On Wednesday, during a break in a 153–131 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, the Washington Wizards led a fan onto the court to attempt a half-court shot, blindfolded, for a chance to win ten thousand dollars. The fan chucked the ball clear of the backboard. “Oh, my—” exclaimed an on-court announcer, cutting herself off as a group of jubilant mascots swarmed the fan. “Somebody’s rich!” she exclaimed. “The mascots are going crazy! The contestant is going crazy! The crowd is going crazy!” The crowd was not going crazy, but never mind. Someone handed the contestant, now with the blindfold removed, a giant check. As he posed, smiling, with the check next to the Wizards’ mascot—a large, beaked, furry-blue creature named G-Wiz—the shot was replayed, in slow motion, on the jumbotron overhead. When the ball missed, the mascots howled with laughter; one of them, a big yellow mountain lion, pounded the ground. G-Wiz took the check out of the fan’s hands and walked away, as the fan doubled over in apparently good-natured disappointment. April Fools’!

The public was not amused. Did the Wizards really trick someone who’d paid good money to watch a horrible team into thinking that he’d won ten thousand dollars, only to humiliate him—and then laugh at him—in front of eighteen thousand people? The outrage was loud enough that, the following day, the Wizards released an apology. The whole thing had been scripted, the organization said; the fan, along with all the mascots and staff, had been in on the act. Still, the team acknowledged, the stunt had “missed the mark.”

I laughed when I heard of the stunt, not because it was clever (it wasn’t) but because it was so typical of the Wizards. The Wizards, after all, are something worse than bad; they’re an affront to the ideals of sports, which include sincere competition. That fake stunt occurred during a fake competition, in which only one team, the 76ers, was trying to win.

The difference wasn’t measured by their effort but instead by their over-all strategy. The Wizards played actual basketball for the first half (there were four lead changes), led by Tristan Vukčević, who’d started at center in place of the injured Alex Sarr, the No. 2 pick in the 2024 draft. Vukčević, a 2023 second-round pick, was no one’s idea of a savior; he’d spent most of his career shuttling between the Wizards and their G League affiliate. But, against the 76ers’ porous defense that night, he almost couldn’t miss. Ninety seconds into the second quarter, he’d already scored seventeen points, on six of seven shooting, and the Wizards were down by only a point. But thirty seconds after that score, with nearly an entire half remaining, Vukčević was benched. The Wizards’ coaching staff, apparently, wasn’t taking any chances. The 76ers went on a 24–4 run, and the rout was on. Before the game, the Wizards were tied with the Indiana Pacers for the worst team in the league, but by the end of the night the bottom spot was theirs alone.

That loss—the Wizards’ twentieth in their past twenty-one games—counted as a success, I guess. As in that April Fools’ stunt, everyone was aware of the scheme. This time, though, not even the fans were misled. The reasoning was obvious: The Wizards can only keep their first-round pick in the 2026 draft if the team secures one of the top-eight picks; otherwise, owing to a complex series of prior trades, the pick would go to the New York Knicks. And, because of how the draft lottery is currently structured, the best way to guarantee a top-eight pick is to finish the season as one of the league’s four worst teams.

That’s been the plan, recently, for a number of teams: draft a promising young player as a shortcut to changing the team’s trajectory. The real appeal is that those stars are cheap; a player’s first two contracts are capped by the so-called Rookie Scale, which lets teams employ great players before they have to pay them what they’re worth. The draft is designed to increase parity by sending the best new players to the worst teams in the league. The problem is that this incentivizes losing on purpose—tanking, in N.B.A. parlance.

For many years, the top pick was determined by a coin flip between the worst teams in the Western and Eastern Conferences. But teams recognized the value of high draft picks: it was better to be really bad than merely mediocre. So, over time, the N.B.A. introduced four significant rounds of changes to the draft system to combat tanking and to make sure that picks went to the “right” teams. Teams that didn’t make the playoffs were entered into a lottery and given a chance to secure the top pick, with the worst team receiving the best odds. Then came choosing the second pick, and so on. But, during the regular season, teams without a hope of making the playoffs started scrambling to detonate their records to get a shot at a future star player—and some teams, most notably the 76ers of the twenty-tens, engaged in a long process of strategic losing in order to stockpile picks. In 2019, the odds for the three worst teams were flattened, as a way to discourage teams from racing to the bottom. But that change, like every one before it, not only failed to reduce tanking but may have made it worse. In practice, spreading the odds meant that even teams who were just bad in general had a chance at landing the top pick. That motivated more teams to tank, not fewer.

An exceptionally strong draft class this season, in combination with the complicated math around protected picks—which are included in trades but don’t always convey if they land in certain spots—has increased teams’ incentives to do well in the lottery. Even the third or fourth pick this year might net a franchise player. Even before the All-Star break, many teams were sitting their best players in close games, trading for banged-up players, or constructing nonsensical rosters. (The Chicago Bulls have an absurd number of guards.) Now on any given night, around a third of all N.B.A. teams are trying to lose.

Of all the challenges plaguing the N.B.A. this season (a rash of severe leg injuries, the arrest of an active N.B.A. head coach during an F.B.I. gambling investigation, the shuttering of regional television networks carrying local N.B.A. games, and so on), nothing has seemed to excite the league office quite so much as the problem of tanking. On some level, this makes sense: professional basketball is an entertainment product, and no one thinks that a team like the Wizards is particularly entertaining. There are issues, too, if the integrity of the game can’t be trusted. So the N.B.A. commissioner, Adam Silver, has publicly vowed several times that the league intends to curb the practice of bottoming out, if not eliminate it outright. In February, he levied six-figure fines on the Utah Jazz and the Indiana Pacers for not playing healthy stars, and he’s talked about “substantial” changes to the draft-selection process. Some of the ideas under consideration have been floating around for a while, but last month a list of proposals was leaked to ESPN. None of the ideas, despite the spin, are all that radical, and some of them work against one another. There are suggestions to increase the lottery pool and place win-floors for teams to get the best chances. There are double lotteries and protections that would put a safety net beneath the very worst teams. What they all have in common is the prospect for unintended consequences, because they don’t address the real problem: teams are still rewarded for trying to be bad.

There’s an obvious, simple solution: abolish the draft. Give every incoming player free agency. This not only has the benefit of being morally correct from a labor standpoint but it also removes the incentive to tank. For some reason, this approach is considered hopelessly unrealistic; small-market owners, the logic goes, would never go for it, because they’d have no hope of competing with, say, the Los Angeles Lakers. But most players aren’t stupid. They want to put themselves in good situations, on teams with coherent cultures and good coaching, where they’d get playing time. The salary cap limits spending, and the size of rosters means that talent would have to spread out. Owners would have to upgrade facilities, institute best practices, focus on player development, establish smart front offices who targeted the right players, employ great training staffs, and cultivate ardent fan bases, in order to attract the rookies they want. Spending money in order to build a system that benefits both individual players and the team as a whole—what a radical idea.

Another obvious, simple solution is just to chill out. Who cares if the Wizards play Tristan Vukčević only eleven minutes on a rare night that he hits all of his three-point-shot attempts? It’s unlikely he would have kept it up anyway! The Wizards have been terrible for most of my lifetime; since 1979, they’ve won one division title and haven’t made it to the N.B.A. finals. Humiliation comes to them naturally. The Wizards are talking about contending next season, once their centerpiece arrives through the draft. They’ve gotten credit for thinking of a plan. But why does anyone think drafting Darryn Peterson would change everything—or anything?

And should we be angry if it does? Tanking is against the spirit of the rules, but it doesn’t hurt anyone—unlike, say, gambling, which the N.B.A. has embraced wholeheartedly. Most fans are smart enough to understand what’s going on, and they can choose to support it or not.

I happen to think that tanking is repulsive. I’d rather cheer for a fun, passionate team that treats its athletes and its staff well than for a team that rides luck and cost-cutting measures to championships. Losing isn’t necessarily bad, and winning isn’t everything. I want to root for a team that focusses on improving young players and puts them in positions to thrive down the road. Sports, after all, can be a vehicle for shaping our values and expressing our desires.

Which brings me to the best fix of all: scorn. Adam Silver should encourage fans to boo tanking teams. Forget fines. Punish the worst offenders by requiring them to apologize, publicly, for missing the mark. ♦