An Unorthodox Process

In the world of sports there are many ways to build a team. While it may seem counter-intuitive, losing can be one of the best ways to win. The front office of a team makes the decisions about who the team will draft, trade for, and sign off of free agency, as well as hiring the coaches. There is no aspect of the game that is not directly influenced by the front office of each team.

Tanking is the one of the teambuilding tactics that many front offices in professional basketball (NBA) and baseball (MLB) are using more and more this past decade. Tanking is when a team trades all of their best players for prospects or draft picks in the hopes of winning more in the long term than it would be able to in the short term. While the coach and the players still do the best they can to win every game, the front office does everything it can to hinder this attempt.

To understand why tanking as a strategy for building winning teams in the future, one must first understand the relative value of top players over average ones. Wins above replacement (WAR) is a metric used to determine how much more valuable a player is to his team than the average player. In the NBA in 2020, the player with the highest WAR was James Harden with 19.8. With the NBA season being only 82 games long, this means the best player in the league is directly responsible for winning one fourth of all games for his team. Having the best player is just about equal to having the 9th and 10th best player, and this pattern is consistent.

What this means to front offices is that basketball is a superstar driven sport. In order to win, you must have at least one of the best players in the league. This is the reason NBA teams tank. The draft is the only way for NBA teams to acquire a superstar talent without shelling out a crazy amount of money for an aging talent in the open market. By trading all of their best players for draft picks, the team loses more games. The team with the least amount of wins gets better draft picks, thus giving the tanking team a better chance to draft the transcendent player that they can build around There are typically multiple teams tanking at once, which congests the arms race for each tanking team to be the best at being the worst and getting that coveted high draft pick. As a result it can take half a decade or longer for a team to draft one or two players they feel could push them to a championship.

Some years there are multiple superstars in the draft, other years there are none. In the NBA, tanking is almost a necessity unless a team already has a superstar, because just about half the league is doing it while the other half is competing for a title.

The Philadelphia 76ers are perhaps the most notable NBA franchise for their years of tanking which was dubbed “The Process.” The 76ers were a slightly above average team for 14 years leading up to the 2012/13 season having made the playoffs 10 times in that stretch. However, aside from a lone appearance in the 2001 NBA Finals, which they lost, the 76ers didn’t make it past the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals.

In 2013, the 76ers front office chose a different path of short term losses for long term gains. They traded their best player Jrue Holiday to the New Orleans Pelicans for a future first round pick as well as one of the Pelicans more recent first round picks in Nerlens Noel. The 76ers stuck by “The Process” for and continued to trade their higher performing players in favor of stockpiling draft picks and young talent with high potential.

The 76ers are now one of the better teams in the Eastern Conference. Odds makers are giving them the 9th best chance to win the 2021 NBA Championship. Although “The Process” phase is over, the 76ers are still an unfinished product with a few potentially transcendent talents still with plenty of room to grow and develop into bona fide superstars.