On Sunday, I wrote an article proposing a simple fix to the NBA’s tanking problem. It’s become the hottest conversation in basketball, and while everyone agrees there are “misaligned incentives,” for some reason, no one is suggesting Costanza Methoding this problem: if tanking exists because the NBA incentivizes losing, then won’t it cease to exist if they just incentivize winning?

My proposal is a little more nuanced than that, but you can read Part I of my Saving the NBA Series here:

In Part II, we examine the Yin to the Tanking Problem’s Yang: load management. Look, basketball got too smart for its own good. We have too many analytics departments, too many data scientists in front offices, and too many players spending obscene amounts of money optimizing their bodies for peak performance. Guys are sleeping in cryochambers, players are cycling their blood or flushing their knees with stem cells or whatever the hell they’re doing in Germany – it’s unclear if LeBron has eaten a carb since 2013. You get the point. Everyone is a lot more attuned to the way the modern game wears on their bodies, which means everyone understands the 82 game regular season is not worth their time.

Barack Obama was president the last time Kawhi Leonard played 70 basketball games in a season! This is a huge problem.

The NBA playoffs are up there with any sports experience in America. But the regular season is damn near unwatchable. We all know which teams are making the playoffs, and could probably predict the conference seeding before the season even tips off. This makes the season leading up to April a mere formality.

There is an ironic through line between the problems of tanking and load management: the league office is the responsible party, and yet their public posture is to blame the players and executives for rational actions within a broken system.

If the league wants to fix load management, they have to change the incentives. The 82-game season is too long, and because it’s too long, players have decided to take games off in order to rest up for the games that do matter. If the league wants them to stop doing that, then they should shorten the season dramatically.

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“BUT THE OWNERS”

When the prior TV rights deal was signed in 2014, NBA franchises were worth an average of $1.1B. Ten years later, in 2024 the average NBA franchise was worth $4B.

The actual TV rights deal from 2016-2025 was $2.67B/YR. In 2025, that TV rights deal grew to $6.9B annually.

In 2014, the average NBA salary was $4.5M. In 2025, the average salary was $11.5M.

In other words, everyone and their brother with any form of equity in the NBA has seen a 3-4x ROI in the last ten years. And yet the product seems to have gotten demonstrably worse. From 2015-2017, the average NBA Finals viewership was ~20M. From 2023-2025, the average viewership was ~10.7M.

Let me repeat: the league’s most important product (The Finals) has seen its viewership halved in the last decade, while the fat cats running the league have, at worst, 3x’d their investments. I’m as much of a fan of capitalism as anyone, but we must start there before we dive deeper into the numbers. Let’s just take a mental picture and put that in a frame on a shelf to return to later.

Because in any conversation surrounding regular season retraction, the immediate response you hear from critics is something along the lines of, “The owners will never allow it.” They’re walking away from too much money. It’s too steep a reduction in ticket sales and concessions.

Aside from the numbers I just laid out, this argument misses a very important point: it is better to own a smaller piece of a growing business than a bigger piece of a dying one. And let me be clear: the NBA, in its current form, is dying.

This is the classic collective action problem NBA owners face. Everyone can see on a league-wide level that the 82-game season is bad for business and hurting the product. But no individual owner wants to give up their own ticket gate revenue or piece of the TV rights deal.

This is why the current NBA moment calls for a dicta–well, a strong ma–a leader with a little more conviction. If Adam Silver doesn’t have the guts to take on NBA ownership, allow me to attempt an appeal:

HOUSE MONEY

Dear NBA Owners,

Congratulations on your most recent TV Rights Deal. An absolute Coup D’etat by you guys. Incredible businessing on everyone’s part. I guess it’s true what they say: you really are the smartest guys in the room.

But you know what my favorite TV Rights Deal is? The NEXT ONE.

And if we don’t change some things up before 2035, I’m afraid we’re gonna get taken to the cleaners. Let’s face the facts: viewership is dying. We’re about to watch LeBron James and Steph Curry retire, and it is unclear how much aura the next generation has. Are we sure – like absolutely positive – our viewership isn’t going to fall off a cliff when they leave? Finals viewership is down 50% from 2015. Players are sitting out games on a weekly basis, and our end of regular season product is an abomination.

WE NEED TO SHORTEN THE SEASON.

But we can’t figure out the right way to do this without first identifying what we stand to lose. Let’s define NBA viewership and in-game attendance as a total season aggregate:

TOTAL GAMES

• There are 30 teams in the NBA, and each plays 82 regular season games. That’s a total of 1,230 REGULAR SEASON GAMES.

• The NBA Playoffs are typically around 80 GAMES.

• That’s 1,310 GAMES PER NBA SEASON.

VIEWERSHIP

• During the 2024-2025 NBA Season, the average national TV game garnered an audience of 1.53M VIEWERS.

• During the 2025 Playoffs, the NBA averaged 4.74M VIEWERS per game.

• It’s very difficult to calculate the average viewership of local TV broadcasts for each team’s market, but based on available data, and to the best of my knowledge, a decent guess is that the average market’s local game gets ~138,000 LOCAL VIEWS.

(80 x 4.74M) + (252 x 1.53M) + (978 x 0.138M) = 899.724M Views Per Season

• Let’s call it 900,000,000 views a year for clean numbers.

• That’s 687,000 VIEWS PER GAME.

ATTENDANCE

• The average NBA arena has 19,000 SEATS.

• The average NBA ticket price is $229 in 2025.

• At 41 games a season, 19,000 seats per game, and $229 per ticket, NBA owners are looking at $178,391,000 in ticket revenue per year.

• The average concession spend per attendee is $18. So a rough concession estimate per season is $14,000,000.

• In total, the value of the in-person experience, from a revenue standpoint, is $192,413,000.

• A rough estimate of event operations costs per game is $300,000. For 41 games, that’s $12,300,000.

In summation, the current 82-game season produces roughly $180,000,000 in gate profit per team, and 687,000 views per game. Therefore, any suggestion for shortening the season has to reference these numbers as a baseline in lost opportunity cost.

THE PROPOSAL

I think the NBA should reduce its regular season to 62 games. That’s a –25% reduction.

Stay with me:

• Start the season on CHRISTMAS DAY to reclaim the holiday as a basketball day.

• Make every team play on TUESDAY, FRIDAY, AND SUNDAY, from Christmas to mid-May. That’s roughly twenty weeks, wherein the league could own the day and capture some of the excitement the NFL has created around its Red Zone package. Imagine all 30 teams playing at once, the east coast playing at 7pm EST, and the West Coast playing at 10pm EST. The multiview nature of this TV experience is an immediate upgrade, and the NBA suddenly turns its Ambien regular season into a 3-night-a-week bonanza.

• As pointed out in Part I, the Rookie Draft would consume the back half of May, and the actual playoffs would take place between June 1 - July 31st. That means FA and the NBA Draft would take place in August, and the NBA would own the dead season in the American sports schedule right up until the start of the NFL season. Best yet? The offseason somehow gets longer for players.

So what does a 62-game season look like?

• Each team plays division opponents 3x (12 games)

• Each team plays conference opponents 2x (20 games)

• Each team plays other conference opponents 2x (30 games)

So a 62-game season reduces the overall games by 300 (30 teams x 20 games … divided by 2 since each game features two teams). But the rookie draft tournament adds back ~30 games.

This creates a net loss in games of 270.

If you remember, our current format features 1,310 games broken up as:

• 978 Local Games

• 252 Nationally Televised Games

• 80 Playoff Games

That means this new format would feature 1,040 games broken up as:

• 678 Local Games

• 282 Nationally Televised Games

• 80 Playoff Games

We can estimate that overall annual NBA viewership would now be 904,224,000. By only losing local broadcast games, and replacing them with 30 highly entertaining national TV games, we could actually end up with a net increase of 4,224,000 views despite the loss of 270 games.

This means the only tangible remaining loss is 10 home games per team, which roughly translates to a loss of –$43.9M in gate profit over the course of the season.

Is this even that much money to make up with the added benefits of a strengthened product?

Let’s revisit the math: The current TV rights deal is $6.9B for annualized views of 900,000,000. I understand it isn’t calculated this way, but for simplicity sake, let’s define the value as roughly $7.67 per view. So if we just increased viewership to 904,224,000, we could expect the new TV rights deal to be worth $6,935,398,080. Divide the additional profit among 30 teams, and you get +$1.18M.

This moves our deficit to –$42.72M.

If the average team has a 19,000 seat stadium and 41 home games, that’s 779,000 available tickets per season. If those home games drop to 31, their available tickets also drop to 589,000. Is it reasonable to assume the annualized ticket sales of 178.39M get distributed instead across 589,000 tickets? Raising the average ticket price from $229 to $303? That’s an increase of 33%. Scarcity naturally increases price, but let’s be conservative and assume it’s a more modest 15%. That’s still an increase of +$20,232,000. As a reminder, my calculations are working off the assumption that every single NBA game in every single market is sold out. We know this is not true, and we know tanking teams end up playing in half-empty arenas by season’s end. I’m giving the current model the most generous numbers for arguments’ sake.

In either case, our deficit now moves to –$22.49M.

In order for us to make up the remaining money, at $7.67 per TV view, we would need an additional 85.4M views across the entire NBA season. That equates to a viewership growth of 9.4%. By comparison’s sake, the MLB saw a YoY viewership growth of 9% when they instituted the pitch clock and eliminated the shift. If the NBA experienced a similar boost, they’d receive annualized views of 985,604,160. At $7.60 per view, we’re looking at additional revenue of $20.62M per team.

This moves our deficit to –$1.87M.

BRINGING IT HOME

It’s important to articulate that despite the enthusiasm in the rhetoric, I obviously understand we are not going to fully solve the NBA’s problem within the margins of two X articles. It’s a fun hypothetical debate.

This is a nuanced problem with varying stakeholders, and a lot of smart people have been working on this for years. The math above, while simplified, is illustrative of the greater point:

When everyone agrees a problem exists, someone needs to step up and solve it, even if tradeoffs are required.

Everything in life involves tradeoffs. The NBA has to figure out which tradeoffs it can live with, and between the league office, and ownership, local TV affiliates, major broadcast partners, and NBAPA, stakeholders are going to have to come together and make a few personal concessions for the long-term health of the product.

While the precise numbers above are back of napkin math (and assuredly debatable), the directional logic is overwhelming. I don’t believe a reduction to 62 games is the Armageddon moment NBA ownership would like us to believe it is. If they were being asked to give up $100M in annual profit, that’s one thing. But if the number is actually closer to $1-2M, and there’s legitimate upside to creating a larger overall pie?

At a crossroads moment in league history like the NBA currently finds itself in, incremental adjustments are not going to cut it. They need a radical reorganization.

And I think this 62-game format is that path.

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At this point, the level of pearl-clutching surrounding NBA Tanking Discourse almost feels obligatory.

Look, we all agree it is bad when teams lose on purpose in a competitive sport. It is even worse when they do it inside a multi-billion dollar entertainment product built on expensive tickets, gigantic TV rights deals, and hundreds of legalized gambling markets on every game.

But when league officials like Adam Silver (and sports media writ large) cry foul about the scourge of NBA tanking, they are choosing intellectual dishonesty. We all know why this is happening: the league created a system designed for this to happen. In that sense, tanking is not only justified, but a strategic necessity.

If the NBA wants it to stop, they could lose the hand-wringing and change the incentives.

FIRST PRINCIPLES

The goal of basketball is to win each game by putting the ball in the hoop more than your opponent. The goal of the NBA is to identify the best team each year, through an eighty-two game regular season used to seed the top two-thirds of the league into a playoff tournament that crowns a single champion. The goal of NBA franchises is to win as many championships as possible; to have sustained excellence.

I’m not trying to be pedantic. I just mean to highlight the obvious truth no one wants to acknowledge: NBA teams are always competing for two championships at the same time: this year’s, and next year’s.

As soon as your team is no longer plausibly competing for this year’s championship, the single most competitive thing you can do is increase your chances of winning next year’s championship. In a league where the path to future championships can swing with a single transcendent draft pick, “Try to win meaningless games in March,” is managerial malpractice.

Things have deteriorated in recent years because teams are no longer adhering to the framework of “mathematical elimination,” before they get a jumpstart on competing for the next year’s championship. This is because there is a first-mover advantage in being the first to tank. If you know your team stinks, and you are ten games under .500 at the All-Star break, it might make sense to get a jumpstart on tanking even if you still have a three percent chance at the play-in tournament. A player like Victor Wembanyama can alter the course of your franchise for two decades!

When the league asks teams to ignore that reality out of a vague “respect for the game,” what they are really saying is: “Please act against your own self-interests so our late-season TV ratings don’t suffer.”

And so we are left with everyone gaslighting one another, paying lip service to the idea of trying to win every game, while shutting key players down for the season over vague injuries, decisions you doubt teams would make if they were in the hunt. We all lie to ourselves about the importance of respecting competition, while ignoring the fact that eliminated teams are actively competing for the SECOND CHAMPIONSHIP (next year’s title.)

Losing the final game of a season when you’re 10-61 and playing another 10-61 team is the rational thing to do, and it is absurd for any serious fan of the NBA to say otherwise.

This is a league office problem, and only they have the power to fix it.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

The NBA is in the optimism business. They sell hope to thirty separate markets. Every franchise has to feel like it is just a few decisions away from truly competing. And so the league designed a system meant to promote parity. The salary cap and rookie draft were instituted in hopes of equal talent distribution across every market.

But the NBA is a unique sport, in that one player has the power to tilt an entire era. This makes the #1 rookie draft pick the single most valuable tool for changing a team’s fortunes. And so teams started tanking to acquire generational talent. The lottery was implemented in 1985 to minimize that incentive, but instead it just turned the strategy into a probability game. The worst teams still had the best odds, they just lost the guarantee.

And so, as has become an annual tradition, a large portion of Adam Silver’s 2026 All-Star Break press conference was devoted to discussing the problems of tanking. The NBA wants to help bad teams reverse their fortunes, but tanking scrambles the true definition of “bad.” Novel concepts like The Wheel have been thrown out in the past, and just yesterday, league officials floated the idea of completely eliminating the rookie draft to the Athletic.

Potential solutions must not reward the middle class at the expense of the league’s bottom feeders, and they cannot stifle strategy in such a way that teams find themselves stuck in purgatory, without hope, unable to change their trajectories.

Here’s the key: as long as draft order is tied in any way to losing, teams will find a way to tank. You can adjust the probabilities, and wag your finger at press conferences, but incentives are incentives.

THE SOLUTION HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT: MAKE TEAMS COMPETE FOR PICKS

Am I crazy to suggest the solution to all of the NBA’s problems is simple? Stop awarding draft picks based on losing, and start awarding them based on winning (after you’ve been eliminated).

1. Eliminate Adam Silver’s play-in tournament and return to a 16-team playoff: 14 automatic berths + 2 berths earned via the Rookie Draft Tournament (one per conference). This gives the playoffs a true scarcity, as less than 50% of the league earns automatic berths.

2. Seed the other 16 non-playoff teams into a single-elimination tournament for the #1 pick, also broken down by conferences.

3. Best yet, the finalists of the single-elimination tournament not only secure the top two picks, they also make the real playoffs as the #8 seeds in their respective conferences.

How This Works in Practice

While the tournament for the #1 pick would be single-elimination, the allocation of picks #3-16 would be decided by a double-elimination bracket. Every pick must be decided by a H2H matchup until all 16 spots are allocated.

The incentives flip in an instant: teams will always be playing for playoff seeding up until the final game of the year. The league’s late-season meaningless games problem is replaced by high-stakes matchups where a franchises’ future depends on winning.

But Ben, this means a team could finish 8th in its conference during the regular season, get the #1 overall seed in the Rookie Draft tournament, immediately lose, and end with something like the 10th overall pick just because the ball didn’t bounce their way in one game! How is that better?

First, the 8th seeds in the actual NBA playoffs aren’t even in the current lottery. Second, being in control of your own destiny is the entire essence of sports. You play to win the game. If you lose in the first round of the Rookie Draft tournament, why are you upset at me?

It is no different than March Madness: Virginia only has itself to blame for losing to #16 UMBC. They played an entire season and were rewarded with the #1 overall seed, only to lose to a #16 seed. That’s life!

Also, even though the fight for the top two picks are single-elimination, the tournament itself is not. That same team could claw its way back to a top five pick if they string together wins. What we’re solving through single elimination is the problem of truly horrible teams (think Hinkie-era 76ers) having no chance in a 5-7 game series against playoff teams, and getting stuck with the 16th pick in the draft.

But Ben. Ben. Are you not just shifting the “tanking” to a different part of the NBA standings? Won’t teams 12-20 overall potentially tank near the end of the season if they think the reward of the #1 pick outweighs the probability of losing 4-1 in the first round of the playoffs?

This is a great question, and definitely the biggest flaw in my proposal. But consider this: right now we have a tanking problem that affects almost half of the league to some degree. It’s rampant. Even if we accept the premise of this question, it requires us admitting that we’re cutting the problem in half.

I also think this would be tougher to do in practice. The gap between the #5 and #8 seeds in each conference bracket is usually pretty close, a few games here or there. And the gap between the #8 team and the #11 teams in each conference is usually much larger. A team that’s fifth in the West after seventy games has twelve games to make a meaningful push for playoff seeding. It would be difficult for them to pivot or adjust course until it was likely too late.

The Rookie Draft tournament is volatile. #1 seeds may have the best chance at getting the #1 pick, but they could just as easily end up with the #14 pick. Are we sure teams locked into the sixth seed are going to throw their playoff guarantees away for a shot at the #1 pick? This is where the standard rhetoric around tanking actually starts to hold weight: if you are a winning team trying to compete for a title, it’s corrosive to your locker room to try to game the system by turning your competitiveness on and off. It’s one thing for terrible teams to pack it in when they have nothing to play for; it’s a whole other thing for talented playoff teams to try to be bad for five games, and then turn around and win four games in a row.

Can we fully eliminate tanking in every form? Probably not. But even in this scenario, “tanking” is reduced to the final couple games of the season, and becomes a fascinating strategic conversation. Imagine the talk radio segments as the Charlotte Hornets try to navigate the scenarios of being the #7 seed in the East vs. the #1 seed in the Rookie Draft, with Cooper Flagg on the line.

By forcing teams to actually play one another to determine draft order, the league turns its biggest problem into a strength, celebrating meritocracy.

Adam Silver’s Legacy

This is a deciding moment for Adam Silver’s legacy. He doesn’t need another band-aid solution.

Right now, the NBA keeps trying to pay lip-service to the optics of competition without actually adjusting the incentive structure undermining it. This is why every anti-tanking proposal feels toothless: more rules, more public scolding, more of the same.

If Silver changes the incentive, the tanking will stop. If he keeps the incentive in place, he’ll have to answer the same questions at next year’s ASG presser.

A Rookie Draft Tournament ends tanking forever by forcing franchises to fight for their future.

Oh, and it’s must-see TV. What’s not to love?