The Boston Celtics taking on the LA Lakers in the 2008 NBA finals. In the 2013/14 season, both faced tanking accusations. Photo by Eric Kilby
It’s no secret that the NBA draft is problematic. While initially set up with an eye to balance—the team with the worst record at the end of the year has the best chance to nab the most promising new player—the draft has also encouraged season-ending tanking. If a team is not going to make the playoffs, why not try to come in last, or almost last, and have a better shot at signing a franchise player? Over the summer of 2013, espn.com asked several economists, including Arup Sen (GRS’13) and Timothy Bond (GRS’12), to contribute their ideas on how to fix the draft.
In “Economists vs. tanking,” Sen and Bond propose the NBA fixes the draft with a credit-based system. Instead of determining the order in which franchises get to select prospective players via the current annual draft lottery—weighted in favor of the worst performers—teams would be allowed to bid on draft spots with credits, with the season’s strugglers receiving the most credits. Unused credits would carry over from season to season, and draft spots would go to the highest bidder. While this doesn’t entirely eliminate the possibility of intentional losing, credits aren’t the same as a concrete draft spot, so the incentive to try for last place would be lower. “No one really wants to tank,” says Bond, an economics professor at Purdue. “All the owners in the league want to win each game. Going to a system without any incentive to lose, where owners and fans can root for a team for the whole year, benefits everyone.”
Sports teams around the globe are progressively turning to economists to crunch their numbers and solve their problems. The massive amount of accumulated sports data offers economists a rich opportunity to explore patterns and analyze the results, from dissecting individual player stats to using “equipment that tracks air movement through the course of a game,” says Sen. He studied the impact teammate quality has on salary and performance in the NBA as part of his PhD thesis. “They’re looking for more sophisticated ways to track players all the time, and it’s factoring into personnel decisions and game strategy. If you look at the profile of general managers in the NBA today, almost all have an analytics background of some kind.”
Sen and Bond are both uncertain when—if ever—the NBA will reform the draft, but they are optimistic. “The NBA is looking for ways to stop tanking,” says Bond. “It’s about setting up the right incentives, and right now, teams have an incentive to tank.” Sen says the NBA has recognized the problem and is poised for a solution. “The new commissioner of the NBA has a reputation for being more progressive, thinking outside the box, engaging with people who are also out there talking about basketball,” he says. “The mood for change is there.”