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The New York Times is a heavy-hitting paper, and a good chunk of its heaviest hitting comes in the Sunday Review section. It's not often about sports, but this past Sunday's cover is dominated by an enormous Rebecca Mock illustration of a baseball player taking a cut in an otherwise entirely empty stadium. The headline over Jonathan Mahler's article asks: "Is the Game Over?"

Tough question.

What follows is sober analysis of how the "national pastime" came to be as irrelevant as it is. Baseball can't touch football by any metric, and now is looking pretty bad compared to basketball too. This all projects to get worse as audiences age, and become more global. Mahler investigates, and makes some points that are straight from the HoopIdea playbook. Basically, in the name of tradition, baseball failed to adequately foster excitement.

As crazy as it sounds, baseball was once celebrated for its speed. Into the 1910s — before all of the commercial breaks and visits to the mound — it was possible to play a game in under an hour, says the author Kevin Baker, who is writing a history of baseball in New York City.

To the game’s early poets, baseball’s fast pace was what made it distinctly American. Mark Twain called it a symbol of “the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century!” The 21st century, not so much.

At the NBA offices, they're congratulating themselves for being on the right side of this point. But that's no reason to rest. If there's any lesson of baseball's decline it's that institutionalized complacency, and an unreasonable attachment to tradition, can quickly catch up to any sport.

The first HoopIdea was to combat needless delays and standing around, sapping the fun of NBA crunch time.

Dramatic tension is to sports as cheese is to a quesadilla. It's not everything, but nobody'll give you a penny for one without it.

Mahler goes on to explore some reasons for the NFL's dramatic ascendance. They include some "structural advantages," like playing only once a week, elimination games all playoffs long, and a scarcity of games that helps each one rise to the level of mattering to a national audience. (With 162 games, plenty of them just don't matter. Mahler points out that a recent Astros game had TV ratings implying fewer than 1,000 people in Houston watched. Meanwhile, the trick is to matter on SportsCenter and in the national consciousness, a tough assignment for a baseball game.)

The funny part about that is ... every league could have those things. It's not like the NFL lucked into a better format. They chose it.

Meanwhile, there are, of course, real, long-term business reasons for minimizing the delays and standing around, and maybe even for reducing the number of games.

Ironically, the reasons those things haven't happened already in the NBA is: business. There's money to be made from the way things are. But that's short-term thinking mired in tradition and a fear of letting the game evolve.

The simple truth is, as much money as there is from the current set-up, there may be even more to be made, long term, from making every minute of every game as energetic, artistic and delightful as possible. That's what HoopIdea is about -- making the best game in the world even better. Getting those things right is fantastic. Getting them wrong ... look how that worked for baseball.

This week, HoopIdea has been going hard on tanking. There's a reason for that. We expect the upcoming season to be tremendous, with a fine collection of contenders spread across two conferences, a pipeline of emerging and returning stars, and a league of hardworking players and coaches doing everything they can to win a ring.

The one bummer: This season also promises to feature a lot of teams that simply can't hang.

Rosters that are ill-prepared to compete will also be featured heavily, mostly because the upcoming draft promises to be a great one. More than a few teams could be better right now, but are going into the season keeping cap space even though they could sign free agents and keeping cheap coaches even though Stan Van Gundy or Phil Jackson could make a difference. These teams are prepared to collect extra losses in the name of increasing their odds for a top pick.

This is worth addressing, if you're the NBA, because what's happening goes beyond long-term planning, which is smart and strategic. Going into any contest hoping to lose ... that's counter to everything we love about sports.

Economists who specialize in sports have been contributing to TrueHoop all week (thanks to the handiwork of Kevin Arnovitz, who made that happen). They don't agree on how the system could be better. But they do agree that the current system is flawed, specifically in that it does too much to reward losing.

The whole idea of a lottery is to keep teams from intentionally pursuing losses by making it uncertain which team will get the top pick. There are various reasons to listen to economists, of all people, on this.

One of the biggest: They have studied it! Two serious studies show that the current version of the lottery simply doesn't do what it's supposed to do. (It was much better, ironically, in 1985, before they "fixed" it.)

Teams are still, evidently, losing games in the name of better picks.

But here's the kicker: Although the handouts to bad teams are too generous, those handouts are insufficient to make teams better anyway. It's like the worst of both worlds. We're polluting the league with intentionally crappy teams, who are dead set on getting Andrew Wiggins. But for the most part, even getting Wiggins won't be nearly enough to make a long-term loser into any kind of winner.

That's not because Wiggins isn't all that. It's because even the best young players often aren't enough to free a poorly run franchise from the millstone of repeated bad decisions.

And that reality, I'd argue, is made worse, and not better, by the league's efforts to help.

What makes a team bad?

• We've been told that small-market teams are the victims. But in a 30-team NBA, the 2013 conference finalists ranked as follows among the nation's biggest markets: 49th (Memphis), 36th (San Antonio), 26th (Indianapolis) and 16th (Miami).
• We've been told team revenue is the key, but are fans of any teams more frustrated right now than those following the revenue-rich but stuck-in-neutral Knicks and Lakers?
• Is it about owners with deep pockets? The Blazers, Nets and Kings have some of the richest owners but are not popular picks to win titles anytime soon.

It's about making good decisions. If your team is well-run, you can succeed anywhere from Oklahoma City to New York City.

The doomed teams are not strictly the ones with the poor owners, nor the ones in the small cities. They're the ones that do dumb things again and again, either because they know no better or are intentionally gaming the system.

Both cases would be reduced or eliminated if the league stopped rewarding losses.

I once published a story that focused on an unnamed general manager who worked but a few hours a week. Not that he was out scouting or meeting with agents. He just did not work much for his multimillion-dollar salary. As soon as it hit ESPN.com, I heard from longtime trusted people in three other front offices saying, essentially, "How did you know about our GM?"

Rest assured, in addition to the new wave of brilliant hard workers, the NBA has a tradition of front-office people who aren't all that interested in how things could be done better, nor in the value of long hours. It's on the way out, but it's not gone yet.

I've heard stories about GMs in the draft war room not recognizing names of top prospects from major programs. I know of brilliant young executives doing the kinds of scouting and analysis that defined the early careers of people like Sam Presti, Rob Hennigan and Ryan McDonough -- and having their work routinely dismissed by bosses too ham-handed to appreciate it. Even as the Spurs built a dynasty on undervalued foreign talent, I've had GMs explain to me at length why internationals are losers.

Even today, many GMs can't bring themselves to trust anything resembling sophisticated advanced analysis, doing things like signing Kwame Brown to protect the rim, because he looks like a guy who ought to be able to do that, even though in terms of the percentage of shots he blocks he has trailed point guards playing alongside him.

All that is to say nothing of formulating a vision, building a winning culture, making hires that fit, and establishing the credibility to mediate disputes between players, coaches and owners. These things simply don't happen on a lot of teams.

Why, in a league in which the players are so incredibly competitive, effective and hardworking, do so many of their bosses get away with being ineffective loafers?

Because the players simply must be among the best in the world or lose their jobs. They are subject to the laws of competition. You have to bust your butt to stick as a player. The front office, though, gets the mother lode of corporate welfare, which does an almighty job of fuzzing up who's really good and who's really bad at running a team. It's tough to hide a bad player, but it's a cinch to hide a bad GM. He's the guy winning the lottery. Or not -- maybe he did that intentionally.

You see the issue?

It can make it seem, to fans and owners alike, almost as if there's nothing to it but luck. But we know, on some level, that's not really true.

As part of Tank Week, economists Arup Sen and Timothy Bond proposed something fascinating and brilliant, where teams would buy draft picks with credits. Play around with that one in your imagination. It's rich.

@TrueHoop I'd love that, except SAS would save its credits to make seven 2nd rd picks, nail all of them, and win 9 straight titles. :)

— Andy Glockner (@AndyGlockner) September 5, 2013

Andy Glockner is half being funny here. But it's also right smack-dab at the heart of what matters here. The Spurs know exactly what they're doing and your team doesn't. On some level, that's great news: Front offices can be amazing! On another level, it's horrible news because yours probably isn't.

Two solutions:
A. Keep handicapping the Spurs by giving your team better players.
B. Rejigger the market to force every team to get real-deal management, as the Spurs have.

I choose "B" because I can't see any reason every team can't have a great GM. There are tons of people who would be amazing running teams. (Those geniuses who run the Tampa Bay Rays -- was anyone even recruiting them before they took over, did things differently, and started winning?) Basketball's next generation of geniuses are mostly waiting for the phone to ring, effectively locked out by a horribly inefficient market that's kept afloat by a very rich brand of corporate welfare. You're the kind of horrible GM the Spurs dream of facing? Here's a lottery pick and media articles praising your genius. Often that's the only way to keep your job.

Meanwhile, with crappy leadership, you're more or less doomed no matter how many great picks you get. The talented players don't develop properly. The chemistry fails. The coaching is a joke. And on and on.

Thirty teams can't win titles every year, but 30 teams can be great at developing systems that work, calling plays and scouting talent.

The league's truly doomed franchises now are not the small markets or the penny-pinchers. The doomed franchises are those that can't make five straight good decisions. And the lottery system goes a long way toward keeping those teams from the evolution, innovation and turnover necessary to get ahead.

Now that's bold... MT @truehoop: The granddaddy of economist recommendations: Eliminate the draft entirely. http://t.co/XanCuoIXj5 #HoopIdea

— Nate P (@NateP_SBN) September 5, 2013

Yes, it is bold. And it would be different. But it's not a lot of the horrid things many think it would be.

Eliminate the rookie salary scale and let there be a bidding war for every rookie. And remember, the NBA effectively has a hard cap. So really bad teams would be able to offer Andrew Wiggins $20 million while free-spending teams would be trying to talk him into things like the quality of the practice facility and training staff.

European soccer basically has this model, and there it does create a super class of perennial contenders. But they don't have salary caps.

Emotion suggests this would create competitive-balance issues. The evidence says: probably not.

@TrueHoop This fails to account for the impact that handing huge money guaranteed deals to very young players would have on the game

— CH (@swanklax) September 5, 2013

All I know is the sky was falling when Kevin Garnett made all that money out of high school. That's the deal that freaked everybody out and ushered in rookie salary scales. But in retrospect it was wholly unnecessary, and today smart people are calling for the removal of these kinds of caps. Garnett turned out to be a champion and one of the best players ever, and while he does get on his hands and knees and bark at opponents, which is weird, he is generally seen as a major boon to the league, which is typical. Players who arrive in the NBA very young tend to succeed more than others, according to Michael McCann's research.

In other words, you could be right, but I'd need convincing.

In the meantime, I assume that's all just a cover story. Less money for young players means more money for everyone else at the collective bargaining table, including veterans and owners. If anyone complains, they say, "Oh, we all know what money isn't good for them." And, amazingly, people buy that.

@TrueHoop but good teams would attempt to get rid of their solid players to sign, say, Andrew Wiggins or Julius Randle.

— Sam Gordon (@SlamGordon) September 5, 2013

Sure, that could happen in a world without a draft.

But, wow, is it tricky.

Let's say you're Pat Riley in the summer of 2014, coming off either three straight titles, or two straight and a very good season. To get under the cap enough to woo Wiggins or a similar player, you're going to need to let major talent go. Basically, at a minimum you're ditching Dwyane Wade for the chance to sign a guy with one year of college experience, who (history shows) is essentially a lock to get roasted on defense for at least a season. Kevin Durant might be the best college freshman in NCAA history, but he didn't help his team, per plus/minus, until his third season.

You know LeBron + Wade + Bosh + cheap role players = perennial contending machine and some likelihood of future titles.

Does LeBron + Bosh + a rookie + cheap role players = equal any titles? Presumably the team is worse while starting that rookie, and much better than they'd otherwise be post-LeBron. But will Wiggins or Randle catch up to where Wade might be while James is still in his prime? LeBron's prime is a horrible thing to waste.

And don't forget you'd have to ditch Wade first, and then see if you can get Wiggins.

Meanwhile, with or without the draft, Riley has the ability to ditch a major player for a current free agent. This isn't that new.

Who knows what the Heat would do, or if this is the best example. But if you're contending, clearing cap space for Wiggins means giving up meaningful stuff. If you're not contending, getting a good player probably helps competitive balance more than hurts it.

But after thinking about all this long and hard through Tank Week, and becoming convinced the existing system is subpar, my conviction is that GMs don't need handouts any more than anyone else in the sport. It's hard to find, acquire and value the right talent? That's really the problem the league is trying to solve for front offices? Isn't that all front offices do?

Change is hard to come by, and I don't expect NBA owners to ditch the lottery and draft overnight.

But if you're asking an honest question about what system would work best for fans, players, front offices, owners and other stakeholders -- who all benefit from the most intense possible competition -- to me the current system is not the place to start. It's not nearly as good as it could be at ensuring the best possible competition.

The conversation ought to begin with going back to the beginning and eliminating the draft entirely. Tweaks beyond that might be necessary, but they ought to be backed up with stronger arguments and evidence than I have been able to find.

There was a time when the Milwaukee Bucks lorded over the NBA’s Central Division as perennial contenders. In the mid-1980s, Don Nelson still had a modicum of structure in his nightly war plan (Nellie’s Bucks consistently ranked in the bottom half of the league in pace), and the Bucks ran off seven straight divisional titles between 1979 and 1986.

Sidney Moncrief was a rock in the backcourt. Out on the wing, Paul Pressey established himself as a prototype for what would become the modern-day defensive stopper. Marques Johnson joined him out there as one of the more reliable, high-percentage wings in the league. When the Bucks swapped Johnson for Terry Cummings, they adapted seamlessly, and Cummings would become a top-10 player during the latter half of the Bucks’ golden period. Alton Lister anchored a defense that was routinely in the top three.

Soon after that stretch, expressions like “small market” entered the league’s lexicon, and the NBA’s better players became empowered to be more selective about where they’d build a career. Gradually, places with cold weather and less cosmopolitan sensibilities had a harder time attracting talent. To play in these markets, stars have to accept a lower Q rating, and that represents lost dollars in today’s sports economy. All of this produces a compounding effect: the belief among players that building a winner in that city is near impossible.

The Bucks organization has always retained its reputation as one of the league’s classier outfits, but it couldn’t fight this tectonic shift. The franchise simply didn’t have enough mitigating factors to overcome it. Like their city, whose spirit has been sapped by new insurmountable economic realities, the Bucks began to fight an uphill battle.

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Since Milwaukee struggles to recruit the kind of players who can single-handedly deliver home-court advantage in the playoffs, that leaves the Bucks with two general directions to follow. They can tread water as a league average team with the hope that, with a break or two, they can add 10-12 wins to their .500 record, join the adult table and continue to build from there. The Indiana Pacers, the former employer of Bucks assistant general manager David Morway, have deployed this strategy in recent years. The Bucks' alternative is to deliberately place themselves in a position to acquire a collection of high draft picks who could morph into an elite core -- the Oklahoma City Model, now a proper noun in the NBA.

"Guys are going to say, 'I want to be a part of this because they're winning,' or you need to be a team, like Cleveland, that gets two No. 1 picks or three or four top-five picks, and a guy says, 'I see what they have,' ” Bucks general manager John Hammond said.

The treading-water strategy needs a public relations professional. The basketball intelligentsia mocks teams that seem content to chase the No. 8 seed, especially in the East (No. 8 seeds in the West are usually pretty good and generally have legitimate aspirations to finish higher). The maxim, “If you’re not contending, you’re rebuilding,” is regarded as smart thinking. Some league executives publicly adopted another neologism -- “the treadmill of mediocrity" -- to describe what many of them see as a fatal condition. A popular notion exists that nothing short of running the table with a series of mid-first-round picks as the Pacers did, a team is a long shot to contend with this blueprint, even though there's little evidence that losing ultimately leads to winning.

The more clever teams looking to improve seek to capitalize on the glitch in the league’s incentive structure. Blow it up, pick high, nail those picks (and every front-office guy believes he was born to evaluate prospects), and you’ll play in late May. Don’t you know that the market inefficiencies that come with the existence of the NBA draft were meant to be exploited? We don’t make value judgments about the ethics of tanking, because aesthetics are irrelevant. These are the rules as they’ve been designed by the league, and the job of an executive is to succeed within those confines.

Under the leadership of owner Senator Herb Kohl and Hammond (a contributor to the assembly of the Pistons’ teams of the early- to mid-'00s), the Bucks have squarely situated themselves in the survivalist camp. Their goal each offseason is to shoot for as many wins as possible. The catalog of transactions in pursuit of this goal isn’t without blemishes -- and management will own up to the Harris-Redick deal -- but that’s been the consistent tactic in Milwaukee.

The Bucks’ brass articulates its rationale behind this strategy. Part of that argument is based on principle, while the other half is the stated belief that tanking doesn’t necessarily yield better results than doing it their way.

“We're trying to say with Larry Sanders -- one of the top defenders in the league -- with Ersan [Ilyasova], with veterans like Zaza [Pachulia], Luke [Ridnour], Carlos [Delfino], with young players like O.J. [Mayo], Brandon [Knight], John [Henson], Gary [Neal], Ekpe [Udoh], and Giannis [Antetokounmpo], I know we may not win a world championship today, but I do think we can be competitive and continue to build with draft picks and cap space” Hammond said.

Critics (present company included) raised eyebrows at extending Mayo a contract of $8 million per season over three years, but the Bucks answer that they acquired one of the best talents among the free agents they could realistically target. If they overpaid by 10-15 percent, that’s just one of those variables that Milwaukee can’t control in play. Besides, it’s not as if giving a $6 million player $8 million is going to decimate their fairly roomy cap situation.

“We're not unique,” Hammond said. “Cleveland has to do the same thing. Indiana has to do the same thing. Sacramento has to do the same thing. It's also true in major league baseball. Sometimes you have to overpay for talent.”

Morway was one of the architects of Indiana’s build-on-the-go strategy. Now in Milwaukee, Morway has considered the Pacers’ success and has come to feel deeply that, even with the league’s weird incentive structure, tanking isn’t necessarily a better strategy.

“There isn’t one way to build a franchise,” Morway said. “You can build a team [by pursuing high draft picks], but there’s a lot that goes on between the concept and the execution.”

For every Oklahoma City, there’s a Charlotte and Sacramento. There’s cause for optimism in Minnesota, Cleveland and Washington, but those teams are still trying to make good on multiple high picks, and none of them have seen the postseason during their current era. The Bucks can cite their own history -- the center they chose at No. 15 in the draft (Sanders, in 2010) will likely contribute more when it’s all over than the center they drafted No. 1 (Andrew Bogut, in 2005). There was undoubtedly some bad luck involved but, for the Bucks, that’s the whole point -- there’s no certainty hitting the lottery jackpot will actually pay out in real life.

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Then there’s the case against tanking that can’t be quantified on the floor but which most small-market teams feel a need to abide by. Like Pacers owner Herb Simon, Kohl is one of his city's last great patricians. The son of Jewish immigrants, Kohl built his fortune in Milwaukee, where he was born, raised and has resided in his entire life except for a couple of years earning his MBA at Harvard. With that accumulated wealth and a dutiful sense of noblesse oblige, Kohl has been one of Milwaukee’s leading philanthropists for decades. And as a member of the United States Senate for 24 years, he literally represented Wisconsinites for a generation.

A sports owner like Kohl (and similarly Simon) who lives in an older city that has struggled to join the growth economies of the sun belt or tech corridors often sees his franchise as a public trust. The team has an accountability to the city. And part of that is delivering a competitive product, to let those making the trip to an aging arena that there’s a better than 50 percent chance they’ll see a win for the home team. Unlike so many of the newer owners who live out of town and have only a passing relationship with the cities of their teams, Kohl sees Milwaukeeans as neighbors. When you invite your neighbors over to your place, you owe them your hospitality.

“Why should I come to the games if you’re telling me you’re not trying to win?” Morway asks rhetorically.

For Kohl, playing to win every night is a common courtesy to fans, the majority of whom have elected him to the Senate on four occasions, the last time with two-thirds of the overall vote. Public trusts have to perform -- especially if they’re asking for popular support. The Pacers are, again, an appropriate case study. In Forbes’ team valuations published in January, they ranked 24th, while the Bucks were dead last. The Pacers asked from the public and received $33.5 million to address their shortfall in operating income at their home arena. Coupled with a negative public image, the fallout from the Palace brawl, the Pacers felt they couldn’t afford to tank. That’s a privilege reserved for organizations in healthy markets and/or those who have accumulated equity and good will.

The Bucks will soon need to make a hard sell to the residents of Milwaukee that they can’t survive without a new home. They play in arguably the worst facility in the league. Unlike some of the concrete palaces in Sacramento or Salt Lake City, there’s no intimate charm or deafening noise in the Bradley Center. It’s just tired. While a team can’t control the climate, economy or general mood of its city, it can offer a nice work space. The Bucks can’t do that until they build a new facility in Milwaukee, and that’s an easier sell when there’s electricity in town, the Bucks are on the verge of a series upset and Bango the Buck’s antics make him a cult hero.

The Bucks maintain that putting together a run like that without cohesiveness and that there are psychic costs when a team accepts losing as part of the program.

“To build a winning culture ... you can’t turn it on and off,” Morway says. “Players see that.”

Oklahoma City managed it, but by pulling off a rare trick. It built a unique relationship with Kevin Durant, who understood that for a few years, the organization would define success on its own terms. Building that kind of trust requires the rare player in a near-perfect situation. For most young players -- even some who project as future All-Stars -- losing can quickly become a bad habit, and that’s not a risk most teams can assume.

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At one point or another, most executives at least float the idea to their owner of starting from scratch. But for reasons ranging from civic responsibility to anecdotal evidence, Kohl and Bucks management decided some time ago that they couldn’t seriously entertain a tanking strategy. Instead, they’ll strive for respectability year in and year out. Since dynamic scorers tend to look past Milwaukee in free agency, the Bucks will focus first on building a top defense, then look to add durable perimeter scorers who can nudge their offense above the league average mark.

Some of the criticism targeting the Bucks is aimed squarely at questionable deals like trading Tobias Harris for two bumpy months with J.J. Redick and a 3-year, $15.6 million contract for reserve big man Zaza Pachulia. But the overriding sentiment is that the Bucks are foolish to do anything to compromise their future in service of winning more games in the present. Truth be told -- they might be. Unless Antetokounmpo, Henson and Knight explode, and Mayo makes a quantum leap (he’s still only 25), it’s difficult to see the path to the conference finals, and history tell us that’s even more likely if they continue to pick in the mid-first round.

Teams like Bucks who direct their management to assemble this year’s model with the highest-performing engine they can design are regarded as quixotic at best and, more times than not, myopic. Chasing the eighth seed is the ultimate act of madness because respectability is worth far less in the current structure than 60-65 losses. Does this kind of arrangement, one where NBA teams who put the best product on the floor might compromise their future, make the league stronger?

A number of an economists have addressed the issue of tanking and found that the phenomenon comes and goes, depending on the details of the draft lottery format. A study I co-authored with Brian Soebbing and David Berri -- both of whom have weighed in here on tanking at TrueHoop -- suggests that NBA teams did not tank during the period when the NBA draft lottery format was weighted equally among non-playoff teams in the late 1980s.

Under this format every team that finished out of the playoffs had the same chance of getting the first pick in the next draft. But that format was scrapped because of concerns about competitive balance after several teams that barely missed the playoffs were awarded the first pick. Going back to the equal weight draft lottery would eliminate some of the incentives to tank, but this may have unintended consequences for competitive balance.

But if I was czar of the NBA, my solution would be more radical, and would take care of another problem generated by the NBA entry draft with a single stroke. I would eliminate the draft entirely. All tanking incentives in the NBA originate with the draft, so eliminating the draft eliminates incentives to tank. The alternative is that all incoming players are free agents and can be signed by any team, forcing teams to compete for all incoming talent.

Critics would howl that this policy would wreck competitive balance. The large-market teams would buy up all the good players, leading to a lopsided league of haves and have-nots!

My response to this criticism is: This would be unlikely to happen with the current NBA roster limits and salary cap. Incoming players would be subject to the cap, and rosters spots on NBA teams are limited, so large-market teams could not stockpile all the incoming talent.

The entry draft also gives teams market power (monoposony power, in the jargon of economics) because of rookie-scale contracts, which reduce the earnings of players in the first two or three years of their careers. Free agency would benefit these players, in that some of them would clearly earn higher salaries.

Also, a significant body of economic research suggests that entry drafts, salary caps and revenue sharing do not have any appreciable impact on competitive balance. This further strengthens the argument that eliminating the draft would not hurt competitive balance in the NBA.

I also think it's important to think about tanking from the fan's perspective. While seeing your team intentionally lose games at the end of the season might reduce attendance in the short run, getting the first pick in the NBA draft can significantly improve a team in the NBA, and fans might be willing to trade-off short run intentional losses for long-run success generated by the first pick. No research has addressed this issue, or examined how tanking affects attendance or media revenues, but it’s worth thinking about.

Brad Humphreys is a professor in the College of Business and Economics, Department of Economics at West Virginia University. His research focuses on the economics of sports and gambling.

Historically, most of the discussion surrounding tanking in the NBA has centered on the NBA amateur draft. Even though drafts are anti-competitive in nature (i.e., amateur players can only negotiate with the team that drafted them and nobody else), one of the rationales leagues give for a reverse-order amateur draft is competitive balance, all member teams have equal playing strength throughout the short and long-term. Many times competitive balance and uncertainty of game outcome work together (i.e., a policy that increases uncertainty of outcome also increases competitive balance). However, tanking and the amateur draft is one instance, historically, where these two concepts diverge. This is one reason that tanking is a complex phenomenon and a difficult one for league executives.

There are two main areas of academic research in regards to tanking and the NBA draft. The first is looking at financial incentives to tank. I coauthored a paper in 2010 (Journal of Sports Economics) with Drs. Joseph Price, David Berri, and Brad Humphreys looking at financial incentives to tank. Examining NBA drafts from 1992 to 2007, we estimated that the average value of the first overall pick in the draft was approximately $4.3 million. In addition to the overall dollar value, we also estimated that first overall picks on average produced 7.2 wins in the first season and 45 wins over the first five seasons of their career. Hence, these players are productive and valuable on average throughout the period.

The second area of research looks at whether and to what extent teams tank under different formats. To summarize the findings from multiple papers (including the one above), there were mixed findings in regards to the reverse-order draft format, no tanking under the equal probability format, and tanking returning under both weighted probability formats. For example, if you are non-playoff team and were going to have the same chance as the worst team overall in regards to receiving the first overall selection, there is no incentive to tank.

In summary, the NBA has been trying to balance uncertainty of outcome and competitive balance in regards to the draft over the last 30 years, and have previously adopted a measure to eliminate tanking -- the equal probability or “unweighted” draft format.

Rookie scale adds appeal to tanking
Aside from lottery format, there’s another important factor to consider: the rookie salary scale, which limits the amount of money a first round draft pick earns in his first five seasons in the league. For instance, the first pick in the NBA draft will earn approximately $4.6 million. This value will increase to over $8 million in the final year of the contact. If the player performs to his potential -- or even comes close -- this usually gives the team “a surplus,” which we can define as the amount of revenue a player produces for the team minus the salary paid to him by the team.

Consider a superstar like LeBron James. The value of his production for the Cleveland Cavaliers during his rookie deal far exceeded his salary. In the research stated prior with Drs. Price, Berri, and Humphreys, one-third of the first overall picks were identified as superstars. Thus, a team may conclude that the reward for tanking under the rookie salary scale far outweighs the risk. If we eliminated these pre-ordained rookie scale contracts, we’d also eliminate a considerable amount of the incentive for teams to tank in order to acquire these players at below market value.

Play for the pick
One “radical” measure would be to have a tournament that determines the number one overall selection. This tournament would consist of all non-playoff teams and could occur during the playoffs. The draft lottery slots are determined based upon the results in tournament. The winner of the tournament selects first, the loser of the championship game would select second, etc.

The format regarding length and home court would be the key deciding factors and these decisions would be a discussion regarding the purpose of the draft (reduce tanking or competitive balance). For example, playing the game at the worst non-playoff team's home court would side towards competitive balance given the NBA’s strong home court advantage, as would a short tournament format (winner take all or best-of-three). A neutral location for a tournament and a longer format (e.g., best-of-seven) would veer more towards reducing tanking. In theory, this would provide a competitive element of determining the draft format while also providing a sense of excitement for fans of these teams going into the off-season and the beginning of ticket sales for the upcoming seasons.

Dr. Brian Soebbing is an assistant professor in sport management within the Department of Kinesiology at Louisiana State University. His main research focus is on the strategic behavior of sports leagues and teams both at the amateur and professional level.

The purpose of the NBA draft is to promote parity by assigning the highest draft picks to the worst teams. The problem is that this creates incentives to tank -- teams may exert less effort to try to disguise themselves as being of low quality. In this piece we focus specifically on everyone’s favorite example of egregious losing, the 2011-12 Golden State Warriors.

The Warriors finished a once-promising season on a 5-22 freefall, giving them the seventh-worst record in the NBA. At 23-43, Golden State was just bad enough to avoid an outstanding trade obligation to send that June’s first-round draft pick to the Utah Jazz.

The terms of the trade created what we call a discontinuity in the Warriors’ payoff function: Additional losses at the end of the season could be the difference between Golden State getting a top-seven pick in a talent-filled NBA draft or coming away from the offseason empty-handed. The value of additional wins, on the other hand, was difficult to quantify and potentially small.

An oft-suggested method to eliminate this kind of discontinuity is to disallow the practice of including "protected" draft picks in trades. However, this could create a large amount of illiquidity and reduce the volume of trades. The fair value for some players happens to be a draft pick in the range of 8-14. Without pick protection these players become untradable to the detriment of everyone in the league.

A new kind of draft
We instead advocate overhauling the way draft picks are assigned. The rights to draft slots (the right to pick at a particular number) will be sold via sequential auction before the date of the draft for “credits.” Teams will bid with their credits and the highest bidder earns the right to make the pick come draft day. Credits will be allocated at the end of each season based on record with the worst teams receiving more. This preserves the original push for parity.

Under this system, teams trade credits rather than future protected draft picks. This eliminates the discontinuity that Golden State faced. One can no longer exert low effort as a way to avoid outstanding obligations. Another benefit is that teams could split up their credits in the manner they deem optimal. In certain drafts, having the first pick may not be a desirable outcome if there is no franchise player to be had. Having more credits may allow teams to spend on acquiring multiple draft slots or potentially save them for future seasons.

Of course, teams still may want to lose to get more credits, but the reduced certainty on the value of these credits shrinks the incentives to lose intentionally. A complex formula for awarding of credits, taking into account relative performance of all teams in a given year would add to this uncertainty without losing the redistributive benefit. For example, we could dock teams credits if their performance in the second half of the season is significantly worse (statistically) than their first-half effort.

A significant real world benefit of our suggestion is that the NBA could keep existing wage structures and the draft intact. The only change would be to replace a draft lottery with a month long market or auction. The day-to-day intrigue on who is bidding what for which pick would give fans of the less fortunate teams something to keep them engaged. Imagine the vibrant conversations of arm-chair GMs and auction-style fantasy league veterans debating the merits of each days bids.

Arup Sen is an economist at a Princeton based consulting group and holds a PhD in Economics from Boston University with a research focus on the NBA.

Timothy N. Bond is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University.

The biggest challenge with addressing the tanking problem is that the NBA draft lottery creates a natural trade-off between its effect on competitive balance in the league and on teams incentive to lose on purpose.

If I were in charge of the NBA draft lottery I would wait until the end of the season and then randomly select a number between 30 and 60. I would use the current lottery system but base the lottery on each team’s place in the standings after that randomly chosen number of games.

By way of example, we ran a simulation using last season. The number we randomly drew was 43. So that means we'd assign teams lottery balls not based on their record at the end of 82 games, but instead based on their record after Game 43.

It would change things somewhat, as you can see in the table. The current system really hurts teams like the Wizards and Raptors, who continued to play rather well during the last part of the season.

The table is not meant to provide evidence that teams like the Magic and Trail Blazers were tanking, but it does highlight how much teams can improve their lottery chances under the current system by losing more games at the end of the season.

This would reduce the incentive for teams to lose on purpose late in the season once they drop out of contention for the playoffs because regardless of which number is randomly drawn, any losses after game No. 60 -- usually played in late February or early March -- would have no bearing on a team’s chances in the lottery. At the very least, this would drastically curtail “tanking season,” assuming any team would want to pack it in much before the All-Star break.

In order for this approach to be as equitable as the current system requires, a team’s league ranking at a point mid-\season is correlated with their ranking at the end of the season. I took a date from seasons between 1991-2010 and find that there is an 88 percent correlation between a team’s rank after 30 games and their rank at the end of the season (with the average team moving three places in the ranking). If you wait until after the 60th game, the correlation increases to 97 percent (with the average team moving 1.5 places in the ranking).

Joseph Price is an assistant professor of economics and Brigham Young University. His research has often covered basketball topics, including incentives and league policy, interracial workplace cooperation in the NBA, performance under pressure and referee bias.

I was asked how I would end tanking in the NBA. We could get radical and do away with the draft altogether, screw parity and let the free market determine what each player is worth right out of college and which teams are willing and able to pay for him. That’s the libertarian answer that you might expect from an economist.

But I’m a bleeding heart liberal economist, one that’s concerned about equity. And in the NBA, equity means parity -- every team having a fighting chance.

The NBA draft tries to equal out the playing field by trying to direct the best talent to the teams that need it most. However, by doing so, we’re forced to risk tanking to improve parity. (Or at least the chance for parity, assuming management and owners know what to do with their draft picks.) How should the league manage this balancing act between parity and tanking in the draft?

Here’s the thing, they already have a great tool to tip the scales away from tanking, all within the current system of amateur drafts, luxury taxes and limited first contracts. But first, a history lesson.

Go back with me to 1985. New Coke. “Back to the Future.” Stallone at his apex.

And Patrick Ewing.

If ever there was a reason for teams to tank to get a chance at the first pick, Ewing was it. But, my colleague Beck Taylor and I have crunched the data, and we found no evidence that teams tanked that year (Taylor and Trogdon, 2002). Why? In 1985, the first year of the draft lottery, every non-playoff team had an equal shot at Ewing (at least in principle).[1] Once a team was eliminated from the playoffs, there was no benefit from additional losing. In fact, the lottery was instituted to avoid tanking, which we showed was happening even in the prior season. So if the lottery was supposed to end tanking, why is it still a problem?

Jump ahead to 1989. New Coke is gone. Milli Vanilli. Shoulder pads. And the NBA switched to the current weighted lottery system, which gives teams with worse records more opportunity for higher picks (i.e., more pingpong balls). Eliminated teams don’t guarantee higher picks by losing, but they increase their chances. Here’s the key point from our analysis of this system -- teams were likely to tank again, but not as much as in the pre-lottery days.

That means the league already has a tool to address tanking -- lottery weights. The lottery weights are a control dial that can be set to tweak the parity/tanking tradeoff. On one end of the dial, the weights are the same for all teams (e.g., 1985). This would eliminate tanking but there’s a chance a “good” non-playoff team gets the top pick (less parity). On the other end of the dial, the weights just sort the non-playoff teams from worst to best to determine the draft order (e.g., pre-1985). The teams most in need of talent get the best options (more parity), but lots of tanking. You could even use the lottery weights to reward the winningest teams post-elimination.

If Adam Silver, the next NBA commissioner, is serious about ending tanking, he doesn’t need to reinvent the entire draft process to do it. He’s already got the right pingpong ball machine for the job.

Justin G. Trogdon is a senior research economist at RTI International.

There are essentially three ways a team can acquire the productive talent it needs to contend for a title:

The Heat approach: Acquire productive veterans
This approach has also recently been used by the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. The problem is that the NBA has a maximum salary. This means that teams cannot use higher wages to attract better talent. Instead, productive veterans are now considering whether or not your team is likely to win. In other words, the Miami Heat approach seems to require that you already have stars to attract more stars.

In addition, teams have to know which veterans to acquire. The New York Knicks have tried to build with veterans for years. But in most recent seasons, the Knicks have failed because they tend to acquire relatively unproductive veterans (primarily because the Knicks focus too much attention on per game scoring).

The Spurs approach: Acquire productive players in the latter part of the NBA draft
When we think of the Spurs, we tend to think Tim Duncan. Although Duncan was the most productive regular season performer for the Spurs in 2012-13, about 48 of the team’s regular season wins came from other players -- the five most productive were Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green, Tony Parker, Tiago Splitter, and Manu Ginobili. Each of them was either a non-lottery first round pick or a second-round pick. All teams have access to such players, but the team must be able to identify such talent. And since the Spurs are relatively unique in utilizing this approach, it’s reasonable to assume most teams cannot consistently identify productive players outside the lottery.

The Thunder approach: Acquire productive lottery picks
The third approach is to acquire productive talent in the NBA lottery. Most recently, the Thunder accomplished this when they built an NBA Finals team around the talents of Kevin Durant, James Harden and Russell Westbrook. Lottery picks are granted to the NBA’s non-playoff teams, so you have to lose to implement this strategy. You also must have a fair amount of luck. Not only does it help to finish very high in the lottery, you also have to be able to select the productive players with those high picks. In some years, though, this is difficult. For example, none of the top seven talents selected in 2010 have become players who produce wins in large quantities. A similar story can be told about most of the players at the top of the 2006 NBA draft.

There is another problem that the Thunder discovered. Initially draft picks play under a rookie contract, so these players can produce wins at a very low cost. But this contract expires fairly quickly. Specifically, the Thunder were able to employ Harden for only three seasons. Once a player moves on to his second contract, the team essentially moves to option No. 1 (i.e. building through productive veterans). So not only does this approach requires luck, it’s also a short-lived strategy.

Nevertheless, teams seem to try and follow the third option. And for that to happen, teams have to lose -- or pursue the strategy of tanking. Such a strategy essentially contradicts a fundamental promise made by sporting competitors; that the competitors will do their very best to win the game.

To eliminate this strategy, we simply need to remove the incentive behind this approach. Again, teams only get high lottery picks by losing. And the more you lose, the better your chance of getting the top picks in the draft. If we want teams to stop doing this, we need to change the incentives of the people who implement this strategy.

This can be done in three ways:

Return to a non-weighted lottery
In a paper I co-authored with Joe Price, Brian Soebbing, and Brad Humphreys, we presented evidence that the NBA’s non-weighted lottery -- utilized in the 1980s -- seemed to reduce the tendency to tank. Back in 1985, only seven teams didn’t make the playoffs. Today it is 14 teams. If all lottery picks were selected via a non-weighted lottery -- as was the case in 1985 -- the worst team in the NBA could receive just the 14th pick in the draft. This would effectively eliminate a team’s incentive to be as bad as possible to get the best pick possible.

Eliminate the draft
A more radical approach (for North American sports fans) is to eliminate the draft. In European sports, there is no draft. But on this side of the Atlantic, it is taken for granted that the losers in professional sports leagues are rewarded with high draft picks. However, as we have noted, this gives teams an incentive to tank. So a simple solution is to abolish the draft and allow top amateurs to negotiate with more than one team.

One issue with this approach is that the top amateurs could simply choose to sign with the NBA’s best teams. This is especially likely if the NBA’s rookie salary cap is kept in place. After all, if the wages of the top players are going to be the same, then these players will simply choose to play for the best teams. To avoid this problem, the NBA could implement a system where playoff teams cannot sign a player until 14 amateurs have already received offers from non-playoff teams. And once a player received an offer from a non-playoff team, he could not sign with a playoff team (but could still sign with any of the other 13 non-playoff teams).

This system would force the non-playoff teams to be as competitive as possible, since the top amateurs would probably prefer to play for the best non-playoff team possible. And again, would eliminate the problem of the tanking.

Punish the losers
The tanking strategy is easy for decision-makers in the NBA to embrace. Teams that pursue this strategy are essentially trying to lose to enhance the team’s draft position. This is a simple strategy to follow. Trying to win is difficult, but losing is easy and the more incompetent the decision-maker, the better the strategy can be implemented. Imagine how easy it would be to do your job if you were rewarded for doing the job badly!

To stop this behavior, the NBA could simply implement a rule that says if a team misses the playoffs for three consecutive seasons, the team must fire its general manager. If this rule was put in place, constant losing would lead to consequences for executives.

David Berri is a Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University. He is co-author of The Wages of Wins and Stumbling on Wins (FT Press, March-2010). He has written extensively on the topic of sports economics for academic journals, and his work has appeared at The New York Times, the Huffington Post, Freakonomics.com and Time.com.

It's a wonderful time for the NBA, with young stars all over the league, an impressive collection of contenders and fascinating storylines from coast to coast. The one real downer, however, is that the game-changing talent of the 2014 draft is expected to inspire any number of teams to lose as many games as possible this season, in the name of the best possible draft pick. In this Tank Week series, ESPN.com's HoopIdea explores tanking and its effect on the NBA.

At its heart, tanking in the NBA is an issue of messed up incentives -- the league wants success but rewards failure.

Lose 65 games and you have the inside track to the best young talent at the cheapest prices. Scrap your way to 40 wins when conventional wisdom picked you in the basement and your consolation prize is a middling first-round pick.

Maddening though these contradictions may be to fans, they are especially galling to those who study incentives for a living: economists. It's almost impossible to find one who likes the NBA's current system, which was built in the name of competitive balance but has hardly been shown to deliver anything like it in any sports league in the world.

The idea is that high picks make bad teams better, but as economist Brad Humphreys explains, there’s a body of research that has found, despite popular perception, that “drafts, salary caps and revenue sharing do not have any appreciable impact on competitive balance.”

HoopIdea's motto: "Basketball is the best game ever. Now let’s make it better." In that spirit, we asked a collection of economists to tell us how things could be better. Over the rest of this week we'll be rolling out proposals to fix tanking from the likes of Joe Price, David Berri, Humphreys, Justin Trogdon, Brian Soebbing, Arup Sen and Timothy Bond.

None defends the current system, which research shows absolutely does lead to tanking. Their proposals are fascinating:

• The NBA has tweaked its lottery in the past, which may have been a mistake -- a careful study shows it once had a lottery system that evidently did not lead to tanking.
• You have heard Bill Simmons' idea for a tournament in which teams that miss the playoffs play for draft position. Some economists say that could work.
• There is a clever idea to reward bad teams but without giving them a reason to rack up late-season losses.
• What if instead of winning a better draft position with losses, you won credits you could use to bid on draft picks? There are some cool things about this, including elimination of the ugly shenanigans the Warriors used a few years ago to lose a lot with a decent team apparently to keep the pick that became Harrison Barnes.
• Teams tank because high picks are so valuable. Part of the reason they're so valuable is because the best rookies are underpaid, thanks to the rookie scale. If rookies could be paid more, however, there'd be a little less reason to tank.
• Lots of economists suggest eliminating the draft entirely. (If it's not, in fact, making bad teams good, what's the point?) Berri has a clever idea, though, about how to do that in a way that will keep hope alive in 30 markets.
• And then there's this idea: Miss the playoffs three years in a row and your GM loses his job.

It's a wonderful time for the NBA, with young stars all over the league, an impressive collection of contenders and fascinating storylines from coast to coast. The one real downer, however, is that the game-changing talent of the 2014 draft is expected to inspire any number of teams to lose as many games as possible this season, in the name of the best possible draft pick. In the first post of a series, ESPN.com's HoopIdea explores tanking and its effect on the NBA.

Here’s a nice HD YouTube video, cued up to the moment when the world’s finest sprinters are lining up for a big race.

Eight of the best athletes the world has ever known, shaking muscles loose and then crouching into the starting blocks, poised to explode. They spend years getting to this level -- running fast defines these competitors. Yet they do their best at it only a few seconds a year.

This is that time.

It's fun to watch, even though the commentary is in German and it's a sport hurting for both celebrity power and highlight-worthy artistry. In fact, it's surely the simplest sport: It starts here and ends right over there. No turning. Not even really any pacing. Eight athletes in a row, each bound and determined to run faster.

We appreciate this on a deep level. "Wanna race?" is an ancient question almost every human has asked or answered. This trips a trigger. The rare delight of sports, in these complicated times, is to see eight crystal-clear agendas, so nakedly, completely and devotedly all in.

That’s competition, and that's part of us.

Screwing up a beautiful thing
Now imagine this. You’re the runner in Lane 4, hands placed carefully, heart racing, waiting for the starter. Three sprinting wizards to your left, four to your right. Everyone has had this date circled on the calendar all year. You’ve got glory to earn and a family to feed.

And you know there’s:

• $100,000 for first place
• $50,000 for second place
• And … $100,000 for last place

What?

Takes a lot of the fun out of the race, doesn't it? Knowing the competition’s big prizes are not just for winning, but for winning or losing.

A little weird, eh?

Of course, that's not what happens in track. But, oddly, it is roughly what really happens in the NBA.

Picture 30 teams trying to win
This season, one NBA team will work incredibly hard, make one smart decision after another, please the basketball gods and enjoy an NBA title in June.

Another team will turn the ball over a ton, play the wrong players and endure heart-wrenching injuries as the basketball gods look the other way. That team will trick the rulebook into an incredibly high pick in the draft of a lifetime with a good shot at a player who will change things for that team for a decade or more.

It's tough to say which team wins the bigger prize.

In other words: Every team would do its darnedest to give fans what they want -- real long-term strategy and real all-in nightly competition -- if the league would take its thumb off the scale. Thirty general managers are hard-wired to pull their hair out to win now and forever just like those sprinters -- if only the NBA didn't muck things up by giving a whole lot of those competitive people strong arguments to cut their competitive juices with the tonic water of tanking.

It's not that the league is forcing teams to lose. And rest assured we still get amazing competition. But the NBA is needlessly confusing things. You know what exits stage left when the priorities get cloudy? The beauty of clear priorities.

Give the big prize to the runner in last place, and it's just too much to expect everyone's best race after race, year after year. The race gets a little less fun to watch.

Maybe it’s not the biggest deal in the world. Maybe the sport can thrive despite this -- clearly it has.

And let's be clear: What I'm not alleging is that coaches or players are throwing games. I'm not even chapped at the owners or GMs who pursue losses by deciding to cut costs, keep bad coaches around, trump up injuries, trade away efficient players, play inferior players or save cap space for another day. They all should do what they think is in the long-term best interests of their teams -- I can't really call the Spurs idiots for the pathetic show they put on to get the draft pick that became Tim Duncan. Everyone should pursue wins, and more or less I believe everyone does. This isn't an ethical issue.

What's messed up is that the league has confused matters. When this season is over and teams like the 76ers, Suns, Kings, Magic, Bobcats, Celtics and Jazz have miserable records, did we learn those teams are dumb, or smart?

Losing badly in the NBA is no condemnation of the team. Which is a profound condemnation of the league. Whoever dreamed up that prize scheme simply got it wrong. It’s a strategy where you can more or less count on some competitors dogging it every time out. In casual conversation, I've heard NBA GMs mocking front offices in places like Houston and Milwaukee for "foolishly" trying to win season after season. It's all backward.

You want to see the most intense competition? You want every game to matter? You want maximum excitement? Well, duh. Stop rewarding failure. Stop creating the problem.

It casts a shadow over the NBA schedule. Maybe a third of the games feature at least one team that no doubt has players and coaches who are dying to win, but who have been intentionally handicapped by front offices that value losses. I don’t know who’ll win that Grizzlies versus Sixers contest, but I know the Grizzlies -- all of them, from the point guard to the president -- want to.

Meanwhile, we could, quite simply, with a wave of the hand from the NBA Board of Governors, have a league where all 1,230 games feature two organizations with all the naked competitive ambition of the sprinters in that video.

That’s what we’re exploring.

Why can’t we have that?

Back in March, during the height of the 2013 playoff chase, the Los Angeles Clippers and Memphis Grizzlies were jockeying for the No. 3 seed in the West. The two teams already loathed one another, their feelings dating to their seven-game series in spring 2012. Things often can get stale in an NBA arena by mid-March, but when the Clippers and Grizzlies hooked up at Staples Center, the buzz was electric.

For the first quarter that night, the NBA was the product at its fullest. The appeal of the game was noted by the Clippers’ broadcast team, along press row and across Twitter. High-grade professional basketball.

The Clippers and Grizzlies are two of the league’s better teams, but neither play in a well-choreographed system that lends itself to hoops ballet. Yet in the first quarter that night, every player on the floor moved with purpose, and crisp decisions were made instantaneously. The ball popped around the floor and the game flowed freely. Oddly, there were no lead changes and the teams combined for only two fast-break possessions. Each team shot greater than 60 percent from the field, but that's not altogether unusual for a single quarter. It was something else:

Zero free throws attempted.

Time of quarter: 20 minutes.

There were no long red lights where the game came to a stop so we could watch nine guys stand around as one player goes through a rote skills challenge of hitting a standing set shot from a predetermined spot on the floor.

The mandatory timeout following the first stoppage after the 6-minute mark came inside of five minutes. The Clippers took an additional timeout a few minutes later to shuffle the deck after a string of sloppy possessions, but apart from that, the quarter zipped along. Blake Griffin was the best version of Blake Griffin, the big man who can beat you with both refined skills and brute force. Tayshaun Prince hopped into a time machine and beat the Clippers with his handle and down in the post. And after an exhilarating 20 minutes, the game was tied 24-24.
 

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An average NBA game features in the neighborhood of 43 free throw attempts -- 43 buzzkills that send our attention away from one of the greatest stages in the world toward our mobile devices, remote controls, refrigerators and toilets.

Why?

From "Cages to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball’s Early Years" by Robert W. Peterson:
 

… At first field goals counted one point and there were no foul shots; offenders were penalized by temporary removal from the game. Then free throws were introduced as penalties for fouling, including such violations as running with the ball or kicking it. Free throws were shot from 20 feet until 1894-95 when the distance was reduced to 15 feet. The rule-makers tinkered with scoring too, setting the value of a field goal at three points and penalizing fouls by awarding a point to the opponents. Finally, for the 1895-96 season, they settled on two points for a field goal, one for a successful foul shot.

Just to clarify, we stop the action more than 20 times per game because the forefathers of basketball, nearly nine decades before the birth of LeBron James, decided that free throws were a good idea during the infancy of the game, a period during which basketball was far more a recreational endeavor than a spectator event. Entertainment value was the last thing on the minds of these men as they sought to codify basketball's legal system.

More than a century later, the free throw is still central to the game. But apart from timeouts, when the game is essentially suspended for other business, is there a moment during 2 1/2 hours that generates less drama (Ollie be damned), where players demonstrate less of what separates them from us, where the formulaic casts a darker shadow over the spontaneous?

Men like James Naismith and his successor, Luther Gulick, were unquestionably smart and innovative. Basketball wouldn’t have flourished globally if not for their vision and craftsmanship of the game. They realized early on that without a proper disincentive, players would hack each other with impunity. As Peterson documented, rule-makers experimented with awarding a point to a fouled team. If a player was fouled, points were awarded directly and we moved on.

There was no "earning it at the line,” because what did the recipient’s ability to hit a set shot have to do with the intent and consequence of the foul he received? As a general principle, “earning it at the line” is not a force of good in basketball. Earning it at the line results in potentially spectacular plays disintegrating into a flying collision, some of which result in injury rather than pyrotechnics. Earning it at the line is the equivalent of intentionally pulling the plugs on the speakers just as the party is getting good.

Since basketball’s formative years, leagues have continued to dabble in new ideas surrounding the free throw. In 1950, the NBA instituted a jump ball following free throws to provide a further deterrent to fouling, an idea that was short-lived. Three-to-make-two was introduced in 1954, then eliminated in 1981.

Tradition has played a prominent role in the evolution of the game, but it hasn’t been sacrosanct. That’s a good thing, because tradition shouldn’t act as the sole source of authority, especially for a game whose innovation in rules, style, schemes, form and presentation has propelled its popularity. The 3-point shot was first introduced as an experiment during preseason games in 1978. It’s been an essential ingredient in the league’s renaissance in the past three decades -- from non-existent to arguably the most exciting regular outcome of an NBA possession.

The scourge of the free throw is a far easier problem to diagnose than to treat because there are no simple antidotes. Could we just automatically award two points to a player when he gets fouled in the act of shooting or while his team is in the penalty? One or the other? Maybe two points for a shooting foul, but only one point and possession for a non-shooting foul in the bonus?

We could, as D-League president Dan Reed recently suggested on TrueHoop TV, make every shooting foul one-and-one. That would eliminate first attempts that produce dead balls and another 30 seconds of stasis, though it might also encourage more hacking because there would be an even better chance for opponents to get the ball back at no expense.

And if we did eliminate the free throw altogether, what could we provide in its place that would give trailing teams the opportunity to close the gap during the final few minutes of a game? We could eliminate consecutive timeouts, consequently forcing the leading team to get the ball in bounds on the first attempt. If they can’t -- and we see this all the time -- that would create a change of possession in five riveting seconds as the crowd explodes over a gritty defensive stand (or goes into shock as their team turns the ball over with no time expiring on the clock, all because they couldn’t get it in!).

Free throws are an entrenched feature of the game, so it’s difficult to imagine basketball without them -- but we do have reference points like those 20 minutes in March when the ball was live 60 percent of the time, and like any great piece of visual storytelling, you couldn't take your eyes off the action because you might miss something.
 

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JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Would basketball be better with fewer (or zero) free throws? You can give us your ideas and talk with us and other fans in the following places:

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And for the truly ambitious: Shoot a short video of yourself explaining your HoopIdea, upload it to YouTube and share the link with us on Twitter or Google+.

Thanks to Curtis Harris for his help on the historical material in the post.

A sport can change dramatically just because one man decides to do something no one else thought of.

Bill Walsh pretty much invented short timing routes in pro football, for example. The concept of throwing to spaces before a receiver arrives seems obvious and intuitive to modern football fans, but it wasn’t always so. If your entire concept of quarterbacking had been based on “finding the open guy,” then it’s a powerful article of faith that a quarterback must wait for his receiver to be open first. Wait for the guy to get free then throw it. Chucking to the mere promise that the receiver gets somewhere? It sounded pretty risky until Walsh’s West Coast offense steamrolled the competition.

It’s difficult to break tradition and attempt something completely new in almost any profession. Perhaps it’s even harder in a profession where you’re asking groups of men to physically act out your wacky idea on a court or field. Imagine gathering a team together and selling it on a strategy it's never conducted or faced before. Tough sledding, even for a coach with steely charisma. There’s also the stigma that comes with bucking The Way Things Are Done.

Think of the grief Mike D’Antoni’s offensive methods get, years after much of the league adopted said methods. Most coaches, across sports, simply go with what they’ve known, never daring to dramatically experiment.

This means, not to sound all TED talkish, that creativity could be the ultimate market inefficiency. The NBA is headlong into this era of increasingly advanced stats. Teams will benefit from gathering better information, but the data can’t always reveal things people aren't doing yet but should. Let’s say no one had thought up the Eurostep before Manu Ginobili tried it one day. (Sarunas Marciulionis and Elgin Baylor predate Manu’s Eurostep, but this is a slight hypothetical.) I’m not certain there’s an analytical means for reaching the conclusion that, yes, you should definitely zigzag with your two steps toward the hoop. Today, the analytics can reveal the advantages of Eurostepping, but you need that first guy to try it out.

This could happen at any time.

Speaking of Manu, I wonder if the San Antonio Spurs have stumbled on a revolutionary way to play defense. After deciding not to guard Tony Allen in the Western Conference finals, they amplified the strange by treating LeBron James somewhat similarly in the Finals.

LeBron wasn’t guarded on the perimeter as he dribbled, despite coming off a regular season of shooting 40.6 percent behind the arc. Erik Spoelstra later expressed shock over seeing his superstar subjected to the "Rondo Rules,” a system of defense typically reserved for horrid shooters.

More shocking than the plan itself was that it worked, at least until Game 7, when James finally took advantage of open outside shots. Perhaps LeBron, a playmaker by nature, was thrown off by a defense that begged him to ignore his teammates and shoot early in the shot clock. Since the Finals, a popular fixation on Gregg Popovich’s Game 6 benching of Tim Duncan came to obscure the story of how San Antonio found great success this postseason in paradoxically not guarding people.

The biggest question on my mind as we enter another season is, “What, if anything, did the Spurs start?” Let’s not make this about LeBron, but instead expand San Antonio’s strategy to other opponents. Plenty of decent-shooting perimeter players aren’t so great at shooting off the dribble. Shooting off the catch is a bit like taking a golf swing from a stagnant, steady position, whereas shooting off the dribble is a bit like hopping up to the tee and hacking like Happy Gilmore. Setting aside how a sports-to-sports analogy might clarify very little, the point is that off the dribble can be tricky.

Despite this, it’s common for perimeter players to be closely guarded as they dribble, just in case they hoist. It’s possible that dribbling players are, in general, guarded far too tightly. It’s also possible that, and here’s where advanced stats can help, certain players actually shoot worse when wide open.

Can not guarding be the new guarding?

Even if this Spurs tactic was just a one-time gimmick, there’s some other sport-warping strategy out there, waiting to be discovered. There are so many possibilities with 10 moving parts constantly in flux. You could see an offense even more predicated on alley-oops than last season's Denver attack. You could see a team offense based mostly on a series of choreographed pass fakes. You could see, as Henry Abbott has covered, teams that just ditch the center position all together. Three-point hook shots? Everyone setting screens with their back like Tyson Chandler does?

Whatever finally does change the game will seem as obvious in retrospect as it was influential at the time.

Doping is all over the sports section these days, which must be a little depressing for sports fans hoping that this was behind us.

On the other hand, if you generally hate being lied to, well, here comes the truth! In a way, this is like getting a bad diagnosis. A harsh day, to be sure. But in reality, nothing like as bad as the unnamed day when you actually got the disease. At least now we can get busy on the cure.

Let the healing begin.

Knowing your enemy is an essential first step of the battle. Back when doping happened entirely in secret, the wise men who led sports -- the executives, the commissioners, the unions and the like -- were shadowboxing an enemy built entirely of guesswork. Who was doping? What with? When? Where?

Now we have a lot of real information. The Mitchell report on baseball. The USADA report on Lance Armstrong and his teammates. The unfolding collection of Biogenesis documents. Now we have dozens of firsthand accounts from everyone from Tyler Hamilton to Kirk Radomski, who are saying, essentially, This is how it really works, and I know because I was one of the ones who lived it.

Many also add how glad they are to have come clean and that it's all over.

When you look at what those people have to say, however, the truth of doping is so very different from what we had imagined.

And so many things we thought we knew about PEDs are proving to have been misguided. The early tests, it turns out, were fairly easy to beat. Yes, even heroes cherished for bravely battling cancer can cheat. And PEDs help with all kinds of things, not just getting big.

Myth: Athletes want to cheat.

Here's one more old assumption: Athletes want to cheat, and the wise old men who lead sports are losing sleep trying to catch them.

There may be some of that. But the evidence points just as much in the opposite direction, as in: There are plenty of athletes hoping for more serious testing, and as often as not it's the power brokers at the top of the sport who are the obstacles.

“It's huge,” Derrick Rose told ESPN The Magazine about PEDs in 2011. “I think we need a level playing field, where nobody has that advantage over the next person."

In one of the great mind-benders of all time, Rose would recant that statement a few days later, saying, "I do not recall making the statement, nor do I recall the question being asked. If that was my response to any question, I clearly misunderstood what was asked of me. But, let me be clear, I do not believe there is a performance-enhancing drug problem in the NBA."

Whatever Rose really meant, what’s interesting here is not just the assertion that NBA players use PEDs but also that here's an athlete who undeniably sounds as though he'd like the sport to be clean.

From the stands, many of us fans assume athletes would prefer the freedom to use whatever performance enhancers they’d like. But it's hard to find anyone, even a confessed doper, making that case. Talk to athletes who know firsthand the life in a doped-up sport, and a huge number of them are adamant it’s well worth aggressively pursuing a level playing field.

In The New York Times, Tyler Kepner tells a baseball tale about how, a decade ago, several clean, young White Sox players, including Paul Konerko, considered boycotting toothless early MLB drug tests in the hope of inspiring tougher testing down the road. This -- players insisting on invasive testing -- is the opposite of what we once assumed would happen.

One of those players, Kelly Wunsch, is now retired, and tells Kepner he can hardly watch baseball these days, as his mind gets stuck wondering how much of what he's seeing is the result of cheating. "The better, the stricter and the more all-encompassing the testing can be, the more we can relax, sit back and enjoy these athletes," he said.

Athletes don't want to cheat. Not as an end goal. What they want is to succeed at their jobs, make money and win.

If the sport is well-policed and you can do all those things clean, so much the better, say the grizzled truth-telling veterans of cycling, the sport that has been through the hottest fires of the PEDs inferno.

Cyclist David Millar tells a story from early in his cycling career. He was a promising young cyclist who suddenly found himself struggling to keep up with the pack after a few years as a professional. We would later learn that was the time when most of the big names in cycling started using the banned blood booster EPO. In his book “Racing Through the Dark,” Millar tells this tale from the 1997 Tirreno-Adriatico race:

Just as I was about to give up the ghost, I looked up and saw Robbie McEwen, the Australian sprinter, swing out of the line of riders, waving his arm in the air, angrily shouting obscenities. ... He put his head down and started sprinting back up to speed alongside the line of riders, only to begin ranting again.

“F---ING JUST STOP!” he screamed. “THIS IS NOT F---ING BIKE RACING!”

Millar was entirely sympathetic. Teammates who doped knew to hide it from Millar, who loudly told anyone who’d ask that he’d never doped. He was the brash good boy of the Cofidis team.

Years into his career, however, he grew tired of waiting for the executives to get serious about drug cheaters. Doping was everywhere, and could have, in his view, been fairly easily cleaned up, but nobody would even acknowledge the problem. The words McEwen had been screaming fell on deaf ears, as one doper after another won the Tour de France and every other big race.

In the following years, Millar grew bitter at the upside-down world he lived in, where “classless idiots were considered to be great champions.” Eventually Millar decided to join the dopers who, in his view, nobody was trying much to stop. It's a tale many cyclists have told: They resisted doping for years and assumed they would never try it, then tired of waiting for those in charge to do anything about it and eventually caved to team pressure to ride as fast as possible.

It's the job of sports' leaders to run the sport so that athletes determined to be clean have a shot at staying that way and succeeding.

In search of leadership

• When Derrick Rose made his comments, the NBA had testing that trailed behind today's, which is said to lag far behind the status quo even now.
• When the young White Sox were clamoring for better tests, baseball had yet to meaningfully test players for any PEDs even though tests were readily available then.
• The man who led cycling in 1997, Hein Verbruggen, famously insisted that Lance Armstrong "never, never, never" doped, something not even Armstrong says anymore.

In other words, there's plenty of evidence of athletes welcoming much more serious tests when they would have been incredibly helpful in preventing broad doping scandals. Much tougher to find, however, are demonstrations of major sports executives expressing anything like that conscience or vision in public. Without a major scandal to force the issue, has the head of any league ever said anything like: "We have a big problem we need to address"?

And yet, such problems have touched almost every sport -- which means the executives are clueless or concerned with making the sport appear cleaner than it really is.

Baseball now leads the North American pro sports with the quality of its testing, but that didn't come about from groundbreaking leadership nor technological breakthroughs. It took a full decade of near-infinite scandal, after which the powers-that-be have relented to a protocol that could have been implemented years earlier. (What can baseball say to clean players who lost their jobs to dopers while the league failed to do good testing that was readily available?)

Verbruggen's cycling organization had nominal testing but never came close to catching Armstrong -- even though he was taking just about every doping product there is, just about all year. That sport's testing only got serious when, after losing all credibility, outsiders were brought in to run the show. Naturally, the report damning Armstrong isn't from the governing body of international cycling, it's from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

For the NBA, this is interesting. The job of policing PEDs falls to the NBA's head lawyer, Rick Buchanan, to be collectively bargained with the union, which has no real leader at the moment.

Meanwhile, I've had NBA union officials tell me they can't imagine why they'd want any athlete tested for anything. And NBA officials have intimated for years, publicly and privately, that they're confident they don't have a problem and their testing program is laudable. But with effective drugs readily available from anti-aging clinics, doctors and online across the nation and around the globe, and testing that could easily be defeated, what could their confidence be built of other than hope?

As someone interested in clean and healthy competition, I'm ready to celebrate anyone who boldly sticks his neck out to insist on the best possible tests. I can't wait until, at that, sports' leaders catch up to the athletes.

LAS VEGAS -- Either the NBA believes itself to be in great shape, or it is doing a fine job feigning satisfaction. At the 2013 Board of Governors meeting, David Stern and commissioner-heir Adam Silver weren’t waxing dire like they were during the 2011 NBA lockout. Stern announced “positive results” in regard to league finance and he predicted an oncoming “banner year.” NBA brass devoted a large chunk of time to announcing a largely cosmetic change -- the Charlotte Bobcats will return to being the Charlotte Hornets after next season -- before moving on to more pressing concerns.

David Stern and Adam Silver revealed a quite NFL-like trajectory for their league. Replay review is set for a large expansion, the kind of extensive retroactive reffing we see in Roger Goodell’s league.

“We had a competition committee report recommending certain instant replay circumstances and we adopted them all,” Stern explained. Now, block/charge calls, the timing of off-ball fouls and unsportsmanlike acts will all be subject to TV monitor scrutiny.

When asked what will be done to speed up the oft-lengthy replay review process, Stern responded, “We’ll be working during the summer to answer that question with specific ideas,” indicating that a central control or fourth referee might be involved in those plans. Currently, you should expect games to last longer.

David Stern also indicated that the new collective bargaining agreement was increasing player movement and revenue sharing, all as a means of enhancing parity. Again, another NFL feature.

“There’s a little bit more free-agent movement than we had under the old agreement," Stern said. "And that was something that we projected and expected because there’s more player sharing as teams under the cap acquire players and as teams who are up against the tax level or even above it find themselves making harder decisions about what players are necessary to retain or not, all of which strikes us as being pro competitive in terms of the league.

"Because the combination of improved player rosters for teams that have been struggling together with revenue sharing gives us the opportunity to be closer yet to the day to where teams can compete on the court and have the opportunity to be profitable.”

For better or worse, pro basketball also seems to be following football in standing pat on another issue: There’s no immediate enhancement coming on PED testing.

“We expect to have agreement on HGH whenever the [players'] union gathers,” Stern said. When asked if that would happen next season, he responded “we hope so,” and added, “It’s on a long list of items.”

Perhaps the NBA is wise to borrow innovation from the country’s most popular sport, and perhaps what works for football might not apply to an NBA setting. Time will tell on these matters. NBA games will certainly last long enough for us to get an idea if reforms are helping the product.