Planet Money vs. the NBA’s tanking problem

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2026

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

What do we want from sports? The very best athletes competing as hard as they know how, putting all their effort and training and natural ability to the test against their opponents. But this time of year, that’s not the product the NBA is putting on the court. Instead, teams at the bottom of the league are competing … to lose, because it could help them get a top pick in next year’s draft. It’s called tanking — it’s bad for fans, and it’s bad for the league.

Tanking has gotten especially egregious this year. Even NBA Adam Silver has called out teams for tanking. He recently announced that league bigwigs are considering “every possible remedy” to “align incentives.”

Today on the show — Planet Money fixes the NBA’s tanking problem by … fixing the NBA draft. We get solutions from Hockey Hall of Famer Jayna Hefford, World Cup Champion Sam Mewis, and long-time NBA analyst Zach Lowe.

Handles for the NBA fans in the episode: thevoiceofevan, fullcourtblitz, ashleynevel, igotnxtpodcast, finesse.wes, basketballsavant, and mikedaddino__.

Live event info and tickets here / Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+

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This episode was hosted by Keith Romer and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with an assist from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.1	Every year, as winter starts to turn to spring, this very weird thing starts to happen in the NBA.
0:13.9	Diehard fans begin rooting against their favorite teams.
0:18.4	This is the only time in recorded human history where I'm not even the slightest bit mad that we're losing to the Brooklyn Nets.
0:25.6	You can bet every loss means so much more for these teams, and they're not hiding it at all.
0:32.6	That's right. It is tanking season.
0:35.6	Somebody gonna see this score and wonder if we even tried.
0:38.3	No, good sir. No, we did not.
0:40.3	Right now, some of the greatest athletes in the history of the world
0:45.3	are being paid millions of dollars to lose.
0:49.3	So the Utah Jazz are not even trying to hide the fact that they're tanking.
0:55.0	They were up by as much as 17 points last night against the magic.
0:59.5	Will Hardy then in the fourth quarter pulls the entire rotation out
1:04.3	and throws in a bunch of G League dudes to completely give that game away back to the magic.
1:09.6	Now, this is so normal in the NBA that if you're a sports fan, you're like, yeah, of course
1:14.8	they're losing games on purpose.
1:16.7	The league gives the teams with the worst records the best chance of getting one of the
1:20.9	top picks in the next NBA draft, so teams have this real incentive to be as bad as possible.
1:26.5	So yeah, tanking is rational.
1:29.6	But if you are a fan of one of these tanking teams, it can be rough.
1:34.9	And I watched that Pacer's game last night, and it was the most disgusting thing I've ever
1:39.4	seen.
	...

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