Is it tanking season already?
Amid a rash of injuries, the Toronto Raptors have been surprisingly good at times. It's unfortunate that, in the NBA, this is a problem
A couple of basketball stories came across my feed within a few hours of each other this week, which made for an interesting contrast.
The first, from Kirk Goldsberry at The Ringer, noted all the ways in which the Washington Wizards are terrible. The Wiz, now 2-18 after a mauling at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks on Thursday night, are not just losing at an incredible rate, they are getting bashed pretty much every night. As Goldsberry notes, their opponents are putting up a record that echoes that of the best regular-season NBA teams ever, the 1996 Bulls and the 2016 Warriors.
Through 19 games, Washington’s adversaries are 17-2, and their key markers compare favorably to some of the all-time-great squads in NBA history. When the Warriors won 73 games in 2015-16, their net rating was plus-10.6. The 1995-96 Bulls that won 72 games had a net rating of plus-13.4. Those are impressive numbers, but this year’s Washington opponents are simply more dominant. I don’t want to jinx anything, but Wizards opponents could win 74 games this season. It might be time to start talking about the 2024-25 Wizards opponents as one of the best teams of the 2020s. They haven’t lost since before Halloween, and, friends, it’s now December.
The second piece was from Michael Grange at Sportsnet. Grange writes that since Scottie Barnes returned from his fractured orbital bone, the Toronto Raptors have been …. pretty good, actually. Not spectacular, by any means, but they have won some games (7-16 now after a pasting from the buzzsaw Oklahoma City Thunder on Thursday) and, more importantly, they don’t often get blown out. Their point differential of -4.35 is better than that of Indiana and Philadelphia (!!), two teams that were supposed to be playoff locks in the Eastern Conference.
But, as Grange writes, that Barnes-driven success is not exactly ideal for the Raptors.
The problem is that when he’s on the floor, the Raptors are pretty good. All their positive process yields some actual results. The reason that’s a problem is because the organization would like to take this one season to troll through the bottom of the standings and the top of the draft lottery.
Which brings us to the scourge of tanking.
The Wizards are awful. An embarrassment. They have rotation players who are aged 19, 19, 20, and 21, plus Jordan Poole, who had one good year with the Warriors, got paid, got punched in the face by a teammate, and has been one of the NBA’s most inefficient players since. Washington is happy to have him for exactly this reason: overpaid and actively makes the team worse? Yes, please! Also the Wiz have Jonas Valanciunas, who really doesn’t deserve this shit.
But, sadly, the Wizards are also doing this correctly. If the idea is to get the best odds in the draft lottery and land a potential superstar, you might as well maximize the losses. The part where you are still putting a team on the court and hoping fans will purchase tickets to watch it is harder to square, but if you are willing to swallow your pride and embrace the tank, the payoff will theoretically be worth it.
The Raptors, on the other hand, should be a feel-good story. They have had massive injury problems, are still regularly missing a couple of starters, and yet between Barnes and Gradey Dick, levelling up in his second year, they are somewhere between scrappy and frisky in most games. They are like a team that knows they are supposed to tank, but can’t quite bring themselves to tank.
Eric Koreen at The Athletic had an excellent feature this week on the summer bonding that the Raptors did in Spain and Miami, and the possible payoff that came from getting all their young guys to train and play together. It suggests an organization that is willing to invest heavily in trying to build a foundation with the young core of players they have, and it seems to have paid off with a team that has, as Koreen notes, excellent vibes, even as they lose more than they win.
To go into the Raptors’ locker room, home or away, after a game this season is to not know what happened just a few minutes ago. Did they win or lose? Based on the tone in the room alone, you could just as easily guess they were 15-7 instead of 7-15.
All of that sounds promising. The way Barnes has stepped up to become a leader, the way other young players are ahead of schedule, the fact that none of the team’s veterans are keeping their distance and waiting to be traded when the time is right.
But it also complicates the assignment. If the Raptors are supposed to be piling up losses in this specific season, all these signs of evident growth are not exactly helping them get there. And it is incredibly stupid that this has become a problem. To be clear: Not that the Raptors are at fault here, but that the NBA’s present system effectively punishes a rebuilding team for outperforming its expectations.
It’s also true that there isn’t an obvious fix, as long as the draft exists. Make the lottery even more of a lottery? Reward teams with better draft position based on wins in, say, March and April? Relegate the Wizards to the G-League?
It’s hard to see any of that happening, although the last idea would be hilarious. But it feels like the NBA will eventually have to do something. A system in which the historically bad team has a better season than the surprisingly competitive one isn’t worth preserving.