SPORTS
10 Obiter Dicta
The Competing Incentives of Sports
Why some teams do whatever they can to lose
michael silver › staff writer
T
h e fou r nort h American professional
sports have an entrenched system of conflicting incentives. The ultimate goal of sport is to
win, and in professional sports this goal corresponds with enhanced revenues. However there is a
secondary incentive in place which awards teams for
losing, namely the draft. The lower a team finishes in
the standings the better pick they will receive in the
draft, distributing the players who enter the league.
The draft is either in directly reverse order of
the final league standings, or partially based on a
weighted lottery, where weightings correspond to the
reverse order of league standings. The stated purpose
of either of these systems is to facilitate improvement
for the poorer teams, and to enhance competitive balance of leagues.
Hockey provides two clear examples of the
dynamics of this system at play. The Pittsburgh penguins were a monumentally poor team in the early
years of the millennium, and were therefore able to
draft Sidney Crosby, Eugenie Malkin, Mark Andre
Flurey, and Jordan Stall at or near the beginning of
the draft. Pittsburgh has since consistently been one
of the best teams in the league. This is one of many
clear examples of the draft being the simplest path
to building a successful team. However in order to
do so a team must be bad for an extended period of
time, and be managed intelligently. A team such as
the Edmonton Oilers has been extremely poor on the
ice for the last seven years, but have been unwise in
drafting, and so have been unable to improve through
the draft.
These two examples show that the general system
of drafts may be problematic in that it awards failure,
but is likely acceptable because it still requires intelligent team building. The truly problematic corollary
of the system is that teams interpret the poorest possible outcome is finishing in the middle of the standings, not winning, but also not losing sufficiently to
improve. Teams recognize that there is little prospect for improvement for a middling team (such as
the Toronto Maple Leafs for the majority of the last 45
years), and instead make concerted efforts to lose in
order to secure the best draft pick possible. A team
actively seeking to lose in this way is termed tanking.
Recently, there have been several controversial
examples of teams blatantly tanking. In the last game
of this past NFL season the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
were aware that if they lost they would receive the
first pick in the upcoming draft. At half time of their
game against New Orleans, Tampa was in control,
winning 20-7. At half time, they removed all of their
best players from the game, and collapsed, losing
20-23. This was widely recognized to be an example
of tanking, but many argue it was justified. The result
of the loss is that Tampa will be able to select the best
Quarterback entering the league first in the upcoming draft, and this will give them the best possible
chance to succeed in the future.
An even more troubling example of tanking has
been taking place in the NBA over the last several
seasons. The Philadelphia 76’ers recognized that
they were never going to succeed with the team that
they had assembled, and made a clear decision that
they would lose as many games as possible for several years, accumulate as many high draft picks as
ê Despite attempts in the NBA to reform the lottery system, incentives for teams to purposely lose games in an effort to get better draft picks remain.
possible, and eventually assemble a better team than
they started with. The traded away the majority of
their NBA caliber players in exchange for additional
draft picks, and drafted players who were unlikely
to help them in the short term, but would eventually
develop into better players. This approach may be no
different from ones taken by teams such as the Seattle
Supersonics (now the Oklahoma City Thunder), but is
more blatant. It could not be confused for simple failure, it is a concerted effort to lose.
Intentional losing is an affront to the core ideas of
sports: that the team should do everything that they
can to win every game that they play. It alienates
fans, and ruins the competitive balance of the league.
However, from a team building, and long term success standpoint it is absolutely justif