreeable and unite everybody once more.

Thanks for the question! You can always send yours to blazersub@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as possible!