The Utah Jazz are in the throes of the most shameless tank in team history.
Multiple players are sitting with injuries that they’d normally play through — Lauri Markkanen with “back spasms,” John Collins with “hip bruise management.” Walker Kessler is 23 years old, and sitting (official reason: “rest) after the Jazz have two days off. Collin Sexton is 26, and has done the same.
And I want to be clear: I think it’s probably the right move. The Jazz, as things stand, are under-talented. Even if they were to try their hardest, it feels unlikely they’d make the playoffs. Head coach Will Hardy has proven himself likely to squeeze out extra wins from his teams — and it is unimaginable that the Jazz, as currently constructed, would be a championship contender.
Just as surely, the draft is the Jazz’s path to improvement. Free agency likely isn’t going to bring the Jazz their next star, and as hard as the Jazz have tried to go “big game hunting” to pick up players by trade, they have struck out.
That leaves tanking. Shameless tanking.
As much as tanking is the right move for the Jazz — and I have advocated for it — I have also underestimated just how bizarre it is in practice. That’s changed over the last few months: sitting healthy youth, coaches playing knowingly subpar lineups, fans celebrating losses, it all just feels so wrong.
I’ve also been curious about the toll it’s taken on the Jazz’s veteran players, who have played years of serious NBA basketball in which winning is actually the goal. In particular, at the Jazz’s practice in between their two games against the New Orleans Pelicans, I went up to Markkanen and just asked him frankly: “What do you think about tanking?”
He paused — he didn’t want to say the wrong thing — but he had thoughts to share.
“I don’t think losing, or purposefully losing, should be part of professional sports. I feel like athletes always want to compete. I understand why some organizations around the NBA are doing it, but I feel like it sucks, in my opinion,” Markkanen said. “There should be a better way to build rosters. That’s the way it’s been, so I understand it, but that’s my opinion.”
I went up to Patty Mills — 36-year-old Patty Mills, NBA champion Patty Mills — and asked the same question.
The same pause followed.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve always played for purpose. I play for purpose, that’s for sure. So when purpose isn’t there, it’s definitely hard,” Mills said. “It’s obviously a business, and everyone realizes when you get to this stage. There are situations that will happen that will remind you of that. At the end of the day — it’s a business call for sure — our job is to go out there and help develop, help teach, especially these young guys, how to be professionals.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Jazz guard Patty Mills (8) as the Utah Jazz host the Atlanta Hawks, NBA basketball in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025.
Both Markkanen and Mills, then, hit on something at the end of their answers: It doesn’t have to be this way.
Tanking is the natural result of business decisions the NBA has made and what it incentivizes. Right now, for the Jazz and roughly 25% of the league, the league has put greater incentives in place for losing (higher draft picks, better players) than for winning. There’s no incentive to be the 11th-best team in the Western Conference when compared to the 15th-best team. There’s just not.
Markkanen and I kicked around various solutions to the problem. Could the league go to a promotion/relegation system, like European soccer, so losing results in demotion to a lesser league? Yeah, but then G League franchises would have to be promoted, and they’re not ready to host NBA games. Could the league give picks out by the number of wins after they’re eliminated from the playoffs, incentivizing teams to win late in the year? Sure, but then teams will push to lose early in the season, giving them more chances to rack up wins.
In the end, we decided that the league probably just has to decouple draft position from record altogether. Celtics assistant general manager Mike Zarren proposed 10 years ago “The Wheel,” a system in which picks would be distributed evenly moving forward. You’d know, for example, that the Jazz would have the No. 2 pick in 2025, then the No. 25 pick in 2026, and so on.
The scary thing is that these proposals might hurt small market teams like the Jazz more than others. As an unsexy free-agent destination, the draft is the preferred way to build for the Utahs, the San Antonios, and the Indianas of the world. Under this proposal, teams wouldn’t be able to count on this tanking-to-contention path as a viable one.
At this point, though? I’m willing to sacrifice that path for the good of the game, for the good of the league. For the good of players like Markkanen and Mills who deserve to have their careers defined by passionate play, not dispassionate sitting.
It’s time for the NBA to make radical changes. It’s time to eliminate tanking, once and for all.
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