BOSTON \u2014 Tanking has become one of the NBA\u2019s most pressing issues this season. A loaded draft with some potentially franchising talent at the top has teams racing to the bottom to maximize their chances at bouncing off the NBA floor and into the playoff conversation next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It has created a unique scenario where the league is split very distinctly into haves and have-nots. The chasm between playoff and non-playoff teams is massive, with the eliminated 11th-place Bucks 10 games behind the 10th seed Miami. Dallas, 11th in the West, is 11 games behind 10th-place Golden State.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not a new issue in this league,\u201d Commissioner Adam Silver said after last month\u2019s Board of Governors meeting. \u201cI understand where that incentive takes our teams. This meeting was not about pointing fingers at any team in particular \u2026 I will say it seemed unanimous in the room that we needed to make a change and we needed to make a change for next season. Exactly what that change is, we\u2019re continuing to work on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before his Boston Celtics<\/a> took on the Charlotte Hornets on Tuesday night, President of Basketball Operations Brad Stevens<\/a> addressed the issue, saying he\u2019s very much on board with finding a solution.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a huge proponent of doing everything we can to make sure that every night is as competitive as humanly possible,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the best players in the world and I think it\u2019s important to let them be that on that stage.\u201d<\/p>\n The NBA has recently presented three different plans to address tanking, each a variation on changing the lottery odds and involving a different amount of teams into the lottery process. One proposal mimics the WNBA\u2019s system of taking two years into account rather than one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a lot of discussions going on about how to best focus on that, both in the near term and long term,\u201d Stevens said. \u201cMaybe there is a near term solution that is a stopgap before a longer-term solution when people have time to really think about it and break it down.\u201d<\/p>\n A stopgap could give the league a short-term solution to see if it, along with a less-than-stellar 2027 NBA draft, can take some of the focus away from tanking and put more attention on the on-court product. Soon, the regular season will end and the league will turn to showcasing its good teams in the playoffs. For Stevens, it\u2019s the type of product he wants to see more often when NBA teams face each other, not just when they play in the spring.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing like the competitiveness and the energy and the talent that you see on the court in these playoffs,\u201d he said. \u201cThe more we can get every game to be incredibly meaningful to every team is really important, in my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BOSTON \u2014 Tanking has become one of the NBA\u2019s most pressing issues this season. A loaded draft with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-589167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}