The NBA has a tanking problem. This is a good draft year, so many teams are “tanking”, or intentionally sitting players and otherwise manipulating their line-ups so as to lose and thereby (hopefully) get a good position in the draft lottery. A game in which one or both teams are tanking is miserable to watch and degrades interest in the league. One way to improve the situation would be to pay NBA coaches, front-office staff, and even owners explicitly for wins.

At present NBA coaches and front-office staff are paid with contracts that are not made public (Below, I’ll use “coaches” to refer to coaches and front-office staff). One common feature is that they are not explicitly paid according to the number of games their team wins. I suggest a change, in which coaches salaries are made public, and for each game, one half of each coach’s nominal salary (from both teams playing) are put in a pot (escrow), and the coaches of the winning team get that pot and split it according to their nominal salaries. In this case, a coach that wins all games will be paid three times as much as if they lost all games. This would be a powerful incentive to win! As Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

A similar thing could be done with NBA owners, where some percentage of the revenue from national TV deals is delivered after each game to the winner of that game. This would be a powerful incentive for owners to win. I think a similar thing could be done with players, but injuries would make it more complicated; starting with coaches, front-office staff, and owners would be best. I would still give much better draft odds to the teams with the worst records. If the pay-for-performance scheme above starts to result in less tanking, I would even tie a teams draft odds more to their record.

This would be a more dramatic change to the NBA than other proposed solutions to tanking, such as changing how draft picks can be protected in a trade. Even though it’s a big change, I think it’s worthy of further discussion. How much resistance would coaches, front-office staff, and owners give to such a change? Would Adam Silver even have the guts to talk about this, to say nothing of implementing it? Are there any unintended consequences? Would small-market teams view this differently than large-market teams? Would it be better to start with a smaller pot than the “50%” pot that I proposed? This is not a proposal, just a half-baked idea; how might it be improved? Let me know.