When the Memphis Grizzlies visited the Utah Jazz last week, only one Grizzlies player who logged minutes—Rayan Rupert—began the season in the NBA. Dariq Whitehead, Memphis’ leading scorer that night, was making his first career start.

Utah, which trotted out its own seven-man group containing four G League call-ups, won the matchup of unrecognizable lineups, 147-101.

The Jazz had already taken self-sabotage to a whole new level earlier in the season. In February, Utah sat healthy stars Lauri Markkanen and Jaren Jackson Jr. in the fourth quarters of multiple games, leading the NBA to fine the organization $500,000 for “conduct detrimental to the league.”

With a loaded 2026 draft class on the horizon, more teams than ever restricted the minutes of their best players after the All-Star break in hopes of improving their odds of moving up in the draft lottery. Tanking was one of the major storylines of the 2025-26 regular season, particularly on social media where discourse often focused more on the league’s bad teams than the good ones.

“We are going to fix it,” commissioner Adam Silver said at a press conference in March. “Full stop.”

Tanking’s Impact on Regular Season Basketball

Utah’s 46-point margin of victory last Friday was particularly one-sided, but uncompetitive basketball was par for the course during the regular season. It got worse as the year went along. In April, 34% of all games were decided by at least 20 points—by far the highest rate for any month in NBA history. That followed a March in which the blowout percentage was 28% (the second-highest month ever) and a February with a 25% blowout rate (the fifth-highest month ever).

This was an historic season for shellackings, but it continued a multi-season trend. Aside from the final three months of 2025-26, only three other months in NBA history had a blowout rate of 25% or greater, and two of them were April 2022 and April 2025.

Average margin of victory tells the same story: an increase in lopsided games in the 2020s. The three highest average final score margins in NBA history have occurred in the past three seasons, and that number surpassed 13.0 points for the first time this year.

It would be tempting to attribute wider scoring margins to the overall increase in scoring—teams averaged 115.6 points per game this year, the highest mark since the 1960s—but previous offensive booms did not lead to a similar increase in blowouts. While the league averaged 109 points per game in the 1980s, for instance, higher than the 1990s, 2000s or 2010s, only 13% of April games in that decade were decided by more than 20 points.

Nor does the variance caused by the recent increase in 3-point shooting (i.e. hot and cold shooting nights) explain the rise of blowouts. The spike in 3-point attempts largely occurred between 2012 and 2019, whereas the blowout rate grew only marginally during that span before skyrocketing since then.

The answer is tanking. For the entirety of NBA history until the 2020s, the frequency of blowouts did not significantly increase later in the season. In the 2010s, 14% of November games were blowouts, and 15% of April games were blowouts. This decade, 16% of November games have been blowouts, but a whopping 23% of April games have fit the criteria.

What changed? For one, teams have gotten more tactical about their approach to tanking, as they have with most aspects of basketball operations. The Oklahoma City Thunder, now the dominant team in the league, provided a perfect tanking model in 2021 and 2022, shutting down Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for long stretches after the All-Star break and deploying lineups of G League players.

An added benefit was that the Thunder uncovered hidden talent while giving relative no-name players the spotlight. Their current, championship-contending rotation includes late second-round draft picks Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe, each of whom proved their NBA abilities playing heavy minutes in mostly losing efforts.

Other franchises have naturally tried to copy Oklahoma City.

Injuries being at an all-time high has also led to more games with impactful players genuinely being unavailable, and it’s given tanking teams easier excuses to sit star players and claim it’s for health reasons.

Another key change, however, occurred right before the ongoing blowout epidemic.

The Great Flattening of 2019

Prior to the 2018-19 season, the league “flattened” the lottery odds, reducing the very worst teams’ chances of snagging a top draft pick but increasing those probabilities for the other lottery teams. For the 2018 draft, the team with the worst record had a 25% chance of getting the No. 1 overall pick, while the team with the 10th-worst record had just a 1.1% chance. The following year, those odds converged to 14% and 3%, respectively.

The league had grown tired of the Philadelphia 76ers’ “process” of blatant tanking year after year in the mid 2010s to secure high draft picks, so it reduced the incentive for teams to be horrible. In doing so, it increased the incentive for mediocre teams to pivot and become bad. Teams in the middle of the standings decided they would rather move down to improve their chances of drafting a generational superstar than lose in the Play-In Tournament.

In one egregious example, the Dallas Mavericks rested healthy players in the last game of the 2023 regular season despite having a chance to make the playoffs, and they were hit with a $750,000 fine. That was a small price to pay for the opportunity to draft Dereck Lively II with the No. 12 overall pick.

This season, the Chicago Bulls began the campaign 23-23 but traded away several key rotation players at the deadline and went 8-28 the rest of the way, securing a 4.5% chance of getting the No. 1 overall pick.

Every era of NBA history has produced its handful of terrible teams, as the 10 worst teams in league history by net rating (point differential per 100 possessions) have come from five different decades, including the 2024-25 and 2025-26 Washington Wizards. The flattened lottery odds haven’t changed that. They have simply increased the number of bad teams.

This season, nine teams had a net rating of -5.0 or worse, making it the only such season in NBA history, according to Basketball Reference. In 2023-24, seven franchises achieved that level of incompetence, which was the first time that happened since 2007-08.

More teams than ever are not trying to win games, which has directly led to more lopsided matchups and a lower overall level of competition. Since the beginning of February, only 23% of games between two playoff or play-in teams were blowouts. But when a tanking team played a non-tanking team, the chance of the game being decided by at least 20 points went up to a whopping 35%.

The NBA’s Board of Governors is scheduled to meet on May 28 to vote on new tanking reforms, according to ESPN. The proposal with the most momentum as of last week reportedly expands the lottery to 18 teams, with the 10 worst teams having equal 8% odds of getting the No. 1 pick.

This would essentially be doubling down on flattening the odds, which was already tested in 2019 and empirically did not reduce tanking. Presenting decent, competitive teams with the prospect of attaining the best lottery odds will only further encourage those in the middle of the standings to hold a fire sale at the trade deadline to try to drop down. Furthermore, teams in the No. 6 seed might even be incentivized to move down to No. 7 to simultaneously have a shot at the playoffs and a chance at the top draft pick.

Yahoo Sports’ Kevin O’Connor later reported that another concept had gained traction within the league office: reducing odds for the worst three teams, meaning that the highest odds go to teams with the fourth through 10th worst records. While discouraging teams from being truly awful has merit, this structure would retain the incentive for middle-of-the-road teams to become worse.

All the league’s publicly reported proposals still incentivize losing on some level. The NBA needs to fundamentally rethink its approach and incentivize winning instead.

A Proposal

At the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports & Analytics Conference, PhD student Adam Gold presented a method to reduce tanking in professional hockey. His idea was that once teams were eliminated from playoff contention, wins from that point on would count towards draft ranking points, with teams that accumulate the most such points getting the highest draft picks.

This plan still enables the worst teams to get good draft position—teams eliminated from the playoffs earlier have more chances to rack up wins—but it flips the goal from losing games towards the end of the season to winning them.

The Professional Women’s Hockey League adopted the “Gold Plan” in 2024, proving its legitimacy as an anti-tanking strategy for a pro sports league.

Critics of the model claim that it simply moves tanking from the end of the season to the beginning of the season. But while some gamesmanship would still occur, it wouldn’t be nearly as blatant as it is currently. Most teams start the season believing that they have a chance to make the playoffs, as opposed to February or March when that hope has slipped away. Losing games at the beginning of the season is “beneficial” under the current lottery odds anyway—if teams really wanted to start tanking immediately out of the gate, we’d already be seeing that happening.

Teams would need to at least spend the first half of the season developing players and building a team identity, or they may find it difficult to win enough games after playoff elimination to make the early losses worthwhile.

Furthermore, the current tanking mechanism of trading away talent simply wouldn’t be a viable strategy under the Gold Plan, since rosters would have to remain good enough to win games down the stretch.

Minor modifications could reduce loopholes. For instance, retroactively rewarding wins in the five games prior to mathematical elimination from the postseason would slightly discourage teams from making a quick push to become eliminated as soon as they near that threshold.

Under this modified Gold Plan, the Jazz and Grizzlies would have both entered last Friday’s game with exactly two wins counting towards lottery ranking points. It could have been a meaningful game that both front offices wanted to win.

As long as certain teams have better odds to get higher draft picks than others, no system will fully prevent teams from gaming it—front offices have gotten too smart. But the NBA already tried tweaking the lottery odds, and it backfired. It’s time to implement a system that, at least on some level, incentivizes teams to win rather than lose.