How to Easily Spot Tanking & Upside of Weak Drafts

You probably have heard that in 2011 there will be a really weak NBA draft.
You also probably have heard about incentive to lose in the NBA, or in simpler word tanking.
It’s a well known phenomenon among observers of this league and yet IMHO two huge points are missing from this discussion. I’ll explain first one today and next one will be in tomorrow’s post.

But first, let’s start with the basics…
My assumption was that in the first 2-3 months of the season teams play up to their true abilities to win games because the possibility of reaching playoffs isn’t out of the question yet but when it’s not going well it creates an incentive to lose more and more games to improve team’s draft pick.

So for the Last 20 Full Seasons I picked 10 Teams Each Year which were the farthest away from playoffs [*], compared it’s wins in the first half of the season to wins in the second half and then sum them up for the whole year. It’s a very simple measure so any kind of discrepancy doesn’t have to mean “tanking” – it can be caused by a lack of luck in the close games or changes in the roster or injuries etc. That’s why I’ve examined every difference bigger than 5 games either way.

[*] – usually it meant simply the worst teams record-wise but in some cases there were ties for 10th or 10th worst team actually qualified for the playoffs.

Obviously, that idea has its flaws, for example:

• it doesn’t include teams which were tanking the whole season so I’ve checked every really bad records,
• it doesn’t include differences in schedule which could be an explanation in some cases,
• I assumed the same motive for every team – to improve draft odds – but in some cases, like Timberwolves in 2006/07, there was different one: they sold their pick to the Clippers, which was Top10 protected, so they had to be sure it will be in the Top10. I couldn’t chart fate of every pick like that,
• We are talking here about 20 years and around 200 teams so it’s possible that I’ve missed some changes, injuries etc. In those cases please let me know in the comments.

OK, that’s enough for the intro, here are the results…