Adam Silver has pledged to address NBA tanking before June 2026, and the language he's using — "full stop," "something more extreme" — signals that the league understands this has moved from a structural inconvenience to a credibility problem. The average margin of victory this season reached 13.1 points, a historic high. Eighty-nine games were decided by 30 or more points. The average point spread sat at 7.1 points, the highest since 1990-91. These aren't abstract statistics about competitive balance — they're the numbers that determine whether fans watch.
At least eight teams have been identified as engaging in deliberate tanking this season: the Jazz, Grizzlies, Wizards, Nets, Bulls, Pacers, and others. The methods have grown more sophisticated and less deniable. Teams sign G League-level players to 10-day contracts and give them significant minutes in close games. Coaches remove their best young players in the fourth quarter when a win looks possible, replacing them with lineups of clearly inferior players. The Jazz and Grizzlies have been the most visible examples, but the practice has spread far enough that it's become almost normalized in how the league's second half of the season is discussed.
Silver's stated problem is that tanking and genuine rebuilding have become nearly indistinguishable from the outside. That's partially true, but it also understates the degree to which some teams have moved from rebuilding into active engineering of losses. A team playing its young players and losing is different from a team that benches its young players in tight fourth quarters to ensure defeat. The league knows the difference. So do the coaches and front offices doing it.
Three proposals were presented to the board of governors: an expanded lottery covering 18 teams with flattened odds, a two-season weighting system that accounts for records across multiple years, and a "five-by-five" method granting identical lottery odds to the bottom five teams. None received enthusiastic support. The fundamental tension is that every team in the room knows it might be rebuilding in five years and wants to preserve optionality. That's exactly the collective action problem that makes tanking so hard to legislate away.
The June deadline is Silver's way of forcing a decision before the next draft, which is the event all this behavior is ultimately aimed at. What "more extreme" looks like in practice is unclear. But the fact that the commissioner is using that language publicly, and that the league is presenting concrete proposals rather than vague intentions, suggests June 2026 may actually produce something. Whether it produces something that works is a separate question — one that the next few draft cycles will answer.
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