I think it's safe to say if you are an NBA fan of any Eastern Conference team this season who is not from Miami or Indiana that you have endured a long and painful season. As a Celtics fan I had very little expectations for this year's team. While I did like the hire of Brad Stevens as the head coach, losing Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Doc Rivers all within one off-season the Celtics were making it clear that they were planning for a full rebuild. The one problem with the current NBA is that it is so hard to rebuild. For the most part the star NBA free agents have limited their options to the major media markets or sunny destinations such as Miami and LA, leaving the rest of the NBA to build their franchises through the draft and signing of marginal players.
The problem with building through the draft is very rarely is there a sure thing. While most drafts contain players that are adequate pieces to building a successful team, very rarely is there a draft that contain one let alone two or three franchise changing players. This upcoming draft is considered to be one of the deepest in recent memory, with players like Jabari Parker, Andrew Wiggins and potentially Joel Embiid, and as a result it has become obvious that a lot of teams are tanking this season in order to try to get a high lottery pick. The 76ers for instance are a team that is not hiding their tanking abilities. Not only did they recently trade one of their up and coming players in Evan Turner, but they have also been demolished in some of their recent outings. They have now lost 11 games in a row including last night to the NBA worst Milwaukee Bucks by 20 (and the game wasn't even that close). Also, in case you were wondering the picture of the guy sleeping court side at the top of my Rant was at the 76ers game last night.
Just to show how bad things are in the Eastern Conference, the third place Toronto Raptors are 10 games behind second place Miami and all 8 teams in the Western Conference currently holding a playoff spot would be a 3 seed or higher if they were in the East. As mentioned earlier as a Celtics fan I expected a season like this, but for new commissioner Adam Silver the amount of tanking that is going on has to be disconcerting.
There have been talks of changing the draft format in order to prevent tanking but none of the potential solutions have become official. One thing that I recommend is that once a team has been eliminated from playoff contention that they get a point for each win they accumulate after they have been eliminated. The team with the most points by the season's end would have the first pick ,the team with the second most points would have the second pick and so on and so on. While a team could theoretically tank for the first half of the season and then turn it on later in the season to pick up victories, I do think this is a better solution than the current one. This way a fan of a team can actually root for their team to win later in the season and not for them to lose.
It is for reasons like tanking that I prefer the college game over the pros, and with that being said it's nice to know that March begins next week.
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