Why does it seem like the NBA is always facing a crisis right after the Super Bowl? Sometimes it’s load management, sometimes it’s players not trying in the All-Star Game, and this year it’s tanking. The moral outrage about teams losing on purpose is overwhelming all other coverage of the league right now, but it’s important to note where it’s coming from. Surely there’s some Utah Jazz and Washington Wizards fans upset their teams are refusing to play their best playersin the fourth quarter of close games, but I’d wager most of them are fine with the plan to increase their lotto odds during a lost season in hopes of adding a future star.

The outcry over tanking mostly amounts to outside noise, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. There’s nine or 10 teams incentivized to lose every game the rest of the season right now, and that’s not a good look for the league. It’s just that in rushing to find a medicine to cure tanking, the NBA risks giving itself bigger problems from the side effects.

The NBA is going to address tanking for next season, according to ESPN insider Shams Charania, and former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski is on the panel advising Adam Silver. Here are the ideas under consideration to fix tanking, according to Charania. I’ll give my take on each of these as we go through them.

• First-round draft picks can be protected only for top-four or top-14-plus selections (pretty good)
• Lottery odds freeze at the trade deadline or a later date (Pointless)
• No longer allowing a team to pick in the top four in consecutive years and/or after consecutive bottom-three finishes (Feels too drastic … how about can’t do it three years in a row?)
• Teams can’t pick in the top four the year after making the conference finals (Stupid)
• Lottery odds allocated based on two-year records (Don’t love it)
• Lottery extended to include all play-in teams (Don’t hate it)
• Flatten odds for all lottery teams (A step too far)

Some of these ideas are fine and some of them are terrible. I still haven’t seen a really good tanking fix that both helps bad teams get a shot at acquiring stars and also incentives teams to win every game. What I do know is that a lot of the proposed tanking fixes would have unintended negative side effects and open up new pathways for bad PR for the league.

My two main takeaways on these anti-tanking measures are this:

1. NBA tanking won’t be as bad as it is right now every year, and the problem should correct itself next season
2. None of these get to the heart of what really is the NBA’s biggest issue.

Why is tanking so bad right now? It’s because the 2026 NBA Draft is loaded, and because one player can make a bigger impact in basketball than any other sport. If you’re a team without a star, you have three ways of trying to acquire one: draft them, trade for them, and sign them in free agency. A real star hasn’t changed teams in free agency since Kawhi Leonard joined the Clippers in 2019, so that one is mostly off the table. Trading for stars usually requires a ton of assets out the door that makes it really different to build around the star once you get them. Drafting stars is the best pathway because it gets a young player on a cost-controlled contract and allows them to forge a stronger connection with a fanbase that watches them grow up over the years.

Tanking is the most sensible path for a bad team to take; to me, it’s just part of the NBA lifecycle. The Jazz and Wizards both already decided they won’t be tanking next year by acquiring Anthony Davis and Trae Young (in Washington) and Jaren Jackson Jr. (in Utah). Teams already know they can’t tank forever, and they shouldn’t be. A rule change that bans teams from moving up in the lottery three times over four years seems like a modest fix that could really help. In this scenario, the Spurs couldn’t have moved up for Dylan Harper with the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft because they already moved up for Victor Wembanyama and Stephon Castle in the previous two years.

Coming up with new rules now hurts the teams who already made their rebuilding decisions at the trade deadline. Take the Memphis Grizzlies and Chicago Bulls, for example, who have been forgoing tanking for years to try to get in the playoffs. This plan has led the Bulls to pure mediocrity, and at the trade deadline they finally came to their senses to sell Ayo Dosunmu, Coby White, Nikola Vucevic, and others. The Grizzlies couldn’t break through in the West either and started trading their best players. If the NBA puts in anti-tanking rules now, then it essentially punishes teams that just chose this path instead of the ones who made it a problem in the first place.

Tanking isn’t the NBA’s biggest problem. The number of games is.

Most of the NBA’s problems can be fixed by shortening the schedule. The 82-game regular season is just too long. Today’s game has more space to cover and more movement than ever before, and it’s simply too physically demanding on players’ bodies over the course of the regular season plus playoffs.

High school and college teams play about 40 games max in a season, usually a little less. The WNBA plays 44 games right now. A European powerhouse like Real Madrid plays something like 68 games between a couple different leagues, then has shorter playoff run. Only the NBA makes its champion play 100+ games per season (the Thunder played 105 games in their 2025 championship season), and in this era of modern basketball, the game is way worse off for it.

Trimming the season to 60 or 65 games would be an ideal number. Suddenly “load management” isn’t as much of a concern because games are more spaced out. Tanking isn’t as much of a problem either because there’s fewer games to light on fire. The standings usually don’t really change that much after the 60-game mark as it is. Every game would feel a lot more important, which is the main thing the NBA wants to establish.

Trimming the season down by 20 games would by costly for both the owners and the players, but it’s possible some of that money could be made up in the long-run with a better overall product. Sometimes, you need to take a step back to take a step forward, and that should be the NBA’s intention as it evaluates what’s wrong with today’s game.

It’s wild that the NBA got terrible press for a bad dunk contest, which is a meaningless NBA event. Meanwhile, this Super Bowl was unwatchable, uncompetitive trash, and so was the Super Bowl before it, but no one ever uses that as an example of why the NFL is broken. The last NBA Finals featured incredible competitive play, a true Cinderella story in the Indiana Pacers, and a superstar putting his body on the line to try to win a championship in Tyrese Haliburton, who tore his Achilles.

The NBA Finals had toughness, drama, great competition. The Super Bowl had none of it. So why are we always stuck arguing about tanking with people who don’t watch the Jazz or Wizards, or something similar?

The NBA has dissolved the value of each game because there’s too damn many of them. It’s the one thing that ties all of the league’s problems together. There is no real way to fix tanking, at least not one I’ve seen. I’m in favor of reasonable tanking measures, but not wholesale changes. If the NBA wants to address its underlying problems, start by shortening the season.