Tanking was a hot topic as the Sacramento Kings prepared to face the Indiana Pacers in a pivotal battle for worst place with major NBA draft implications.
Sacramento and Indiana went into the contest with the worst records in the NBA and only a half-game between them in a race to the bottom. Both teams had incentives to lose, but as the night went on it became clear the Kings and Pacers were playing to win.
The Pacers opened up a 20-point lead in the third quarter, but the Kings came back to win 114-109 on Thursday before a small but boisterous crowd of 14,618 at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento. Devin Carter scored 22 of his career-high 24 points in the fourth quarter as the Kings stormed back to win their second game in a row after beating the Chicago Bulls on Sunday.
The Kings (16-50) have had the worst record in the NBA since Jan. 30. That dubious distinction now belongs to the Pacers (15-50), who have lost 10 in a row and 14 of 16.
Kings coach Doug Christie, who often describes himself as a sore loser, shared his thoughts on tanking during his pregame press conference.
“For me, this is just me personally, I don’t mess with the game,” Christie said. “Do not mess with the game. You let the game do what’s it’s going to do. There has to be a respect for the game and how you go about the game, and in my opinion stuff like that scars the players.”
The Pacers looked nothing like the team that reached the NBA Finals last season. Tyrese Haliburton has been out all season with a torn Achilles. Andrew Nembhardt (back), Pascal Siakam (knee), Ivica Zubac (ankle), T.J. McConnell (hamstring) and Johnny Furphy (ACL) were also out for Tuesday’s game.
The Kings were also missing several key players with Zach LaVine (finger), Domantas Sabonis (knee), Keegan Murray (ankle), De’Andre Hunter (eye) and Dylan Cardwell (ankle) out due to injuries.
In February, the NBA fined the Utah Jazz $500,000 and the Pacers $100,000 for violating the league’s player participation policy as part of a league-wide crackdown on tanking. NBA commissioner Adam Silver later announced the league is planning to impellent significant anti-tanking rule changes for the 2026-27 season.
“The league has announced that they’re going to make some adjustments to how the league operates with respect to the end of the season or whatever it is, so I think it’s great,” Carlisle said. “I look forward to it.”
This isn’t the first time the NBA has taken a hard look at tanking and the lottery process. Carlisle remembers discussing it when he served on the NBA competition committee beginning in 2012.
“There was a lot of talk about the lottery system, how to make it better, how to make it more fair,” Carlisle said. “There have been some minor adjustments to it, but at that time the determination was made to keep it pretty much the same.”
Under the current system, the teams with the three worst records have a 52.1% chance of securing a top-four pick and a 14.1% chance of landing the No. 1 pick. The team with the worst record can pick no lower than No. 5. The team with the second-worst record can pick no lower than No. 6 and so on.
The Pacers have more incentive to lose than any team in the league. They traded their first-round pick to the Los Angeles Clippers as part of the deal to acquire Zubac, but it is protected 1-4 and 10-30, meaning Indiana will retain the pick if it lands in the top four or falls outside the top 10. The Pacers have gone 2-21 since making the trade.
History of tanking
The tanking discussion is nothing new in the NBA. Teams have been bottoming out for years in order to secure high draft picks.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The San Antonio Spurs did it in 1996-97, selected Tim Duncan with the No. 1 pick in the draft and won four championships over a span of nine years. The Philadelphia 76ers averaged 18.8 wins over four seasons and received the No. 1 pick in 2016 and 2017, but they never advanced beyond the conference semifinals.
More recently, the defending NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder drafted Chet Holmgren with the NO. 2 pick after winning 24 games in 2021-22. The Detroit Pistons, who now sit atop the Eastern Conference, had four top-five picks in four years, including the No. 1 pick in 2021.
“The two best teams in the league, record wise, East and West, were both built by getting to a point where they were very bad record wise and built it back up, and both of those teams have done a great job of doing that,” Carlisle said. “Oklahoma City did it over a number of years and Detroit essentially did it the same way.”
Pride and professionalism
Meanwhile, in Sacramento, the Kings have leaned into a youth movement as they develop younger players for the future. On Tuesday, Carter closed out the game with Killian Hayes, Nique Clifford, Daeqwon Plowden and Maxime Raynaud while veterans such as DeMar DeRozan and Russell Westbrook led the cheers from the Sacramento bench.
Christie praised his veterans for their pride and professionalism.
“They come to play every single night, and there’s a respect that goes with that,” Christie said. “This league is hard as hell. This season hasn’t been what we would want, but there have been so many injuries and so many things that have happened, and they haven’t relented in how they go about their business.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2026 at 12:42 PM.
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Jason Anderson is The Sacramento Bee’s Kings beat writer. He is a Sacramento native and a graduate of Fresno State, where he studied journalism and college basketball under the late Jerry Tarkanian.