When Losing Becomes a Strategy

Late in the 2022–23 NBA season, the Dallas Mavericks played a game against the Chicago Bulls that felt strangely hollow. Dallas still had a mathematical path to the play‑in tournament, yet several key contributors were held out, and the rotation on the floor suggested something other than a sincere push for victory. Chicago won comfortably, and the game passed into the standings with little drama. But the league later fined the Mavericks for conduct detrimental to the league, which was an unusual way of saying something simple: the competition had not quite been treated as competition.

Moments like that raise a question that basketball fans often argue about in practical terms—Is tanking smart?—but the deeper question is different. It asks what kind of rules a league can live under. The philosophical tension here sits between two ways of thinking about rules: one that asks what general rules would produce the best overall outcomes, and another that asks whether the system itself is arranged on fair terms for everyone who participates in it.

The difference matters because tanking is not just about losing games. It is about how a league decides what losing is allowed to mean.

Why the Draft Exists

The NBA draft is designed around a simple fairness idea. Teams that struggle should receive better access to new talent so the league does not harden into permanent hierarchies. Without some corrective mechanism, wealthy franchises or historically successful teams could accumulate advantages that weaker teams could never realistically overcome.

This basic structure resembles the kind of reasoning John Rawls had in mind when he imagined people designing institutions from behind what he called a veil of ignorance. If you did not know whether you would end up as the fan of a dominant team or the supporter of a struggling franchise — choosing from behind the veil of ignoranceThe veil of ignorance is Rawls’s thought experiment in which people design institutional rules without knowing what position they will occupy. This forces them to choose rules that are fair to everyone, including those in the weakest positions. — you might reasonably prefer a system that occasionally helps the weaker side recover. A league that allowed permanent dynasties and permanent cellar dwellers would not feel like a fair cooperative enterprise.

In that sense, the draft looks like a fairness mechanism. It redistributes opportunity toward those who need it most.

The problem begins when that fairness mechanism becomes something teams can deliberately exploit.

When Rebuilding Becomes Intentional Losing

Consider the Philadelphia 76ers during the early 2010s. Under a radical rebuilding plan, the team stripped down its roster and accepted three seasons of extreme losing records: 19–63, then 18–64, and finally 10–72. The long‑term idea was clear. By falling to the bottom of the standings repeatedly, Philadelphia could secure multiple high draft picks and eventually construct a stronger future roster.

The plan eventually helped deliver Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons through the draft. In hindsight, the strategy looks effective.

But success alone does not answer the philosophical question. The relevant issue is not whether the plan worked for Philadelphia. The issue is whether a league should allow a rule that makes such strategies rational.

Rule consequentialismRule consequentialism is the ethical theory that judges the rightness of an action by whether it follows a rule that, if generally adopted, would produce the best overall outcomes for everyone affected. approaches the problem by asking which rules would produce the best overall results if everyone accepted them. Under that perspective, a league might reasonably permit weak teams to rebuild aggressively—trading veterans, prioritizing young players, and accepting short‑term losses—because those strategies can restore competitive balance across the league. If rebuilding is transparent and long‑term, it may actually strengthen the system.

Yet even here the picture is uneasy. The immediate costs of such seasons fall on current players, on fans buying tickets to watch inferior basketball, and on opponents whose schedule now includes games against teams that are not trying to be competitive in the usual sense. A rule that permits rebuilding might improve the league over time, but the burden is not distributed evenly in the present.

That unevenness is exactly the kind of feature Rawls wanted institutional rules to justify.

The Fairness Problem

Justice as fairnessJustice as fairness is Rawls’s central theory that just institutions are those whose rules would be chosen by rational people from a position of impartiality, ensuring the system remains acceptable even to participants in its weakest positions. asks a different question from the one that dominates sports debates. Instead of asking whether a strategy benefits the team using it, the framework asks whether the underlying rules would be acceptable to participants who did not know which position they would occupy within the system.

Imagine designing the NBA without knowing whether you would end up as a rebuilding team, a contender facing that team, or a fan attending games during the worst season in franchise history. From that impartial standpoint, you might still accept the draft. It compensates struggling teams and prevents permanent inequality.

But you might hesitate before endorsing a system in which teams can intentionally degrade their own competitiveness for strategic advantage.

From behind the veil of ignorance, the risk becomes obvious. You might be the fan paying to watch a team deliberately field a weak roster. You might be the player trying to compete in a season structured around losing. You might be the opponent whose schedule is quietly distorted by games that are less meaningful than they appear.

The fairness problem, then, is not that weak teams receive help. It is that the help can be obtained through deliberate failure.

The Line Between Rebuilding and Manipulation

This tension becomes clearer when comparing different kinds of losing seasons.

The San Antonio Spurs in 1996–97 finished with a 20–62 record after injuries devastated the roster, including the loss of David Robinson. The following summer they won the lottery and drafted Tim Duncan. Few people view that season as morally troubling. The Spurs were genuinely disadvantaged, and the draft simply allowed them to recover.

That case fits the fairness logic of the draft almost perfectly. A team suffering real misfortune receives an opportunity to rebuild.

Contrast that with a situation like the Mavericks game mentioned earlier. Dallas did not lose because the roster collapsed. The team made a strategic decision in a specific game that had competitive implications for the standings.

The difference between those two cases is subtle but important. One involves honest inferiority. The other involves the strategic manufacture of inferiority.

A rule consequentialist would likely draw the same line. A league rule that allows rebuilding may produce healthier long‑term parity. But a rule that permits teams to compromise meaningful games for draft position would likely damage the league if widely adopted. Fans would trust the standings less, the schedule would feel less legitimate, and the competition itself would begin to erode.

The league’s response to the Mavericks—an explicit fine—suggests that the NBA itself recognizes this boundary.

Institutional Repair

Leagues rarely solve philosophical problems directly. Instead, they modify rules.

The NBA’s decision to flatten lottery odds beginning in 2019 was an attempt to reduce the incentive to chase the absolute worst record. Under the previous system, the worst team had a much higher probability of receiving the first pick. Now the three worst teams share equal odds. The change does not eliminate the temptation to lose, but it weakens the payoff for extreme losing.

From a philosophical perspective, that reform looks like an attempt to align two goals at once. On one hand, the league still wants weaker teams to recover through the draft. On the other hand, it wants to discourage the deliberate pursuit of the bottom of the standings.

In other words, the institution is searching for a rule that both produces good outcomes overall and feels fair to the participants inside it.

Seeing Tanking Differently

Fans often debate tanking as if it were simply a clever strategy. Some organizations execute it better than others, and the conversation then turns into a question of competence.

But once the issue is framed in terms of rules and fairness, the perspective shifts. Tanking stops looking like a single team’s tactical decision and begins to look like a stress test for the league’s institutional design.

If the rules of a system quietly reward losing, rational actors will eventually discover that fact. At that point the moral burden does not fall only on the teams exploiting the rule. It also falls on the structure that made the strategy sensible.

Basketball has always been a competitive practice built on the assumption that both sides are trying to win. When that assumption becomes uncertain—even occasionally—the meaning of the competition itself begins to blur.

Which is why the real question about tanking is not whether it works.

The real question is whether a league can remain a fair and meaningful competition if losing becomes one of its most rational strategies.

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Footnotes / Philosophy Terms

1. Veil of ignorance ↩

The veil of ignorance is Rawls’s thought experiment in which people design institutional rules without knowing what position they will occupy. This forces them to choose rules that are fair to everyone, including those in the weakest positions.

2. Rule consequentialism ↩

Rule consequentialism is the ethical theory that judges the rightness of an action by whether it follows a rule that, if generally adopted, would produce the best overall outcomes for everyone affected.

3. Justice as fairness ↩

Justice as fairness is Rawls’s central theory that just institutions are those whose rules would be chosen by rational people from a position of impartiality, ensuring the system remains acceptable even to participants in its weakest positions.