I’m writing this a few hours before the NFL draft, where bad teams (on the field) can become good (on paper) over the course of a weekend. The NBA and NHL playoffs are underway, leaving half of those league’s teams on the outside looking in, mapping out plans to improve. And while the MLB regular season is still young, opinions have already formed through the first 20-25 games on which teams are legit playoff contenders, and which teams should instead be focusing the future.

All of that is to say, right now, the topic of tanking is relevant across the four major American professional sports.

For those who are new to the game: Tanking is the act of losing on purpose. From a team perspective, the goal of tanking is typically to lose any many games as possible during the season in order to earn the highest pick possible in the offseason draft, since each league in some form or fashion rewards the worst teams with the best draft picks in their never-ending pursuit of parity. For teams that aren’t exactly good, rather than settle for inevitably mediocre results, there’s an incentive to be intentionally bad and ideally set themselves up for future success. The forced futility of tanking can create an opportunity to draft a franchise superstar and begin rebuilding a winning team.

Exhibit A for the upside of tanking is the San Antonio Spurs. Winners of five NBA championships between 1999 and 2014, the franchise never missed the playoffs between 1998 and 2019. But the Spurs had fallen on hard times after foundational stars Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili retired, and Tony Parker and Kawhi Leonard moved on to other teams. So the Spurs began a “youth movement” around the turn of the current decade, fielding sub-.500 teams four years in a row. Their tanking efforts paid off in the 2023 draft lottery, when San Antonio landed the No. 1 pick, which it used on generational 7-foot-4 phenom Victor Wembanyama.

Although the Spurs just finished Wemby’s rookie season with a Western Conference-worst record of 22-60, the franchise’s future is now bright and things are headed in the right direction with Wemby as the centerpiece. Had the Spurs actually tried to put their best competitive foot forward in the 2022-23 season, they most likely would’ve won too many games to have a shot at winning the Wemby lottery and would continue building around less-than-superstar talents.

Other recent tank jobs of note:

• The NFL’s Houston Texans had tanked its 2022 season well enough that a loss in their final game would secure the No. 1 pick in the draft. But head coach Lovie Smith had the gall to actually win that game — for which he was soundly criticized — slotting Houston into the No. 2 pick. Smith was fired, but things somehow worked out perfectly for the Texans; they used the No. 2 pick on quarterback C.J. Stroud, who led the team to the playoffs as a rookie. Now the Texans go into the 2024 season as a dark horse Super Bowl contender.
• Between 2017 and 2021, MLB’s Baltimore Orioles failed to post a winning season, and in three of those seasons lost over 100 games. And by most accounts, that’s what they were aiming for. During that stretch of sorriness the team stockpiled draft picks, and as those young prospects — like Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, and Jackson Holliday — have developed into major-league contributors, the O’s are now one of the best teams in baseball. Last season they won an American League-best 101 games.
• Last year, the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, with a chance to win and get into the postseason play-in tournament, tanked their regular-season finale. The loss allowed them to improve their draft position, but the effort was so blatant that the NBA fined the franchise $750,000.

And that’s part of the trick with tanking: it’s not supposed to be obvious. Also, the players can’t be in on it. Pro athletes don’t want to lose, and they aren’t exactly eager to put their team in position to draft the rookie who could be their eventual replacement. The responsibility for tanking thus falls on coaches and front-office executives, the ones who build and guide the team’s roster. And they can’t flat-out admit to tanking. Executives can put together a subpar, inexperienced roster, and coaches can put their most subpar, inexperienced lineups on the field. And they’ll call it a “development phase” or “a “youth movement” or “taking our lumps,” but they can’t call it what it is: losing on purpose. That would be an insult to the fans who are still paying premium prices to support the team, and the companies still paying top dollar for broadcast and sponsorship rights. The organization’s assumption (and hope) is that even if this subpar, inexperienced group genuinely plays hard, they’ll still lose a lot of games because their opponents will be simply better. And it’ll all pay off when the team gets that fortunes-altering draft pick.

(If it’s not already clear, tanking in this sense is exclusive to pro sports. In college and high school there is no draft, thus no incentive for a team to want to be bad for an entire season.)

Personally, I can’t stand tanking. Trying to lose when your organization has the resources available to try winning (money for free agents; draft picks; players and picks to use as trade assets; coaches and staff to help players improve; players who want to win and hate losing) is unacceptable.

And yet a lot of people have been convinced that tanking is actually better and somehow more noble for a franchise than going all-in to win, such as forming a “super-team” (e.g., the current Phoenix Suns) or trading draft picks to load up the roster with established veterans (e.g., the Super Bowl LVI champion L.A. Rams). The idea of building “organically” — primarily through the draft — has become so romanticized that teams who get there inorganically by tanking are respected more than teams who are constantly in win-now mode. People who tolerate tanking believe that acquiring players through the draft is better than via trade, which is better than via free agency. When the truth is, all three forms of player-acquisition currency are created equal.

As much as I don’t like tanking — and as much as the next fan may not like super-teams — we can all admit that each method can work to reach its desired goal, and has worked in the past. There’s proof-of-concept here. And sports is a results-based business. So, in that sense, there are times when one can argue that tanking was the right thing to do.

But morally, is tanking wrong?

In sports, there is an unspoken agreement between a team and its fan base. The fans provide their financial, vocal, and physical support of the team; and the team sincerely tries to put a winning product on the field.

Does tanking violate that agreement? Or does it slide in under the realm of acceptance because the long-term goal of losing now is to win later? Does putting forth a sincere effort to win leave zero leeway for throwing away one season in hopes of laying the groundwork for a championship dynasty?

In a paper titled, “The Guiding Principles of Faith: Sincerity, Honesty, and Good Will in Islam,” it is written that, “Right intention, which is sincerity, is the foundation of everything else we do in Islam. … Every act of worship, charity, or any good deed will be judged by the intention behind it.” Sincerity is put in contrast to hypocrisy — which is defined as performing acts and deeds for ulterior motives.

In this context, it would appear that morally, the people who own and operate sports franchises should be sincerely trying to succeed, always. Or, those words could be referring exclusively to acts of worship. Does the same principle of sincerity apply to one’s job?

In an essay titled, “Labor Rights in Islam,” Sh. Abdool Rahman Khan writes that, “work to provide sustenance for oneself and one’s family is considered as an act of worship.” In that case, what you do for a living does require the same high standard of how you life your life outside of work.

That said, there are situations in which being less than sincere is what one’s job calls for. Lawyers, for example, may have to feign ignorance to draw out the testimony they need to secure justice. Police sometimes go undercover — i.e., pretending to be who they’re not — to get criminals off the street. In that same vein, is it OK in sports for coaches to feign incompetence, or for executives to pretend they’re trying to build the best roster possible, if they’re truly striving for the greater good? It is already understood that coaches will tell players that they’re better (or worse) than they really are in the name of encouragement or motivation, and that team executives will be less than honest with media or competing team executives in the name of shrewd player acquisition. (If you watch the NFL draft this weekend, you’ll hear a lot about “smoke screens,” for example.)

It’s all strategy. And that’s what sports really comes down to: strategy in the name of competition with the goal of winning. Whether it’s to win now or win later is up to the competitor to decide. Chess players will give up one piece to set up a game-winning move. Fighters will take a punch to set up a knockout counterpunch. Football teams will intentionally allow a touchdown so they can get the ball back with enough time to score one of their own. A decathlete or heptathlete may take it easy in one event to conserve their energy for their best event. Those are technically small-scale examples of tanking. Tanking on a larger scale is done in the same spirit.

So, no, it’s probably not morally wrong for a pro team to lose on purpose. In its own sneaky way, their intentions could be described as pure.

But I still can’t stand it.