A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Some questionable quality of basketball being played in the NBA right now. Some teams seem to be tanking, which means losing on purpose. Keith Romer from NPR's Planet Money podcast reports on why broken incentives are to blame.
KEITH ROMER, BYLINE: The NBA draft rewards losing. The worse your team does, the better chance you have at getting a top draft pick the following year. So some teams rest their best players or trade them away or decide now might be a good time to announce a season-ending surgery. With several star college players set to enter next year's draft, a lot of teams have been tanking so hard it's raised eyebrows around the league, including those of NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Here's Silver at a recent press conference.
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ADAM SILVER: Are we seeing behavior that is worse this year than we've seen in recent memory? Yes, is my view.
ROMER: But it's not exactly the team's fault. The NBA's own system is set up so that if you want the best shot at a top pick tomorrow, you might want to lose today.
ZACH LOWE: As long as that general incentive structure exists, teams are going to exploit it in whatever ways are advantageous for them.
ROMER: For the last month or two, NBA analyst Zach Lowe, from The Ringer, has been bombarded with possible fixes.
LOWE: Everyone has their favorite solution. I mean, the number of emails and tweets and suggestions, everyone has a fix that is - they think is the silver bullet.
ROMER: Economics, of course, all about incentives. So we at Planet Money joined the hunt for a fix, and we found two in different leagues that have no tanking. The first - the PWHL, the Professional Women's Hockey League. League executive Jayna Hefford explains that their draft is governed by something called the Gold Plan.
JAYNA HEFFORD: Developed by a gentleman by the name of Adam Gold.
ROMER: Under the Gold Plan, once a team is eliminated from playoff contention, the team is incentivized not to lose but to win. The top pick in the PWHL draft is given to the team that racks up the most points winning games after it's been knocked out. So no team ever has a reason to quit on a season.
HEFFORD: For fans of a team that gets eliminated early, they have reason to continue to show up and to continue to cheer for their team to win games and earn points.
ROMER: An even more radical approach can be found in another league with no tanking - the NWSL, the National Women's Soccer League, because, says former player Sam Mewis, there is no longer a draft.
SAM MEWIS: Players who want to enter the league can just enter into conversations with teams that they're interested in, that are interested in them back.
ROMER: Without a draft, teams have to compete for the next potential star on the open market, on salary and on who can provide her the best place to develop as a player.
MEWIS: Now the clubs are competing to have the best facilities, the best coach, the best environment, the best culture for these young players to go play.
ROMER: But both the gold plan and eliminating the draft come with potential downsides. They could make it harder for losing teams to acquire the players they need to get better. Still, NBA analyst Zach Lowe says it's worth at least thinking hard about what a new system for the NBA might look like and imagining a league less plagued by tanking.
LOWE: I've come to just sort of think more about what does the world look like when everyone has to try every year.
ROMER: Keith Romer, NPR News.
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MARTÍNEZ: If you want to hear about more potential solutions to the tanking problem, listen to the Planet Money podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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